Sublime/Pauline: Denying Death in Paradise Lost

Abstract

Writing in 1936, in the historically resonant moment between the two Wars, Walter Benjamin detailed the disappearance of death from the public stage of modernity, recounting the ways in which death had vanished from common sight, was pushed to the social and intellectual periphery, sublimated and forgotten. ‘Dying,’ writes Benjamin, ‘was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times, dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living’ (93–4).