Apoptosis

Rabi Shehu

Apoptosis

Apoptosis concerns the pre-programmed death of living cells and it is a mechanism that serves the maintaining of the life of the fully constituted organism. In this sense, apoptosis is an introjected death; it is simultaneous with life. It differs from the notion of necrosis, which describes non-programmed cellular death caused by external agents which irrevocably damage the organism. In this project, my approach to death is from a radically non-biological perspective. To make this transferring from biology to aesthetics, I will use the notion of apoptosis as a metaphor, as a vector of movement from one domain to another. This conceptual usage of apoptosis as a negative event preceding positive outcomes constitutes the core of my project. Apoptosis as an aesthetical operator has a double function: first, it de-biologizes the human subject and second, it renders this subject capable of another life, a life called existence. It is a death that opens the path for the second life of the subject. The de-biologistic accounts for the apoptosis of our biological life, for the independent aesthetical existence, to emerge. Apoptosis is an annihilating or vacuolizing operator endowed with creative powers. It is a movement present in the four parts of my project: Death-Flowers, Aesthetics of Revolt, Aesthetics of Ruins, and “Flocka”- Floating Death, that weaves them together into one concept of death: not the biological death of the human subject, but death as a transcendental condition of the existential subject.