Blocking death anxiety at the psychological level misses its ontological-temporal structure.
Evidence
Thus when Bloch (quite rightly) evokes the fearlessness in the face of death of the revolutionary, who, having passed to the level of collective solidarity, no longer really has an individual life to lose in the older sense, he nonetheless here remains within the realm of empirical psychology, or of political ethics, if one may put it that way, and has not yet come to terms with the deeper, ontological roots of the death anxiety and of death itself. The appeals to the technological aspects of Utopia, moreover—the progress of medicine in prolonging life, the prospect of a relatively painless type of extinction—are even less satisfactory in this respect. Yet we will not be able to understand Bloch’s ultimate response without a long detour through the present itself, and through the instant: for from a temporal point of view what characterizes death is precisely its structure as that instant in which no future (and no hope) is any longer possible. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 264
Categorization
- XREF: The move from empirical to ontological (and the deferral ‘we will not understand without a long detour’) is Jameson’s signature dialectical method — advancing by negation, holding the answer in suspension. — connects to: Attitudes toward death rest on a more fundamental project of living; Mortality awareness collides with survival instincts to produce existential terror — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 12
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly does death-as-instant-with-no-future ground Bloch’s eventual response, and does this prefigure Jameson’s later, more famous claim about the loss of the future in postmodernity?