Brain death and grief. Formalism and technification as factors that encourage denial of death in the 21st century.

Abstract

This article offers a critical reflection on brain death as a contemporary definition of death and examines its ethical, cultural, and symbolic implications in twenty-first-century societies. The author argues that brain death is not a neutral or purely scientific criterion, but rather a technoscientific and legal construction aligned with dominant modern values such as formalism, efficiency, and the denial of suffering. Drawing on the 1968 Harvard Report and engaging critically with thinkers such as Hans Jonas and Peter Singer, the article shows how death has ceased to be an intimate, communal experience and has become an institutional verdict administered by experts and regulated by law. This transformation has direct consequences for the identity of the dying subject, who is reduced to a technologically sustained body, and for the identity of mourners, whose grief is increasingly shaped by standardized and impersonal rituals. The study analyzes how the technification of death reshapes cultural representations of life, pain, and loss, weakening the symbolic bonds that traditionally enabled the elaboration of mourning. The article concludes that brain death embodies a contemporary form of the denial of death, profoundly affecting human identity and ethical practices surrounding dying.