English

Capital as Death Denial

Terror Management Theory (TMT) argues that subconscious fears about death shape our behaviour in often disturbing and destructive ways. Building on the work of Ernest Becker, the core theoretical claim of TMT is that human activity, including all forms of culture, is ‘…designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.’ Capitalism is unlike anything that preceded it, and this novelty stems from a specific behaviour amongst capitalists that leads to sustained growth: the routine reinvestment of profits in the anticipation of future profitability. What might this novel feature of capitalism have to do with death denial? What kind of phenomenological specificity is bound up with this historical specificity? My aim in this chapter is to tackle these questions, primarily through a comparison between the role of death in capitalism and the archaic gift economy. My argument can be summarised as follows. First, I place the archaic gift economy, organised around the redistribution and destruction of surplus, on the low end of the death denial continuum. Archaic economic activity is collective and sacred, actively invol

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