ERANOS CONFERENCE 2020 Rebirth: Life Threatened and the Passion for Life
Casa Eranos, Ascona (Switzerland) – Sept. 3-5, 2020
Never as today, the different forms of life are confronted with the risk of their own impairment, when not with the evidence of their extinction. The process of civilization shows itself in all its contradictions. But life is also always the history of its rebirth. Each crisis brings with it the ridge of a new blossoming. In our contemporaneity, the desire for rebirth goes so far as to embrace the post-human dream of hybrid life forms freed from death or of a life completely organized by algorithmic rationality. Both are cases of a ‘passion for life’ so powerful that we believe we can escape our own finitude. Both are radical forms of a desire for life in which an old vice, that of omnipotence, re-emerges. But we can also think of rebirth in radically different terms. That is, by questioning our model of civilization, to ask on what new basis it should be resettled. What do myths and religions tell us about this? Is there a ‘passion for life’, which is expressed through mythical and religious narratives, through great metaphors that tell how life and death are each other’s reverberations? And is there a lesson for the present in all this?
Program (PDF)
The video recording of the conferences is available on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.
