Editorial [Antae, Vol.3(2)] 

Abstract

It is, of course, not surprising that a good portion of life is spent thinking about its end. And, after this, a possible new beginning. From a religious point of view, the afterlife conditions the way a life is led, which in turn raises the possibility of pitting life against the afterlife: being-in-the-world-now as opposed to eternal life. Alongside these religious concerns, the notion of afterlife sets up a tension between permanence and ephemerality. The unvarying endurance of artifice attracts both John Keats and W.B. Yeats in poems like ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’. Conversely, Friedrich Nietzsche denounces the ascetic life of renunciations, championing instead the more Dyonisian immersion in immanence and its implicit decay. Neither is it surprising that to speak of (after)life is also to speak of death.