The Doxa of Dignity: Dying Well with Susan Sontag and Maria Gerhardt

This essay questions the hegemony of "dignity" in contemporary bioethical debates about good deaths. It does so by exploring how cultural ideals organize the affective setting of death in David Rieff's memoir, Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), and Maria Gerhardt's novel, Transfer Window [Transfervindue] (2019/2017). In depicting the emotional turmoil of terminal cancer, these pathographies reveal that the very ideals adopted to ensure a sense of dignity (autonomy and family involvement) may sometimes make an impending death even more unbearable. Recognizing lack of affective stability as death's ultimate problem, I utilize the utopian imaginaries of Gerhardt's fiction to suggest "anesthetic deaths" as an alternative bioethical ideal that channels intellectual resources from the Nordic welfare regimes into discussions otherwise marked by liberalism and conservatism.