Forsan Et Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit (review)

Abstract

Death books by their very nature aspire toward a large target audience but tend not to attract a wide readership in fact, as the topic can become nebulous and, not to mention, rather forbidding. U.S. subjects are, authors Ehlers and Krupar tell us, ensconced within an all-encompassing medical, pharmaceutical, food and fitness-crazed regulatory culture—call it bioculture—that organizes the populace according to an overall life-management regimen that renders its subjects anxiously and obsessively preoccupied with health (not just sex) concerns. [...]extending Foucault's basic biopower thesis from sex to health is apt and proves insightful. The book endeavors to avoid "privileging" the natality-mortality dichotomy ("the life-death dyad") that served as the crux of the Foucauldian pivot toward biopower, that reportedly dramatic shift in the nature of power from death-dealing to life-making. (89) I express that gratitude as someone whose sister-in-law died recently of COVID-19, alone and intubated in the third overflow ICU ward of the woefully overrun hospital that barely accepted her (and then, only after waiting seven hours in the parking lot, already barely breathing with pneumonia and with blood oxygen levels in the 70s);and as someone who, after her death less than a week later, had to spend several days to find a crematorium that would take her body (and even then, with another two-week delay at the least) and found said willing crematorium only after the South Coast Air Quality Management District had suspended the air quality restrictions on the number of bodies that could be cremated daily in the southern California region.