which very well may render such models irrelevant – an implication that
would certainly weaken the excessive experience of trauma associated with
‘unnatural’ or ‘bad’ deaths and the social implications and stigmas that go
along with them.
To summarize, if dying and bereavement come to be viewed as private
within modernity, then the postmodern revival of death is borne in part out
of resistance to the bureaucratization of dying and grief, a response where
the distinction between public and private becomes blurred. What this resis-
tance should signal is not the failure of modern thought as such, but the
failure of one-sided forms of modern thought, those forms relying on a
subject-object paradigm rather than more intersubjective orientations. The
postmodern revival of death is a paradoxical way of taking back what ratio-
nal discourses (in the narrow sense) have abstractly colonized or disenchanted
by means of positing the sovereignty or sacredness of the individual. The
problem is that when the individual is viewed as sacred, there is a tendency
to suppress our mutual dependency and our linguistic and cognitive con-
nections with one another. The supposed illegitimate separation of public
and private interests is not the problem; rather, the problem resides in the
attribution of authority in an undifferentiated way. There is no good reason
why either medical authorities or the individual must be viewed as sover-
eign. A critical theoretical approach demonstrates the negative potentials of
this approach. In Watler ’s theorization of modernity and postmodernity his
concepts suffer from deficiencies and problems that, in practical terms, bring
about the possibility of alienation and only heighten anxieties. As I have
argued here, the use of religious language is one recent example of this.
Perhaps thanatology needs to recognize that in modernity no death should
be considered “good.”
While the postmodern revival of death expresses an interest in death as an
object of reflective and discursive control, this interest can be viewed as an
inversion of the traditional response to death. In the traditional attitude death
is ultimately the responsibility of the community, with the religious view that
the community as a whole will be judged by supernatural powers in a life
to come. In postmodernism, this responsibility is inverted in the sense of
transferring responsibility for death from the community to the individual.
The survivors are, in effect, acquitted of responsibility toward the dying
because it is viewed as the responsibility of the solitary individual. Instead
of being communicative partners, the self is viewed in opposition to others.
Intersubjectivity and Religious Language • 199