Overview

This book confronts the question of immortality: Is human life without immortality tolerable? It does so by exploring three attitudes to immortality expressed in the context of three revolutions, the Soviet, the Nazi and the Communist revolution in China. The book begins with an account of the radical Russian tradition of immortalism that culminates in the thought of Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), then contrasting this account with the equally radical finitism of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Both these strands are then developed in the context of modern Chinese philosophical thinking about technology and the creation of a harmonious relation to nature that reflects in turn a harmonious relation to mortality, one that eschews the radicality of both Fedorov and Heidegger by discerning a “middle way.”

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Jeff Love is a Research Scholar at Northwestern University’s Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. He is the author of The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève (Columbia University Press, 2018), Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008), and The Overcoming of History in War and Peace (Brill, 2004).  Michael Meng is Associate Professor of History at Clemson University. He is the author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Harvard, 2011) and co-editor of several volumes including Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (Indiana, 2015) and Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany (Rutgers, 2020).  

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