Please join the Harriman Institute and the Columbia Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) for a book talk with Anya Bernstein, author of 'The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia' (Princeton University Press, 2019), in conversation with Anton Vidokle (e-flux) and Adam Leeds (Slavic Languages).
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.
ANYA BERNSTEIN is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and Assistant Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard 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).
