Resonance and Alienation in Dying

Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and alienation is a sociological theory of modern people’s relationship to the material and social world; the article explores if and how this theory might illuminate contemporary dying. After introducing Rosa’s key concepts of alienation and resonance, the article applies them first to the individual’s dying (my personal death) and second to the possible dying of western modernity, or even humankind itself, due to global warming and ecological degradation (our collective death). Each section looks at how, as the end of individual or collective life approaches, people’s material, social and existential worlds change, and hence how their relationships to the world change. An accustomed world that to some extent may have been resonant becomes alien; yet resonance is sometimes found in the newly alien world of the dying. Finally, resonance is compared and contrasted with some Majority World concepts of living well: Buddhism, ubuntu, and buen vivir; and with psychological concepts commonly applied in the West to both individual mortality and global warming, namely denial, awareness, anxiety and grief.