Endgames: The Cult of Death in America and Russia

Treat every person, so commands Kant's categorical imperative, "never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end." In the original German, the final word is "Selbstzweck," which unintentionally gains a suggestive second layer of meaning when translated as "end in itself." For "end" in English implies both a purpose and a termination, the former asserting that persons have intrinsic, unfungible value, the latter acknowledging that they are transient mortals who play a minor role in a drama whose denouement is anything but the flourishing of the individual self. The implicit tension between the two meanings of "end" drives the argument of Dina Khapaeva's The Cele-bration of Death in Contemporary Culture, a deeply felt, urgently driven jeremiad against what she sees as the cult of death in contemporary culture.

Trained in classical studies at St. Petersburg State University, Khapaeva left Russia along with her husband, the distinguished European historian Nikolay Koposov, in 2009. Deeply disillusioned with Putin's regime, she spelled out her reasons in a work translated into French as Nouveau portrait de la Russie: Essais sur la société gothique (Khapaeva 2012b), which bemoans the refusal of her countrymen to acknowledge and make amends for the horrors of the Soviet era and their retreat into what she calls a "gothic morality" reminiscent of the Middle Ages. Her most notable previous work in English is a 2012 study, Nightmare: From Literary Experiment to Cultural Project (Khapaeva 2012a), which traces the evolution of nightmares as mental states in novels to their manifestation in modern consumer society. After several years in Paris and Helsinki, Khapaeva now teaches at the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she combines interests in cultural studies, memory studies, medievalism, and the history of emotions.

Khapaeva's explicit normative ground is an unabashed humanism, which urges us to treat every individual in the first sense of the categorical imperative. Defiantly defending what she calls "human exceptionalism," she endorses the conviction that "humans are profoundly different from any other species and are therefore to be uniquely valued" (23). She sees the erosion of this anthropocentric credo at the root of an alarming insouciance toward morbidity evident in a surprisingly wide sample of popular culture, both in America and in the Russia from which she recently emigrated. Squarely placing a large measure of the blame on the influence of late twentieth-century French theory, she bemoans the insidious spread of the ideologies of "post-humanism" and "transhumanism" and even the outright defense of the "inhuman," which have seeded the ground for the celebration of death in popular culture. Although conceding that it may have originally expressed valuable insights, Khapaeva insists that "once critique of humanism was adopted by popular culture … it lost its critical potential … no longer a critical tool but a commodity, antihumanism has acquired a new cultural role and a new cultural meaning" (32–33). Even in the guise of such seemingly progressive movements as "animal rights," it works to undermine respect for the irreducible value of individual human life.

Accelerating since the turn of the millennium, when apocalyptic fears gained new currency, an obsession with mortality and its often violent causes, so Khapaeva argues, has informed everything from gothic clothing styles and curiosity about serial killers to monster movies and torture porn. It is evident as well in the exponential rise of Halloween as a major holiday, including in Russia despite attempts by right-wing nationalists and their allies in the Orthodox Church to condemn it as a sign of Western depravity. The widespread fascination with the Mexican "Day of the Dead" and the figure of "Santa Muerte" outside Hispanic communities—presciently anticipating the success of the Pixar animated film Coco, she claims it is "currently sweeping the United States" (59)—further testifies to the ominous trend. So too does the emergence of "thanotourism," visiting sites associated with mass death, and "murderabilia," the practice of collecting items connected with violent crimes...