Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe

Günter Blamberger holds a Chair in German Philology at the University of Cologne and is Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities (Internationales Kolleg Morphomata) in Cologne. Since 1996 he has been President of the International Kleist-Society, and editor of the Kleist-Yearbook. He was responsible for the Kleist-Bicentenary in 2011. His biography on Heinrich von Kleist (Fischer, 2011) received an award as Germany’s best non-fiction book in 2011 and will be published in English in 2018. He is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. His main areas of research include German and European literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, moralistic philosophy, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies on creativity, contemporary German literature and film, figurations of melancholy, figurations of death. His recently published books are On Creativity, Ed. (Penguin Press, 2015), Sind alle Denker traurig? Ed. (Fink, 2015), Venus as Muse, Ed. (Brill/Rodopi, 2015), Auf schwankendem Grund. Dekadenz und Tod im Venedig der Moderne, Ed. (Fink, 2014), Figuring Death, Figuring Creativity: On the Power of Aesthetic Ideas (Fink, 2013), Peter Esterházy, Ed. (Fink, 2013), Möglichkeitsdenken, Ed. (Fink, 2013), Ökonomie des Opfers. Literatur im Zeichen des Suizids, Ed. (Fink, 2013), Daniel Kehlmann, Ed. (Fink, 2012)..  Sudhir Kakar, psychoanalyst and writer, has been Lecturer at Harvard University, Research Fellow at Harvard Business School, Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard as also Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, McGill, Melbourne, Hawai’i, Vienna; a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin and Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Cologne. Kakar's many honours include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship, Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association, Fellow of the National Academy of Psychology, Merck Tagore Award, the Bhabha, Nehru and Indian Council of Social Science Research National Fellowships in India and Germany’s Order of Merit. His latest books are Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius and the novel The Devil Take Love.

1. Moksha: On the Hindu Quest for Immortality Sudhir Kakar.- 2. Threshold-Images between Life and Death in Western Literature and Film Günter Blamberger.- 3. Illusions of Immortality Jonardon Ganeri.- 4. The quest for immortality as a technical problem. The idea of Cybergnosis and the visions of posthumanism Oliver Krüger.- 5. From biological to moral immortality: The transformation of the working class hero in communism Anja Kirsch.-  6. Images of Death and the Afterlife in India Naman Ahuja.- 7. Dream, Death and Death within a Dream Arindam Chakrabarti.- 8. The Afterworld as a Site of Punishment. Imagining Hell in European Literature Friedrich Vollhardt.- 9. The Afterlife of the Dead in this World: Ghosts, Art, and Poetry in German Modernism Georg Braungart.- 10. “Death-x-pulse”: A Hermeneutics for Near-Death-Experiences Jens Schlieter.- 11. Paths to Nirvana? Hunger as Practice of Suicide Thomas Macho.- 12. Afterlife and Fertility in Varanasi Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar.

“This is an inspiring contribution, opening questions about the specificity of ‘modern’ conceptions of death and the relation between ‘religious’ and ‘artistic’ representations. … the volume provides rich and thought-provoking contributions from a fine group of scholars. The book is successful in showing that the universal experience of death has created an immensely diverse set of religious and cultural representations that cannot easily be classified as ‘Western,’ ‘Eastern,’ ancient, or modern.” (Philippe Bornet, readingreligion.org, August, 2018)