Preserving the Human Being. The Struggle for Secular Eternity in Europe’s Entangled Modernities

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The focus of this project is on engineers, physicians, and natural and computer scientists of the European and US modernities from the 19th to the 21st century. It traces their secular and secularist definitions of death and their ongoing struggles to overcome human mortality. In the 19th century, these ʻavantgardes of secularismʼ pursued the project of cremation and other approaches of dealing with the human corpse in confrontation with Christian traditions. Over the following centuries, these attempts were complemented by additional strategies and technologies in analog and virtual space. Through them, the secularists influenced public opinion and the paradigms of the modernities. This project explores the ways in which these secularists conceptualized the human being after crossing the threshold of death. It probes their strategies to make sense of death in a secular age by analyzing historical backgrounds, technology, scientific knowledge and practices. In doing so, it aims to substantiate the assumption that the enduring human being is a crucial element of the secular. Thanks to technology, they live on: as ashes that do not decompose further, as potentially resurrectable specimen or cryopreserve, stored in the digital, or physically preserved through biotechnological processes. The study centers on Italian, German and French, as well as British, Russian, Swiss and US-American perspectives on modern history. In addition to the secular in its entanglement with the religious, which is analyzed in the field of the history of death, the project involves the histories of technology and the body. Furthermore, special attention will be paid to the influence that concepts of othering (gender, race, class, religion) may have had on the formation of the secular.