By David Eagleman
SUM is a stunning exploration of humorous and unforeseen afterlives that experience by no means been considered–each awarded as a vignette that gives us a beautiful lens during which to work out ourselves right here and now.
In one afterlife you could locate that God is the scale of a microbe and is ignorant of your life. In one other, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who equipped us to determine what they can now not. In a distinct model of the afterlife you're employed as a history personality in different people’s goals. otherwise you may perhaps locate that God is a married couple suffering from discontent, or that the afterlife comprises in simple terms these humans whom you consider, or that the hereafter comprises the millions of earlier gods who now not allure fans. In a few afterlives you're cut up into your various a while; in a few you're pressured to stay with tense models of your self that characterize what you've gotten been; in others you're re-created out of your bank card files and net historical past. David Eagleman proposes many types of our objective the following; we're cellular robots for cosmic mapmakers, we're reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we're experimental matters for gods attempting to comprehend what makes stick together.
These splendidly imagined tale–at as soon as humorous, wistful, and unsettling–are rooted in technology and romance and awe at our mysterious lifestyles: a mix of loss of life, desire, desktops, immortality, love, biology, and hope that exposes radiant new points of our humanity.
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Additional info for Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Sample text
As García Düttman writes of Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s integral actuality, the idea of prose evades either “poetic singularity” 26 or “philosophic generality” in order to present “the thing no longer separated from its intelligibility . ” The world of integral actuality establishes a “between” that is no longer oriented to “two extremes” but rather “exceeds what it simultaneously separates and brings together . ” However, one cannot “persist within pure possibility” since one would no longer be hesitating before its fulfillment.
For Levinas, however, we can only know of our death, of our finitude, in experiencing the deaths of others. ”79 For Nancy, the experience of Bataillean sovereignty is an “abandonment” of being to what is outside itself. ”83 Heidegger’s “authentic being” and organic community is rejected as a being-toward (or working toward) subject to the future; instead, where community denotes only a limit that is interrupted as soon as it is reached, it is “unworked” (désouvrée). Anything one might offer as a “work,” whether it is a people, a nation, or a work of art, is “abandoned” at this limit, its proposal of exemplarity withdrawn.
106 Agamben, Coming Community, 35. 107 Agamben, Coming Community, 2. 108 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 60. 109 Nabokov, Ada, 587. Emphasis in original. 110 Nabokov, Lolita, 13. 111 Nabokov, Ada, 536. 112 Nabokov, Ada, 18. 113 Nabokov, Ada, 18. 114 Nabokov, Ada, 536. 115 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 156. 116 Nabokov, Ada, 550. 117 Bataille, Accursed Share, 220. 118 Nabokov, Ada, 536. 119 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 69. 120 Bataille, Accursed Share, 210. 121 Nabokov, Ada, 219-220. 122 Nabokov, Ada, 556.