408 becoming more human by becoming more godlikesimulacrum of existence. It prepares us for death only by killing us in
steps. As a result, we cease as well to increase our share in the marks of
divinity. By giving our divinity away to the mummy, we also abandon
to the mummy our humanity.
In much of the historical experience of mankind, the force of mum-
mifi cation remains veiled. Economic and cultural oppression overshad-
ows all other constraint, chaining the vast majority of ordinary men
and women to the wheel of production and condemning them to repe-
titious and humiliating work for the sake of sustenance. At the same
time, it enlists the authority of religion and philosophy in the ac cep-
tance of subjugation.
If only the social order could be turned upside down and expunged
of the taint of entrenched social division and hierarchy, then— the critic
and the prophet imagine— we would at last be free. Instead of this
awaited liberation, we might discover that the weakening of the class
structure of society, made possible by the demo cratization of the mar-
ket, the deepening of democracy, and the liberating work of education,
may nevertheless leave us subject to the mummy. We would then feel
cheated of the freedom that we had supposed to be the reward of social
reconstruction, and awake from one enslavement only to fall victim to
another. Th is realization provides no reason not to rebel and not to re-
shape the institutions of society. Instead, it gives us a reason to under-
stand that the reformation of the social order represents an incomplete
basis for our rise.
In a society and a culture in which our hopes continue to be infl u-
enced by the sacred and profane traditions of the struggle with the
world, the sole recourse against mummifi cation may seem to be the
good of greater life that we seek from the future: a future of po liti cal
reconstruction or of God- given salvation. Th is projection of a greater
life onto a historical or trans- historical future represents, however, an
ac cep tance of estrangement from life in the present. Mummifi cation
seals this estrangement from the present. It does so in the form of a self-
infl icted diminishment of life, to which, in despair, fear, and exhaus-
tion, we surrender.
Th us, life comes to be lived as a movement between two varieties of
its diminishment. We conspire against ourselves in the wasting of
our highest good. Th rough mummifi cation, we kill time: the fl eeting,