“Pliks es nācu no mātes klēpja, un pliks es turp atgriezīšos!”: māksla nomirt patērētāju sabiedrībā

Abstract

Today, we do not talk about death very much; if we do, we talk about mass death in media which is an estranged tragedy and does not appeal to us. On the other hand, the spirit of the time which we live in tries to prevent us from aging mostly by using consumerist philosophy, thus placing death and dying, and, especially, the consciousness of our own death in the grey zone. In this article, we aspire to sketching the main attitudes toward death in consumerist society, using theories of consumerism and also Google Analytics in order to define the lifestyle of the contemporary consumerist. Then, with some examples from the point of view of philosophy of religion and also keeping in mind the theology of Book of Job from the perspective of philosophy of religion, we will try to find an answer to the question – “how does the theology of the Book of Job or the interpretations thereof can help us to form our style of death?” Two main ideas are synthesised in the course of the article: firstly, consumerist lifestyle can be characterised as “desire for the desire”, while in Book of Job, when it is read from the consumerist’s perspective, one can see the repeating of faith, which is also an essential part of the theology of Soren Kierkegaard. Thus, the synthesis of these conclusions can construct consumer’s “death style”, which can be defined as “desire for the everlasting”.