Unburied Bodies

Front matter

UNBURIED

SUBVERSIVE CORPSES AND THE AUTHORITY OF THE DEAD from THE AMHERST COLLEGE PRESS

UNBURIED

Preface

I never really intended to write a book about dead and unburied bodies. I am far more suited personally to exactly what burial inaugurates: continuity, closure, acceptance—along with a healthy dose of denial—and moving on with life. In the two years that I have been writing this book, however, I have lost several people that I was very close to and, as it happened, saw two of them when they were dead at their funerals. The strangeness and intimacy of such an experience is not something I want to discuss further, but it has definitely colored this book, and I feel haunted and guided by my connection to these people, both when they were dead and when they were alive.

I have always been one of those people who have been terrified of death, so I don’t undertake a conversation about dead bodies—and unburied, brutalized ones at that—lightly. When I talk in this book about the power that the dead body has over us, about giving ourselves over to the authority of the dead, to the subversive power of the corpse, Tam not thinking in purely theoretical terms. I know that the dead body has a huge effect on us, but what I am trying to interpret in this book is what that effect actually is: why the corpse is so disturbing but also so moving, why it affects us as little else does, and how to think of that effect in terms that have major political resonance.

Seeing both my beloved friend Nasser Hussain and my equally beloved sister-in-law Betty Segui suffering and dying in the space of little over a year has taught me something (and since then, I have also lost my beloved uncle, Maurice Failevic). It has taught me not so much to appreciate life as to appreciate (as awful as that sounds) death as well—to see the way that death is both the epitome and the end of suffering, the way it changes everything, the way it is so final. I can’t say I’m less afraid of dying now that I’ve seen people I know and love face death so bravely (although they have shown me that it is at least possible to do so), but I think I can appreciate more that death is not something to shut out of your life but rather something to live with, to allow it to influence your life and not the other way around.

This is a book about allowing death to shatter the assumptions of the living, about fighting the projections that dominate us while we are alive (projections of safety, order, sovereignty, and the like) via the way the dead body reveals the failure of all of those things. Because of my own experience of the deaths of people I was very close to, I know this not just as an intellectual idea but as a personal one as well. But this is not a personal book, so I'll leave it there by saying that I dedicate this book to Nasser, Betty, and Maurice. I'll never stop wishing they hadn’t died, but since they have, I want to let their deaths sit with me, and by extension, I wish for the deaths of people that you know to sit with you as well, because all of us are touched by mortality sooner or later.

Although this book is about a seemingly very morbid subject, I think it is ultimately a book not about death but about life. I ask, What is life when it is affected by death? How does death “save” life from itself? And more pointedly, and politically, how can an unburied body, a seemingly pure victim of state power and authority, serve as a font for the resistance and subversion of that very same power?

I do not pretend that losing loved ones to disease and other nonviolent matters is equivalent to the kinds of losses I am writing about here. Subjects of state and mob violence—generally, in the United States and other settler colonial nations, subjects of color—and especially bodies that have been left on display in the street, robbed of any form of dignity or privacy, experience a level of violation far, far beyond issues of personal loss and absence. Such bodies have become political objects, pawns, and a way to express the state or the racist mob’s contempt for its victims. But these bodies are also something else, and it is that “something else” that I would like to focus on. I wish to recognize how, even as these bodies are made to suffer the taunts and degradations of an inherently violent and racist society, there is a way that the state—as well as other actors caught up in the web of what we have come to call (via Foucault) biopolitics—cannot x Preface completely control and determine what their deaths mean and what their dead bodies express. It is that dimension in particular that I am trying to theorize in the pages of this book—to think about what else a dead body is beyond a pure object or a pure victim, how even a dead and unburied body can be a source of resistance, defiance, and threat to the very power that has rendered it so vulnerable and exposed. Indeed, it can be part of the unmaking of that power.

As we live in the age of Trump in the United States and many equivalent tyrants around the world, I believe this realization is more important than ever. If we think of ourselves as being only living bodies, if we think that this is all we are or have to give or hold onto, we risk a deep quiescence in the face of rising global fascism. If we hold life as so precious and irreplaceable that no risk of any kind is allowed, so that we forfeit all political power to the state and let it utterly determine its citizens (as well as define who is and is not a full citizen, who can live, and who must die), then death becomes an instrument of tyranny, a way to turn the limit on life into a mechanism of state power and authority. If, on the other hand, we learn to let the dead affect us and teach us what life is and can be when it is informed by death, then we become something more than bodies willing to do and suffer anything to preserve what we believe life has to be.

With great sorrow, I strongly believe that for all the state violence we have already seen in recent years, in the United States (and other countries as well), we are going to see an enormous piling up of the dead in the years to come: we will see countless more Michael Browns, more Trayvon Martins, more Sandra Blands, more Philando Castiles, more death on the streets, and more people of color killed behind jail cell walls. For this reason, we must not let the terror of this kind of violence silence that other, much quieter voice of the dead themselves (what I will call “the authority of the dead” in the conclusion to this book). If each murdered body simply piles up in relative anonymity, then all we get is terror. But if we let each body speak to us, we can learn something, and we can have a different political response. That is the purpose behind this book: so that we feel not despair but resolve, not just loss but a gain as well, not just terror but a sense of what life is and can be when we remember that the dead also have something to tell us. More

Preface xi accurately, as I will explain further, the dead have something to untell us; they “speak” in an inaudible voice, but one that has tremendous force and power nonetheless. Theirs is a power that can, if we allow it to affect us, bring down even the mightiest structures of state and biopolitical oppression.

xii Preface

Introduction When the State Kills, It Is (Also) Killing Itself

The long and violent history of sovereignty leaves a legacy of unburied bodies. In contemporary times, we have numerous examples of this. In the United States, Michael Brown (who was targeted for having walked in the middle of the street rather than on the sidewalk in Ferguson, Missouri) was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson, and Brown’s body was left in a pool of his own blood for four hours. In Turkey, Kevser Eltiirk, also known as Ekin Wan, a PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerilla, was shot dead by Turkish security forces, and her naked, bloody body was left on display in the street. Another example of this phenomenon is the huge number of Native American remains that, rather than being properly buried, are often unburied and then held in storage or on display in museums and anthropology departments across the United States (among other places where this kind of practice occurs). These are only some of the more infamous moments in the last few years of a phenomenon that is ubiquitous to sovereign power and may even extend beyond it.' In classical times—albeit in the realm of theater—perhaps the best-known example of an unburied body is that of Polynices, the brother of Antigone. In the play Antigone, King Creon deliberately left Polynices (his nephew) unburied for having had the audacity to fight against his own city. The play revolves around Antigone’s resolve to bury her brother, setting off a cascade of suicides and destruction.

1. Although contemporary forms of sovereignty may be on the wane, there is no evidence that either state murder or the various other forms of biopolitical and neoliberal violence that is inflicted on bodies—dead ones very much included—is ending. For more on waning states, see Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2010).

In each of these cases, we appear to be witnessing a showing of state power, of its contempt for its victims and its display of authority. A state—or some corresponding authority system—that won't bury its victims is, it seems, an entity that is so powerful as to be able to do as it pleases. The dead bodies on display appear as warnings against others who might try to defy the state. It suggests further that the state is, in effect, above its own laws, that it can afford to flout conventions of decency and humanitarianism—f not overtly, then at least by implication. It is as if the state is saying, “We are generally law abiding, but we don’t have to be. Look at what we are willing to do to show our power.” What looks like a casual accident (no one got around to picking up the body yet) or a fit of sovereign pique (in Antigone, Creon’s decision seems to have been based on whim and anger) amounts to a declaration of the true power of sovereignty, its monopoly on violence, and the exposed threat (not unlike the exposed, often naked dead bodies left on the street) that speaks to a violent discourse beneath the language of rights and lawfulness.

For all of this, there are some problems with the assumption that the state is successfully and unproblematically projecting an image of strength, that it can stand defiantly above its own laws without consequence when it displays these unburied bodies. In the contemporary stories noted above, each of these displays led to big trouble for the state in question; in modern times, social media ensures that these bodies are unburied but not forgotten. But even in earlier times, unburied bodies were remembered, marked, and—if the oppressed community in question could pull it off—honored or even avenged. The dissemination of and popular response to such imagery turns the “meaning” of these unburied bodies from a sovereign threat to a source of protest. The very same image of state power inherent in the unburied dead becomes, in the hands of protestors and resisters, a way to defy and displace that power.

Thus, to remain with the three examples I offered above, the widely disseminated images of Michael Brown’s body helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. In Stockholm, a Kurdish woman lay naked and covered with fake blood in front of the Swedish parliament to protest the treatment of Ekin Wan, a moment that went viral on social media. Agitation to rebury Native American remains has risen to increasing prominence as universities and museums are forced to contend with their own participation in an economy of unburial and exploitation.’

Antigone also suggests that the display of bodies does not always produce the results the state would desire. After all, Creon’s power is ultimately unmade as first his niece Antigone, then his own son Haemon (Antigone’s fiancé), and then his wife Eurydice, die in rapid succession. At the end of the play, rather than basking in sovereign authority, Creon is depicted as a ruined man, confused, broken, and weak. As the play comes to an end, his authority is perhaps the final victim in a cycle of defiance and unmaking.

How then do we reconcile the apparent display of sovereign authority inherent in unburied bodies with the radical response we see in the cases described above? What is actually being displayed when a body is left unburied? What kinds of claims are being made over the corpses of those who either deliberately or incidentally ran afoul of state authorities? In this book, I intend to look at these questions by examining some of the most basic assumptions about what these bodies signify and how people can reappropriate that significance with radical political effects. Against a liberal discourse based on personal autonomy and human rights, I will turn instead to an anarchist reading of the unburied body as itself posing a major threat to sovereign authority. I will argue that the body, far from being an object that is utterly at the disposal of the state, manifests exactly what the state cannot control; while living human beings are, generally speaking, always subject to projections of authority and power by the state (as well as other forms of authority that underwrite and surround the state), dead bodies— as I'll explain further—are not. This is not to argue that the corpse is somehow “free” of the normativity and control that the state projects onto its living subjects; rather, the corpse, being effectively beyond the reach of the state’s biopolitical power, suggests a way in which that power is not totalizing.

2. Of course, there are myriad other moments when there is no backlash, when the state is not faced with its own violence; but even then, the same forms of resistance are present and legible, if not read, by those who witness this display.

It is, of course, not true that states are indifferent to dead bodies. In a recent essay, Banu Bargu, referencing Achille Mbembe’s writings, speaks of “necropolitical violence,” which she defines as “the violence that takes as its object the realm of the dead—the corpse, the act of burial, funerary rituals, the graves and cemeteries as sites of burial and commemoration, and forms of mourning and reverence.” Bargu describes how, in contemporary Turkey, this practice can be seen in acts ranging from Ekin Wan being left dead, naked, and bloody in the streets, to the booing and jeering of right-wingers over a proposed moment of silence at a soccer game for the victims of the Ankara bombings (victims who were protesting the authoritarianism of Erdogan), to the state’s refusal to let families bury the dead the state had murdered. This necropolitical violence suggests that the state cares very much about bodies of all kinds, both living and dead, and that it seeks to demonstrate its own power, as noted above, precisely through the selective violation of any sense of respect for particular dead bodies.

Bargu’s description and terminology help us think further about the state’s treatment of dead bodies and explain why the state often goes to such extremes to demonstrate its contempt for its enemies. This is critical to understanding why the state acts as it does from the state’s own perspective. What we still need to understand, however, is how these bodies nevertheless can evade the state’s grasp, how they can come to manifest—or perhaps, indeed, “embody”—something the state does not control (and perhaps no one else does either).

To think about this question further, I will consider the question of the unburied body from both a liberal perspective and a more radical one—in the latter case, principally via a reading of the body by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin helps us think about what the body is when it isn’t the subject of so many projections (through a process that Althusser calls interpellation).* For Benjamin, rather than being something true and autonomous and self-possessing (the liberal understanding), the body is the site where the failure of projection can be read. In his view,

3. Banu Bargu, “Another Necropolitics,” in “Something Is Rotten in the State,” ed. Basak Ertiir and James Martel, supplement, Theory and Event 19, no. 1 (January 2016).

4. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (“Ideology and the State”), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-126.

this is most clearly true with corpses, insofar as their very repulsive qualities—their decay, their undeniable markers of mortality—signify that they are not sites of continuous and predetermined projections of identity and meaning. The dead body can be said to “counterproject” instead—to dispel and displace the stories and meanings the state wants to force upon each and every one of its subjects.

As such, the body, and particularly the corpse—and perhaps even more particularly, the unburied body—subverts the very narratives of state authority and power that its display is purportedly meant to demonstrate. One argument I will expand on further in this book is that as we move down through the layers of abjectness, going from least abject (the rich, the white, the male, the straight, and the cisgendered) to increasingly poor and marginal forms of status (the poor, the people of color, the female, the queer, and the transgendered) and lower still (the prisoner, the stateless refugee, the concentration camp inmate; obviously these can be overlapping categories) to the very bottom (the dead, the unburied and displayed corpse), we see a corresponding rise in the resistance to projection and normativity. To Benjamin, signs are always betraying and subverting what they are meant to represent, and the unburied body is perhaps the paradigmatic version of this tendency. Rather than being the weakest, the most vulnerable, the most victim-like site of control, the unburied body is the place where state projections of power and authority go to die themselves. Coming up against a form of materiality that is impossible to deny (given the corpse’s rotting, dreadful aspect), state authority is exposed as empty and void. In other words, the nothingness of the corpse, the way it is a marker of loss and death, exposes the nothingness of the state and other forms of projected authority in a way that little else could.

This is not to celebrate the fact that states engage in such cruel practices as failing to bury their dead, whether they are deemed as enemies or peripheral subjects. I never want to discount the suffering that the families, friends, and comrades of the dead go through due to these exposures, nor do I intend to diminish the suffering of the once-living subject who is murdered and then displayed. The point is simply to say that at the moment of the state’s apparent greatest strength, we see signs of its own rot and decay. By projecting that failure onto the corpse of the victim of state violence, the state itself is exposed as a mortal, vulnerable, and all-too-human entity.

Layout of the Book

I will make my argument over the course of four chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 lays out my basic claims about the corpse and unburied bodies, drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin and other theorists. The chapter also engages with the liberal discourse of human rights in order to argue that the violation of the unburied body is not a matter of violating such rights. To evoke human rights in such cases is the equivalent of saying, “The state had no right to leave that body unburied; something sacred or basic about human bodies has been violated, and it is on that basis that we reject this practice.” Such a position amounts to turning to some transcendent status in order to resist state violence, but in fact, state violence itself comes (as I will argue further) from that same transcendent sphere. In this way, I will argue that a discourse of human rights does not amount to a form of resistance to state violence but is in effect a perpetuation of it in a different form. Resistance to state violence must come not from within the realm of what Benjamin calls mythic violence—the projected authority that includes the doctrine of human rights as well as the general laws and policies of states—but rather from its failure, a failure that becomes particularly visible in unburied bodies as such rather than in something they symbolize or represent. Accordingly, I will argue that the value and power of the unburied dead body comes not from some higher right or natural law that gives it its due but from the way the body, and especially the dead body, disrupts and subverts the projections of political authority that it is meant to convey.

In chapter 2, I examine two key literary examples of unburied bodies from the classical period, focusing on the stories of Patroclus and Hector in the Jad and then Antigone and her brother Polynices in the play Antigone. In these tellings, the dead body is very much caught up with the power of the state, with its symbolism and its vulnerability. I will argue that the frenzy that attaches itself to dead bodies in these stories—the lust to desecrate and the urgency to protect, retrieve, and bury these bodies, even to the point of self-sacrifice—indicates the extent to which the dead body becomes the site where all the complexities of projected political authority come to rest, a node where state power becomes particularly and unexpectedly vulnerable and threatened.

I will contrast these two readings according to the way they treat and consider the unburied dead. Whereas in the Irad, the desperate battle over corpses reveals both the hubris and vulnerability of the state, in Antigone, we see an example of how a ruler’s attempt to use a corpse as a vehicle of state power can backfire disastrously.

In chapter 3, I treat three early modern and modern renditions of unburied dead bodies. I begin with Machiavelli’s description, in The Prince, of the way Cesare Borgia had his own henchman, Remirro de Orco, cut in two pieces—and had his corpse, as well as the knife and cutting board used, displayed in the town square. I argue that reading Machiavelli carefully, we see that this narrative—although formally depicting Borgia’s acts as a brilliant way to purge himself of the crimes that de Orco committed in his name and thus establish Justice and a lasting political authority—actually or simultaneously depicts the violence and illicit authority of Borgia himself. Machiavelli’s discussion of this display reveals the way that state power is always established via threats and how at the heart of a principle like “justice,” one often finds a much more naked and violent form of power that is graphically depicted both through and on the dead body itself:

Following this reading of Machiavelli, I show, with a reading of a short story by Franz Kafka called “The Hunter Gracchus,” how the subversive power of the dead becomes that much more visible when the competing narrative of state authority is removed. In this story, a corpse can speak for itself, and this speaking, I argue, gives voice to a subversive power that is otherwise wholly and pointedly silent. Perhaps most critically, “The Hunter Gracchus” shows how, as we move from the classical and early modern into the modern period, there is a transformation from a primary concern with the power and violence of the state to a more general—if no less political—concern with social and political violence more generally. In this parable, because the hunter represents no state or nation but is a kind of endlessly traveling—and thus stateless—figure, we see how the projections and powers of the dead operate in a context that is relatively undistorted by sovereign phantasms of authority and control. This allows us to see not the “truth” of bodies but rather a field in which those bodies are not immediately overwritten by state interpellations (even as it is far from innocent of forms of social and political violence more generally).

Finally, I look at a description of a lynching in James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” to focus on the particular experience of subjects of color—in particular, black subjects at the hands of a racist state and social system. In reading Baldwin’s depiction of a violent episode of lynching, we see a move toward a racialized violence that suggests an ever deeper vulnerability for established political authorities even as those authorities appear ever more powerful and threatening. This story also demonstrates how state violence can morph into social violence under conditions of biopolitics (as I explain further in the following chapter) built on questions of race and violent exclusion. Here I note that Baldwin’s writing provides a sense of how the violence done to black bodies becomes a way to export not just violence but death itself onto a racialized other, leaving a white community that, to cite Baldwin from another writing, “do[es ] not believe in death.”’ Baldwin shows a white community that is bonded together by its belief that in killing others, it has somehow itself escaped death (the death so clearly manifested in the bodies they lynch and display), thus approaching the kind of universal—and immortal—perfect forms of subjectivity that are the ultimate promise of the liberal universal. This belief is eternally threatened by both black life and the inescapable mortality of all bodies—the white supremacists’ own bodies very much included—hence exposing the vulnerability of the very community that uses the display of dead bodies of color to announce their triumph over life and death alike.

The examination of Baldwin’s story transitions the book from a general consideration of unburied bodies to a focus on the racialization of these bodies—in this case, bodies of color. In chapter 4, I specifically contend with unburied bodies of color, both in literature and especially in real life, focusing at the end of the chapter on the life and death of Michael Brown. Before I get to his story, I look at

5. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 92.

the theoretical models that explain the way that race itself is a central and critical mode of transmission of authority in an era of biopolitics. Examining the work of Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, and Saidiya Hartman, as well as Frank Wilderson III and Neil Roberts, I look at the various forms of violence that such racism produces as well as at ways to resist that violence, even in the context of a racist state. I turn finally to Brown himself, in part via a work by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. I argue that in addition to the ways that Moten and Harney see resistance in Brown despite—or even because of—his death, Brown’s death adds another layer of resistance, a particular exposure of the racism at the heart of the entire apparatus of the projection of power and authority in an age of biopolitics.

In the conclusion to this book, I describe the way the desire to have the dead speak can be supplemented by something else: a way to have the dead “unspeak” or “untell” us what we think they have to say, leading to Benjamin’s concept of the “authority of the dead.” By blocking or interfering with the mechanisms of projection (and hence “unspeaking”), the dead can in effect disrupt and undermine the kinds of voices that often appear to be legitimate protests against state violence and allow other kinds of voices (the voices that Spillers and Hartman and Moten and Harney are all listening for) to be heard more clearly and without distortion. It is these other voices, I will argue, that produce or constitute the authority of the dead and thus serve as its source.

Ultimately, I will argue that the untelling and undoing that result from the authority of the dead amount to a form of political anarchism, a politics produced in and between the breakdown of grand narratives of order and sovereign—or what I would like to call archist—authority. Archism is the contrary of anarchism; it is a system of rule and domination based on phantasm and projection. The term archism is not often used because part of the conceit of archism is that it is natural and self-evident, the only possible form of politics. For this very reason, I think it is important to give it a name and to mark it as such. Archism, as I will show, is not merely tied up with states; it can well survive the death of the state per se. What archism cannot survive is the end of hierarchy, of a sense of control and domination, and as I will argue further, perhaps most of all, it cannot survive a loss of its own sense that it controls and holds off death (for some anyway). To the authority of archism, I would thus counterpose the authority of the dead. This is an anarchist authority, a power set against states and any other form of vertical or archist hierarchy in favor of a quieter (actually mute), subtler form of human agency and being together that the living can learn (if only by negative inference) from the dead.