One of the things we’ve understood throughout our history is that death is, of all experiences, the most universal and inescapable. Yet, at the same time that we humans realized its existence, we also began to desire to overcome it. Over the millennia, this desire has given rise to fleeting superstitions and age-old religions, mystical visions and literary fantasies, complex philosophical systems and posthuman scientific research, but each of these solutions has ultimately fueled a further desire to push back the limits that biology has imposed on us.
In these pages, Ines Testoni revisits the tradition of Western thought to offer new answers to a present simultaneously filled with disenchantment with the possibility of a spiritual life after death and obsessed with the need to defy time. Drawing on Parmenides’s reflections on absolute, «unthinkable» and «inexpressible» nothingness, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s studies on terminally ill patients, the sense of eternity experienced and described by Jorge Luis Borges, among others, and the conclusions of Baruch Spinoza and Emanuele Severino, Testoni attempts to identify a new way to overcome the terror of annihilation without descending into authoritarian or nihilistic tendencies.
To Be Eternal is a manifesto to free us from the anguish of the end. It’s an invitation to rethink the relationship between time, death, and transcendence in a non-dogmatic way, recognizing through reason what we truly are: beings poised between the desire for the absolute and the awareness of our fragility. Because when we discover what has always made us immortal, then we can also find a radically new way to live this existence.