I couldn’t be more excited to bring you this episode with death expert, bestselling author, and mortician, Caitlin Doughty!
Caitlin is the author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory as well as her new book about death rites, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death.
She’s also the host of the wildly popular youtube series, Ask A Mortician which is one of the foundation stones of the death positive movement, which is seeking to change our relationship to death in our culture.
In this ep:
- Taking death rites out of the “News of the Weird” category: 5:30
- If we can’t think it’s okay for someone to interact with the mummy of their mother, how will we work on our politics? 11:20
- Conner Sees His Dead Mother, or But can we really respect people’s experiences or is it just lip service? 13:25
- Resisting creating a metaphysic around death…or forcing yours on someone else: 19:15
- The potential of the strange psychological, spiritual event of death: 21:40
- How death is our life’s project: 23.50.
- What’s Your Death Fantasy? (And why?): 27:50
- Lacan, Bataille, and how thinking about what the dead want tells us about the living: 34:55
- Grieving is a physical process: 39:05
- The boundary reveals itself as the connection: 40:25
- How death makes us available to others in a new way: 42:20
- Death is the engine that moves life forward: 48:00
- The origins of sex: 49:00
- And here’s where we get irritated about the singularity. And go on about it for quite a bit: 52:30
You can get full show notes with links to books we talk about, some info on previous Caitlin/Conner collaborations, and more by going to my patreon, where you can also support the show!
Love!
CH
Conner Habib 
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