Help me not to say goodbye to you: Digital immortality between sociology and psychoanalysis

Abstract

Death has always represented the insurmountable boundary around which every culture has built its own systems of meaning. With the advent of digital technology, this boundary has become porous: technologies such as chatbots trained on the deceased’s messages, three-dimensional avatars, interactive holograms and social media profiles that outlive their owners open up the possibility of a continuous, dialogical and — at least in appearance — inexhaustible post-mortem presence. This paper examines the phenomenon of digital immortality through an interdisciplinary lens, bringing sociology and Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue. In the first section, building on Bell and Gray’s (2000) distinction between unidirectional and bidirectional immortality, the main technological projects of digital survival are analysed—from Replika to Eterni.me, from LifeNaut to 8i’s holograms—interpreted as an expression of a broader cultural transformation that Jacobsen (2017) has defined as the ‘post-mortem society’. In the second section, Lacanian theory of double death allows us to interpret digital persistence as a device that defers symbolic death, producing a structural form of digital melancholia: the surviving subject cannot experience the void because it is constantly and artificially filled. The analysis shows how digital simulacra operate predominantly in the Imaginary register, preventing the work of mourning that only symbolic distance makes possible, and how the transformation of the contemporary superego — from an instance of prohibition to an imperative of exhibited jouissance — constitutes the cultural structure within which these technologies proliferate. The paper concludes by outlining prospects for future research in clinical, legal and comparative fields.