When Reading is No Longer Recreation

Some writings cannot be consumed like what we call “content” these days. One cannot simply pass over them, take something away, and move on to the next. The paradox, of course, lies right here: for such a writing to be seen and read at all, it must enter a space whose primary mechanism is entertainment, speed, and the capture of attention; the very space where a serious text must fight alongside a thousand other things for a few seconds of people’s pause. Roozbeh Aghajari’s piece, “The Normalization of Death: Necrolife and Social Life,” is one of those texts that resists this logic. Even if its language were simpler and not so densely written, reading it would still not be easy. Indeed, it would be difficult. Because its task is not to convey a few ideas or declare a position; it intervenes in the reader’s perceptual apparatus and forces them to re-evaluate their relationship with what they see.

One of the most serious departure points of the text is this seemingly simple sentence: “We always begin from the middle.” This “beginning-from-the-middle” is not just a narrative choice or philosophical taste for me; it is a methodological necessity. A social event does not have a zero point. No murder, execution, war, revenge, or eruption of violence descends upon society from the heavens. Every event has been made possible within a network of habits, memories, institutions, fears, languages, and prior experiences. Separating the event from this context might make it easier for moral judgment, but it removes the very thing that needs to be explained: how such a thing could happen here and now. The value of Aghajari’s text is that it does not allow us to conclude the event with moral shock, just as it does not allow us to dissolve it into the grayness of other deaths by saying “this is just like the others.”

The central concept of the writing, “necrolife,” gains importance from this very point. It is not about contemplation of death in its philosophical and conscious sense; that confrontation through which humans understand the limits of their own existence and perhaps, consequently, take life more seriously. The discussion is about a social and psychological state where death becomes so dispersed in daily life that it turns into part of the background of perception; it exists, but is no longer seen in the same way each time. Aghajari writes precisely: “The normalization of death does not happen all at once; it occurs gradually.” For me, the social psychology of necrolife is significant for this very reason. To survive in the face of an abundance of threat and loss, the mind inevitably constructs mechanisms of adaptation, homogenization, and forgetting. But this very defense mechanism can reach a point where the distinction between deaths, and even our capacity to fully experience a catastrophe, is eroded. In this sense, necrolife is not just something “outside” of us; it precipitates into our way of seeing, reacting, and even in what no longer shakes us.

In my view, the more difficult and valuable point of the text is where it does not turn this analysis into a safe intellectual stance. The reader cannot easily stand aside and point their finger at “them.” The questions in the text, whether one likes it or not, demand self-reflection: Where do I stand in this cycle? Which death has become tolerable for me, which death have I minimized because of the victim’s identity, which casualty have I used to prove my own political stance, and before which dismembered body has my tongue suddenly become filled with calculation and “cost”? Here, thought is no longer of that abstract and romantic kind that many “thinkers” fondle; it is not a thought that merely makes the world the object of contemplation while keeping the thinker themselves outside the frame. Your “self” is also involved. And precisely for this reason, reading such a text is not tedious in the usual sense of the word; it is difficult.

Another important part of the text is that it does not treat living-death merely as a “cultural mood.” At the end, it formulates this more explicitly: “Living-death is a structure that has its own agency.” This sentence opens the path of the discussion from individual psychology to politics, economics, and social institutions. If death becomes an everyday occurrence, it is not simply because people have become more cold-hearted or the society’s moral sensitivity has declined. One must ask what structures produce, distribute, justify, and make death tolerable; what languages legitimize it; what ideologies make some corpses sacred and others insignificant; and how a human being who is themselves crushed under the pressure of “non-living” might become the foot soldiers of that very death-living order. This is where the concept, if taken seriously, finds the capacity of a real research agenda: from social psychology and the sociology of violence to political economy, ideological analysis, and the study of the mechanisms of normalization.

This is why I think this piece must be read. Not because one needs to agree with all of its political propositions or judgments; the value of a serious text is fundamentally not measured by the degree of our agreement with it. It must be read because it does something that has become rare in today’s rushed atmosphere: it reclaims the event from the clutches of immediate reaction and places it back within context, conceptualizes what we feel but often experience only in a scattered way, and most importantly, does not leave the reader outside the subject of analysis. This kind of writing cannot be simply liked and passed by. One must stay with it for a while. Perhaps we should even let it disturb us.