The Future of Immortality: A book talk with Anya Bernstein

Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University

IRCPL at Columbia

A book talk with Anya Bernstein, in conversation with Anton Vidokle (e-flux) and Adam Leeds (Slavic Languages).

International Affairs Building, room 1219

As long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human.The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist thought in Russia, with global implications that reach to Silicon Valley and beyond. If aging is a curable disease, do we have a moral obligation to end the suffering it causes? Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth—something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human?As vividly written as any novel, The Future of Immortality is a fascinating account of techno-scientific and religious futurism—and the ways in which it hopes to transform our very being.This event is organized by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and cosponsored by the Harriman Institute. It is part of the <a href="https://www.ircpl.columbia.edu/death-series" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Death and After</a> series at IRCPL.______________________________Anya Bernstein is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and Assistant Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from New York University. Her first book, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2013), was winner of the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion in 2014. Bernstein also published widely on the issues of religion, secularism, art and censorship in contemporary Russia, and on the battles over religious relics, issues of end-of-life care, and politics of shamanic tourism in Russia. As a visual anthropologist Bernstein has directed, filmed, and produced several award-winning documentary films on Buryat Buddhism and shamanism, including Join Me in Shambhala (2002) and In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006). The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia was published by Princeton University Press in 2019.Anton Vidokle, born in 1965 in Moscow, Russia, is an artist and filmmaker currently living in New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally. In 1998 he founded e-flux, a publishing platform and archive, and in 2008 e-flux journal (along with Brian Kuan Wood and Julieta Aranda). Adam Leeds is a scholar of late Soviet and post-socialist culture and society at Columbia University. His work is concerned with political rationalities and technologies of rule. His current project is a historical ethnography of the mathematical economists of Moscow from the Soviet Union to contemporary Russia. His research interests are Soviet socialism and postsocialism; bureaucracy and technocracy; the state, modernity and utopianism; liberalism and neo-liberalism; ethics and political affects; the legacies of cybernetics; and the history of the human sciences.

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The Future of Immortality: A book talk with Anya Bernstein

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