MEMORY AND IMMORTALITY: FROM PRINCE CHARMING TO STELARC
MEMORY AND IMMORTALITY: FROM PRINCE CHARMING TO STELARC

Summary/Abstract: Memory is a defining feature of humanity, at both individual and collective level. At the same time, memory is intrinsically linked to mortality. By applying Mieke Bal’s model of cultural analysis, explained and exemplified in Double Exposures: The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1996), this article brings together three cultural artifacts in “preposterous” associations: Petre Ispirescu’s scholarly tale “Youth without Age and Life without Death”, Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), and Stelarc’s striking performances. The analysis mainly focuses on the connections between memory, mortality, identity and entity, as they were conceptualized in the above-mentioned works. It tackles death and immortality in the mythical realm of the fairytale, Stein’s modernist solution to the problematic issues of identity and her theory of the potential attainability by everybody of the immortality of a genius, and the challenges to human memory brought about by post-humanism in Stelarc’s work. For Prince Charming, his painfully achieved immortality was undermined by the outburst of memory and longing, which forced him to embark on a journey back into his humanity, at the end of which he encountered death. For Stein, the immortality of the genius is readily available to anyone, and it is achieved by a masterly positioning of one’s self in the “continuous present” of being without doing. Stelarc, on the other hand, advocates a technologically mediated immortality of a body whose capacities to perceive, act and remember are digitally enhanced. A return to Prince Charming, after technologically-mediated expansions of the capabilities of the human body, begs us to consider death of old age as good death, and remembrance as a universally human affordance.

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