A Talk on ‘“When death itself shall be deathless”—Endless Death and the End to Death in Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick’ by Nicolas de Warren
ABOUT THE TALK
In this lecture, Professor Nicolas de Warren critically explores the transhumanist desire for immortality by technological means through a discussion of Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016). He will then contrast this novel’s treatment of the post humanist desire for a redemptive immortality with Philip K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964). Professor de Warren is primarily interested in understanding the promise and peril of attaining a condition of deathlessness, as technologically produced in an age defined by an acute anxiety about Euripides’ ageless question: Who knows if life is not death, and death is not life?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nicolas de Warren is a Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University. He was formerly a Research Professor in Philosophy and Director of the Center for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy, or the Husserl Archives, at KU Leuven, where he initiated and helped set up the digital Husserl project. He is a member of the founding team of The Open Commons of Phenomenology, which is “a non-profit, international scholarly association” that seeks to “provide open access to the entire corpus of phenomenology, and to build a shared, collaborative digital working environment for the phenomenological researchers around the world.” He is also on the board of directors of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. His publications include German Philosophy and the First World War (2023), Original Forgiveness (2020), A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (2018), and Husserl and The Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology (2010). He is currently working on two book projects: a phenomenology of the afterlife that examines different senses in which, whether individually, collectively, or historically, the dead haunt the living; a study of the impact of the First World War on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. He is also completing two co-authored books: The Erosion of Trust and Truthfulness in the Age of Democratic Uncertainty and We Nuclear People: Responsibility for Nuclear Waste in the Vastness of Time.
The guest lecture is mandatory for PHIL334/LITT334 students.
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