All things spectral

Abstract

The question of the human and the nonhuman, how they are produced and inscribed on bodies, has been the subject to a burgeoning amount of research. In this paper I'd like to offer an analysis of what seems to constitute a gap in our theories of the nonhuman, that is the question of dead – radically inert, mute and vulnerable – bodies. By reference to a Greek word sema, which denominated both a ‘tomb’, a ‘sign’ and a ‘trace’, I would like to investigate the three-fold context in which the dead bodies are enmeshed: the material, the discursive and the spectral one. Drawing on the concept of the ‘remnant’ (G. Agamben) and the ‘spectre’ (J. Derrida) I will pose a question regarding the ways in which dead bodies are included in power relations, powers of visibility and normalisation, and how they may challenge them. Finally, I will offer a project of ‘materialistic hauntology’, an ethical stand towards bodies that are in course of dematerialising, but that still matter.

Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory

“…The life force will never stop (e.g., bacteria live on decomposing matter). Such an approach to death is what Olga Cielemęcka (2015) criticizes, and I agree with her criticism, as reducing death to a particular form of vitality. I find it ethically and politically important to stay with death because death and dead bodies are an intrinsic part of knowledge-production practices through which transgenic fruit flies, in this case, are made invisible and banished into a land of nonhumanness, nonbelonging and nongrievability.…”

“…In other words, this new materialist approach, precisely because of its political commitments to materiality and ethical accountability to matter's agential force, often emphasizes generative processes over death. For instance, the focus on vitality and generativeness in Braidotti's work may have caused her new materialist philosophy of death to be read as leaving death and dead bodies untheorized (Cielemęcka 2015). In my reading of Braidotti (2013), she discusses death as a part of life.…”

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

“…To begin with, the corpse is marked by a fundamental ambivalence, confounding, even queering, dichotomies such as human/inhuman, culture/nature, absence/presence, in being both material and spectral, abject and sacred, unspeakable and communicable, here and there (Cielemęcka, 2015: 236; Kristeva, 1982: 109). The liminal status of the corpse illuminates the integral connection of human to nonhuman with the abandoned corpse exposing the differential vulnerabilities and exposure to harm and the variable buriability/grievability of subjects, which is normalized by exclusionary definitions of the human (Butler, 2004; Cielemęcka, 2015: 244–246). Secondly, the emphasis on (dead) bodies draws attention to materiality and the residues that linger after death despite attempts to bound and dispose them.…”

“…Secondly, the emphasis on (dead) bodies draws attention to materiality and the residues that linger after death despite attempts to bound and dispose them. This posthuman view challenges the philosophical distinction between supposedly inert death and generative life, demonstrating the future-oriented and generative force of dead bodies that can open up new forms of interconnection and creative synthesis (Braidotti, 2013; Cielemęcka, 2015: 243–244).…”

“…Finally, beholding the corpse of the Other confronts us with the limits of representation and our responsibilities for the dead/dying Other: the ‘state of vulnerability inherent to the dead body provokes questions regarding ethical obligations and political possibilities to speak and act on behalf of the others, of how to express a harm which is not our own’ (Cielemęcka, 2015: 236). When Demir states that taking Kurdi’s photograph was ‘the only way [to] express the scream of his silent body’ (Griggs, 2015), did she and, by extension, the Western media have the right to speak for the mute(d) other?…”