Online Talk · Memento Oblivisci (Remember to Forget): Stoicism, Zombie Idea and the Egotism of Performing Your Own Death with Author Richard Faulk
Monday, April 28, 2025
7pm ET (NYC Time)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, emailhello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
This talk is an expanded version of an original iteration delivered at Morbid Anatomy’s 2024 Memento Mori Festival.
Implicit in memento mori—the injunction to remember that we all must die—is an acknowledgment that our default is to forget. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just as people who refuse to die become undead monsters that feed on the living, zombie concepts, whose verbal husks endure even after their animating insights have flamed out, curdle into platitudes that smother genuine thought.
We see that cycle play out in early Imperial Rome, when Stoic philosophers like Seneca advocated “rehearsing your death” as a means of cultivating independence and moral courage. Within a generation, that austere precept had metastasized into a cultural vibe, a pre-Goth gothicism that delighted in funereal imagery. In a masterful takedown—the Cena Trimalchionis (Dinner at Trimalchio’s)—the satirist Petronius reveals how this fixation on dying had itself become a denial of death. This illustrated talk will explore this fascinating and largely forgotten historical moment.
Richard Faulk is an Oakland-based writer whose work focuses on the permeable borders between science and magic, history and myth, and the trivial and the sublime. He’s the author of the books Gross America and The Next Big Thing. He also wrote the first English translation of the historic medical text Thesaurus Anatomicus, which appears in Frederik Ruysch and his Thesaurus Anatomicus, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.
Monday, April 28, 2025
7pm ET (NYC Time)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, emailhello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
This talk is an expanded version of an original iteration delivered at Morbid Anatomy’s 2024 Memento Mori Festival.
Implicit in memento mori—the injunction to remember that we all must die—is an acknowledgment that our default is to forget. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just as people who refuse to die become undead monsters that feed on the living, zombie concepts, whose verbal husks endure even after their animating insights have flamed out, curdle into platitudes that smother genuine thought.
We see that cycle play out in early Imperial Rome, when Stoic philosophers like Seneca advocated “rehearsing your death” as a means of cultivating independence and moral courage. Within a generation, that austere precept had metastasized into a cultural vibe, a pre-Goth gothicism that delighted in funereal imagery. In a masterful takedown—the Cena Trimalchionis (Dinner at Trimalchio’s)—the satirist Petronius reveals how this fixation on dying had itself become a denial of death. This illustrated talk will explore this fascinating and largely forgotten historical moment.
Richard Faulk is an Oakland-based writer whose work focuses on the permeable borders between science and magic, history and myth, and the trivial and the sublime. He’s the author of the books Gross America and The Next Big Thing. He also wrote the first English translation of the historic medical text Thesaurus Anatomicus, which appears in Frederik Ruysch and his Thesaurus Anatomicus, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.
Monday, April 28, 2025
7pm ET (NYC Time)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, emailhello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
This talk is an expanded version of an original iteration delivered at Morbid Anatomy’s 2024 Memento Mori Festival.
Implicit in memento mori—the injunction to remember that we all must die—is an acknowledgment that our default is to forget. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just as people who refuse to die become undead monsters that feed on the living, zombie concepts, whose verbal husks endure even after their animating insights have flamed out, curdle into platitudes that smother genuine thought.
We see that cycle play out in early Imperial Rome, when Stoic philosophers like Seneca advocated “rehearsing your death” as a means of cultivating independence and moral courage. Within a generation, that austere precept had metastasized into a cultural vibe, a pre-Goth gothicism that delighted in funereal imagery. In a masterful takedown—the Cena Trimalchionis (Dinner at Trimalchio’s)—the satirist Petronius reveals how this fixation on dying had itself become a denial of death. This illustrated talk will explore this fascinating and largely forgotten historical moment.
Richard Faulk is an Oakland-based writer whose work focuses on the permeable borders between science and magic, history and myth, and the trivial and the sublime. He’s the author of the books Gross America and The Next Big Thing. He also wrote the first English translation of the historic medical text Thesaurus Anatomicus, which appears in Frederik Ruysch and his Thesaurus Anatomicus, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.