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After Death
A disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.
At least for the time being, we humans are still finite and mortal—but death isn't what it used to be. As the body is technologically extended in space and time, we are split between our finitude and our doubled presence in a limitless web of signs, an “immortal” world of information.
After Death offers a penetrating philosophical diagnosis of our contemporary condition, describing not only an anesthesia, but an amnesia in which the compulsions of a hyper-present colonize both past and future, prevailing over any sense of duration, becoming, or appreciation of the “thickness of the real.”
Are we living in a kind of counterfeit eternity in which we are effectively already dead? Against the anxiety of the constant present, how can we hope to return to the experience of being in time and facing death?
After Death is a disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.
At least for the time being, we humans are still finite and mortal—but death isn't what it used to be. As the body is technologically extended in space and time, we are split between our finitude and our doubled presence in a limitless web of signs, an “immortal” world of information.
After Death offers a penetrating philosophical diagnosis of our contemporary condition, describing not only an anesthesia, but an amnesia in which the compulsions of a hyper-present colonize both past and future, prevailing over any sense of duration, becoming, or appreciation of the “thickness of the real.”
Are we living in a kind of counterfeit eternity in which we are effectively already dead? Against the anxiety of the constant present, how can we hope to return to the experience of being in time and facing death?
After Death is a disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
80 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2020
3 people are currently reading
263 people want to read
About the author
François J. Bonnet
14 books13 followersFrançois J. Bonnet is a composer, visual artist, recording artist (as Kassel Jaeger), director of Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA-GRM) in Paris, and part-time lecturer at the Université de Paris 1.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 22, 2020
From the beginning of this book (more like an essay, barely clearing 50 pages of A5) I had high hopes for Bonnet: the view of death he articulates at the very beginning is a skillful rendition of the Deleuzian-Spinozist notion of unfolding, and many other insights herein read as though they came from Deleuze himself. However, as I read on it became clear that this was merely a superficial affinity. In my opinion, Bonnet is someone who has read a lot of French theory but has understood very little of it. Phrases and concepts from across Deleuze's career are recognisable, but only in name and not in substance.
The dynamic of amnesia-anaesthesia he identifies as the mechanism of contemporary remake culture is intriguing, although poorly developed and unnuanced. Consider his claim that the forgetting of death is death by forgetting: it certainly sounds nice, a charming dialectical palindrome, but he offers no substantial defence of the claim that forgetting constitutes a kind of death for us. The absence of nuance and depth in argumentation are everywhere undermining the positive project Bonnet is trying to achieve.
In the end, the thesis he is proposing is indistinguishable from what Heidegger had to say on technology and the horizons of human authenticity, although I suspect that Heidegger as a thoughtful reader of the ancients wouldn't have made the false claim that for them destiny and fate were identical: in Stoic thought, much ink was spilt just to dissuade us from making this equivalence, apparently unbeknownst to Bonnet. Following Heidegger, Bonnet believes that technology has trivialised our ability to engage with our lives through the medium of time, consigning us to synchronise with the evanescent 'hyperpresent' which was enabled in the first place by "telecommunications technology". To escape from this, Bonnet muses, we must confront the inevitability of our deaths (being-towards-death) and revitalise the notion that our destinies are somehow bound up with the collective lives of our communities.
If Bonnet was writing this stuff in France in the '80s, he would have been called a fascist.
The dynamic of amnesia-anaesthesia he identifies as the mechanism of contemporary remake culture is intriguing, although poorly developed and unnuanced. Consider his claim that the forgetting of death is death by forgetting: it certainly sounds nice, a charming dialectical palindrome, but he offers no substantial defence of the claim that forgetting constitutes a kind of death for us. The absence of nuance and depth in argumentation are everywhere undermining the positive project Bonnet is trying to achieve.
In the end, the thesis he is proposing is indistinguishable from what Heidegger had to say on technology and the horizons of human authenticity, although I suspect that Heidegger as a thoughtful reader of the ancients wouldn't have made the false claim that for them destiny and fate were identical: in Stoic thought, much ink was spilt just to dissuade us from making this equivalence, apparently unbeknownst to Bonnet. Following Heidegger, Bonnet believes that technology has trivialised our ability to engage with our lives through the medium of time, consigning us to synchronise with the evanescent 'hyperpresent' which was enabled in the first place by "telecommunications technology". To escape from this, Bonnet muses, we must confront the inevitability of our deaths (being-towards-death) and revitalise the notion that our destinies are somehow bound up with the collective lives of our communities.
If Bonnet was writing this stuff in France in the '80s, he would have been called a fascist.
September 3, 2022
damn, them kids be on they goadammn phones so much that death now escapes us, and by death i mean life. please let me die.
March 15, 2024
Smell the scent of refrigerator coolant and the hint of pungent, cadaverous decay, and read this book.
There is no substitute to intimacy with death than to chew one’s food with it as perfume on the tongue.
Excellent meditation on death, Heidegger, Bataille, Baudrillard & Deleuze.
There is no substitute to intimacy with death than to chew one’s food with it as perfume on the tongue.
Excellent meditation on death, Heidegger, Bataille, Baudrillard & Deleuze.
January 25, 2021
"Because, to tell the truth, nothing happens anymore. Nothing any longer has the time to happen. There is no duration left for anything to unfold in. Nothing can anchor itself in the world long enough to make sense. While the present still has duration, the hyperpresent no longer does. It is pure currency, pure instantaneity. In the age of the hyperpresent, nothing happens that is not already undone by the event that comes immediately after it. In this inexorable stream of aborted moments—of instants separated from one another, shattered into ever more tenuous fragments, we find ourselves submerged. But this submersion is not just suffered passively. It is also provoked, sustained, and even desired by an implicit adhesion to the amnesiac project of the hyperpresent. Self-forgetting occurs through surrender—willing abandonment to the immersive force of the flow of synchronisation. We happily allow ourselves to be taken over by a microfragmented temporality that paralyses us, that inscribes us and submerges us in an eternal present. And if it is a general feature of postindustrial societies that we 'no longer have time', it is not really because things are going faster and faster, but because time itself has been dissolved into a multitude of futureless instants deprived of becoming, autonomous and independent of one another, and connected by a single, tenuous thread—the thread of radical currency, of the static hyperpresent."
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July 27, 2023whoever wrote this needs to have sex
January 13, 2026
The world as Bonnet describes it in After Death is one of the hyperpresent: Where our finite-being, the way of being respectful to the finitude of Death, is being replaced by a long eternal now of projected-being, a being that is always itching to be updated and shared in the synchronous networks of the internet. Projected-being is something of a hypersocial mode of existence, where we are affirmed of it via 'synchronicity', by constantly uploading our goings-on to secure ourselves in the web of online recognition. Projected-being replaces finite-being in the sense that the affirmation of ourselves comes from this synchronicity, rather than from the 'object' itself. Enjoying the sunset isn't enough; I must upload it first.
His diagnosis is apt, but his argument for returning to finite-being, of embracing the finitude of life in its constant becoming, is both heavily derivative of Heidegger and leaves much to be objected to by those who still stand against Death. He paints Society's clamouring for Eternity as a mistake, as something that steers humanity away from the more noble mode of becoming. The denial of Death, however, is something that is not merely a 'global fantasy' as he calls it; it is a rolling, omnipresent force within humanity that has steered civilisations, art, and technology.
From the moment humanity invented the first tools, chipping stones against boulders to sharpen them and attaching them to sticks, we had already begun to rally against our own finitude. The development of humanity since the dawn of time has been the expansion of our capability, of reaching out and denying our limitations. This denial is not a symptom of a pathology, but an inherent and crucial feature of humanity itself.
While the author resents the idea of "The End of the World," and seems disillusioned with the idea of a post-Death existence, it is precisely the phantasm of Eternity which is the engine of life itself. We love one another not because it enlightens us about each of our finite beings, but for those fleeting moments in the arms of another, we are eternal.
His diagnosis is apt, but his argument for returning to finite-being, of embracing the finitude of life in its constant becoming, is both heavily derivative of Heidegger and leaves much to be objected to by those who still stand against Death. He paints Society's clamouring for Eternity as a mistake, as something that steers humanity away from the more noble mode of becoming. The denial of Death, however, is something that is not merely a 'global fantasy' as he calls it; it is a rolling, omnipresent force within humanity that has steered civilisations, art, and technology.
From the moment humanity invented the first tools, chipping stones against boulders to sharpen them and attaching them to sticks, we had already begun to rally against our own finitude. The development of humanity since the dawn of time has been the expansion of our capability, of reaching out and denying our limitations. This denial is not a symptom of a pathology, but an inherent and crucial feature of humanity itself.
While the author resents the idea of "The End of the World," and seems disillusioned with the idea of a post-Death existence, it is precisely the phantasm of Eternity which is the engine of life itself. We love one another not because it enlightens us about each of our finite beings, but for those fleeting moments in the arms of another, we are eternal.
April 10, 2024
damn, them kids be on they goadammn phones so much that death now escapes us, and by death i mean life. so please let me die.
there is no time like the present, but what if the present is taking too long? the present repeats itself endlessly in a state of total forgetment and artificial bliss. everything is happening right now or not at all never did and how dare you suggest otherwise? the present is starting to take up too much time and I'm not sure l even have enough left to die. we never grow old (who needs growth) while protectively cloaked in the idolatry of youth. instant to instant choking and spluttering on an engorged and oversaturated stream of the new already picked apart and obliterated, already discarded by the hyper-current's obsolescence machine. stagnant knowns align everywhere with no room for unknowing or falling behind. there is nothing to become because there is no becoming, no future, and certainly no past that l've ever heard of. never to wait, never to sit in silence, not going somewhere but always already there. trapped in the illusory world of infinite immortality and instant gratification I long to be out of the loop just once. steadily building up to a career in falling behind.
#short #cute #nice #fun
there is no time like the present, but what if the present is taking too long? the present repeats itself endlessly in a state of total forgetment and artificial bliss. everything is happening right now or not at all never did and how dare you suggest otherwise? the present is starting to take up too much time and I'm not sure l even have enough left to die. we never grow old (who needs growth) while protectively cloaked in the idolatry of youth. instant to instant choking and spluttering on an engorged and oversaturated stream of the new already picked apart and obliterated, already discarded by the hyper-current's obsolescence machine. stagnant knowns align everywhere with no room for unknowing or falling behind. there is nothing to become because there is no becoming, no future, and certainly no past that l've ever heard of. never to wait, never to sit in silence, not going somewhere but always already there. trapped in the illusory world of infinite immortality and instant gratification I long to be out of the loop just once. steadily building up to a career in falling behind.
#short #cute #nice #fun
June 1, 2021
A community that dreams itself eternal, instantaneous, and infinite is a delusional community. This is the exact purpose of the synchronous Network - it is the synchronous community's communalisation of the present that is the source of the forgetting of death. This kind of community, caught up as it is in denial, is incapable of forming a politics adequate to what is effectively the fundamental requirement of humankind. Not a requirement for consolation in the face of one's inevitable death, but on the contrary, the need to be confirmed as mortal.
December 18, 2022
Bonnet lucidly diagnoses the postmodern condition through an analysis inspired by Heidegger, Baudrillard, Nietzsche, Tiqqun amongst others. Brevity is exercised expertly with no point being lingered on.
March 6, 2021
Reads like the french fashion show of sound studies from the early 90s with the bad hairdo of the 80s.
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February 20, 2022Good and useful. I read it basically in a morning. Going to keep an eye out for Bonnet's writings in the future - he's a very good one.
August 23, 2023
Society of the Spectacle for the terminally online world.
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December 1, 2025for no organism can sustain itself without a boundary that gives it a form and allows it to interface with the world outside of it.
bounded, finite-being, overcome, finds itself drawn into the activity and exchanges of the open world
with our eyes wide open, we need to confront our finite being with the enormity of the world's and call forth a thinking of distant horizons and elsewheres.
to sacrifice oneself, to render oneself sacred
society seeks eternity, it enlists us all in this quest and encourages us to believe in the limitlessness of our existence, our abilities and our youth.
to tell the truth, nothing happens anymore, nothing any longer has the time to happen, there is no duration left for anything to unfold in, nothing can anchor itself in the world long enough to make sense. While the present still has a duration, the hyperpresent no longer does, it is pure currency, pure instantaniety. In the age of the hyperpresent, nothing happens that is not already undone by the event that comes immediately after it, in this inexorable stream of aborted moments, of instants separated from one another, shattered into ever more tenuous fragments, we find ourselves submerged.
we are eternal right up to the point we die
forever reaching toward the before, the after and the elsewhere
bounded, finite-being, overcome, finds itself drawn into the activity and exchanges of the open world
with our eyes wide open, we need to confront our finite being with the enormity of the world's and call forth a thinking of distant horizons and elsewheres.
to sacrifice oneself, to render oneself sacred
society seeks eternity, it enlists us all in this quest and encourages us to believe in the limitlessness of our existence, our abilities and our youth.
to tell the truth, nothing happens anymore, nothing any longer has the time to happen, there is no duration left for anything to unfold in, nothing can anchor itself in the world long enough to make sense. While the present still has a duration, the hyperpresent no longer does, it is pure currency, pure instantaniety. In the age of the hyperpresent, nothing happens that is not already undone by the event that comes immediately after it, in this inexorable stream of aborted moments, of instants separated from one another, shattered into ever more tenuous fragments, we find ourselves submerged.
we are eternal right up to the point we die
forever reaching toward the before, the after and the elsewhere
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews