In times marked by fragmentation and crisis, theoretical psychology faces an urgent task: to rethink its relationship with mortality. This paper proposes “theorizing mortality as resistance” (a mode of thought that confronts death anxiety not as a private neurosis, but a as a political and ethical frontier. Drawing from existential and humanistic traditions (Becker, Yalom, Arendt, Butler), this work argues that awareness of finitude can serve as a radical form of consciousness, unsettling the cultural mechanisms that deny vulnerability and sustain domination.

Modernity’s obsession with progress and permanence has produced a psychological alienation from death, yielding collective defenses (distraction, consumption, and technological transcendence) that suppress our shared fragility. By contrast, to think with death is to recover the capacity for humility, compassion, and ethical imagination. This paper situates theoretical reflection as a moral act: a practice of staying awake to impermanence in a world that encourages numbness.

Through analysis of narrative, art, and philosophical discourse, the presentation contends that mortality awareness can generate new forms of solidarity and meaning-making. In this sense, theory becomes vigil (an ongoing commitment to preserving humanity amidst decay. To theorize mortality, then, is to resist despair by not denying darkness, but by learning to swell within it, creating the conditions for ethical renewal and collective hope.