The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness. Eric Cazdyn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.From the start, Eric Cazdyn asks us to consider that we (the individual and collective) are dead. Whether it is a medical, political, economic, or cultural that has us in its grasp, imposing disaster (financial collapse, political upheaval, or terminal illness) or the morbid promise of inevitable destruction, we must engage in a re-thinking of crisis (3), and in so doing, act as if the worst possible is already upon us. By living in this double future, in which we eliminate the fear of the inevitable embracing it, vistas of possibility spread wide before us so that we may constructively choose between the known limits of the present over the unknown [and unknowable] freedoms of the future (6).The subtitle of the book (The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness) is telling, for through it Cazdyn redefines our private and global relationship with time, providing a way of thinking about and threat from the microbial to the geopolitical. For him, we have entered something like a 'new chronic mode' of time that cares little for terminality and acuteness [and virtue of which] every level of society is stabilized on an antiretroviral cocktail... every person is safe, like a diabetic on insulin (13).Neither a nihilistic treatise nor a dystopian prophecy, the book is a thought experiment for postmodernity, with implications for our future.Whether analyzing the efficacy of pharmacotherapy, criticizing and contrasting Freudian and Marxian tenets, deconstructing Zizekian logic, or tracing the roots of many natural and man-made disasters (tsunamis, collapsed financial bubbles, military revolutions, terrorist acts), Cazdyn invokes notions from physics and argues that in the new chronic, time folds in on itself, where concepts like terminal illness, cultural revolution, and economic overturn no longer have meaning. Freed from the constraints of inevitability, we are compelled to take responsibility in and for the present.Through wide and recursive ideological arcs, Cazdyn moves seamlessly from these classical philosophical notions to those of the modern digital era, and in particular, what he calls the ubiquitous narrative (69), which includes the commodification of amateur videos, real-time reporting, and reality television. He opines by manufacturing crises, reality culture effectively attempts to preempt them [and in so doing] shores up our deepest fantasies and fears (69). …