Death and Apocalypse in the Digital Megamachine

Immortality is integral to the notion of apocalypse, which, in turn, can be thought in terms of a quest to overcome various limits associated with life. Twentieth-century Western thought provides one way of tracking this shift from immortality of the soul to material immortality, through various recurring tropes about life, about death, about life after death, and about life without death. Indeed, this literature can even be understood as a neglected entry in the apocalyptic archive of the West. Psychoanalytical concepts of the death-drive and later attempts to read social formations, such as industrial capitalism, as forms of institutionalised death-denial are not normally thought to be part of this archive, but they nonetheless give us a glimpse into the immortality projects that characterise the contemporary technological condition and the forms of apocalypse attached to it.