Society’s interchangeability of persons has domesticated death.
Evidence
The radical replaceability of the individual makes his death practically – and in utter contempt – revocable, as it was once conceived to be with paradoxical pathos by Christianity. But as a ‘negligible quantity’ death is entirely assimilated. For every person, with all his functions, society has a stand-in ready, to whom the former is in any case no more than an intrusive occupier of his workplace, a candidate for death. So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been finally domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 255
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘exchange of functionaries’ reducing death to redundancy echoes the workplace-replacement motif running through the reader’s earlier chapters on social capital and bureaucratic institutions. — connects to: Administrative mass death requires a humanity already dead to itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 255; Collectivism erases actual death by treating everyone as interchangeable — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 107; Interiorizing death makes it a personal, responsible feature of a unique life (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Collectivism erases actual death by treating everyone as interchangeable
#expands(0.95) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 107 - Interiorizing death makes it a personal, responsible feature of a unique life
#contradicts(0.85) - Industrial society reduces individuals to interchangeable species beings through conformist working conditions
#exemplifies(0.80)