Suchergebnisse

The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form of agency, and to undercut the authority claims made by state power. Ranging across time and space from the battlefields of ancient Thebes to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and taking in perspectives from such writers as Sophocles, Machiavelli, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, and Bonnie Honig, Martel asks why the presence of the abandoned corpse can be seen by both authorities and protesters as a source of power, and how those who have been abandoned or marginalized by structures of authority can find in a lifeless body fellow accomplices in their aspirations for dignity and humanity.

The European colonial expansion marks the beginning of a death drive for underground resources. That its consequences are felt today in the form of global warming and other metabolic rifts is not a surprise. In the sixteenth century alone, this led to the death of 60 million indigenous peoples in the Americas, a mass genocide with global environmental impacts. In this context, I have been investigating a series of exhumations, with a focus on Latin America, while thinking about the practice of environmental architecture. Exhumations—the removal of bodies from the ground so as to reveal or to give light—are a key to understanding resource extraction and its geological optics. However, in recent decades, exhumations have gained further prominence by supporting indigenous demands for the protection and restitution of ancestral territories; within the prosecution of human rights violations, owing to the development of forensic practices; or due to the new importance given to soil and material analysis within disputes on environmental justice. Located at the intersection of extraction and the resistance to it, exhumations are a crucial feature of how territorial, environmental, and political disputes are conducted. I am especially interested in how exhumations foreground political communities constituted in relation to grounds and territories, often in the form of complex intergenerational relations, extended kinship structures, or political alliances that cut across epistemic divides. The range of projects and communities that exhumations capture is, of course, extremely wide, but in the context of a discussion on the rights of future generations and architecture, two dimensions of exhumation are particularly important: the cultivation of intertemporal modes of coexistence and of kinfullness.

Aside from casual references to Soviet biopolitics in the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, the theoretical literature on biopolitics has largely ignored the Soviet experience, while empirical research in Russian studies has rarely addressed biopolitics. The article examines the experience of Stalinism as an important case for the study of biopolitics that helps resolve a problem preoccupying scholars from Foucault onward: the proximity of biopolitics to its opposite, the thanatopolitics of the mass production of death. How is it that a mode of power presenting itself in terms of care, augmentation, and intensification of life so frequently end up negating life itself? The article addresses this question in the context of the confluence of two political rationalities in the project of Soviet socialism, the revolutionary transcendence of the old order and the biopolitical immanentism of the construction of new forms of life. Focusing on the catastrophic policies of the Great Break (1928–1932), it argues that this combination is ultimately aporetic, leading to the violent destruction of the very lives that were to be transformed. The conclusion considers the contemporary relevance of the lessons to be learnt from Stalinist biopolitics.

Aside from casual references to Soviet biopolitics in the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, the theoretical literature on biopolitics has largely ignored the Soviet experience, while empirical research in Russian studies has rarely addressed biopolitics. The article examines the experience of Stalinism as an important case for the study of biopolitics that helps resolve a problem preoccupying scholars from Foucault onward: the proximity of biopolitics to its opposite, the thanatopolitics of the mass production of death. How is it that a mode of power presenting itself in terms of care, augmentation, and intensification of life so frequently end up negating life itself? The article addresses this question in the context of the confluence of two political rationalities in the project of Soviet socialism, the revolutionary transcendence of the old order and the biopolitical immanentism of the construction of new forms of life. Focusing on the catastrophic policies of the Great Break (1928–1932), it argues that this combination is ultimately aporetic, leading to the violent destruction of the very lives that were to be transformed. The conclusion considers the contemporary relevance of the lessons to be learnt from Stalinist biopolitics. ; Peer reviewed

Legvold reviews 'The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change' by Katherine Verdery. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change by Katherine Verdery is briefly reviewed.

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Katherine Verdery. New York: Columbia University Press. 1999. 185 pp.

Of the 13,000 works of art in the Canadian War Museum's holdings, only 64 display dead bodies. Prevailing explanations of this absence revolve around respect for the dead and ethical responsibility to avoid the glorification of war. And yet death and destruction are pervasive in war. The irony is that one leaves the museum with the sense that war does not produce corpses, or at least not very many of them. Nowhere is this irony more evident than in the Canadian War Museum's armaments collection, described as 'the way in which human ingenuity has been applied to the science of war, creating weapons and other devices to attack, protect and kill', but with only technical information about weapon calibre and capacities provided. This article describes an effort to dig up the dead. Studying the form and function of the labels accompanying weapons, I argue that seemingly mundane technical specifications classify and standardize certain kinds of bodily injury and death, and make the bodies destroyed by war present. Overall, arguing that injury and death are in the (technical) details, I challenge the assumption that a focus on technological devices sanitizes war. Instead, I propose a way to investigate and interrogate how death and injury in war are calibrated and embodied in the standards that make weapons 'conventional'.

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead women's bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign 'Woman'. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of 'Woman' as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe.

Death, the passing of a loved one, friend, colleague or just someone we may have known, is virtually always sad and often traumatic. However, it is a part of life and has to be coped with. Each year around 60 million people worldwide die from a wide and diverse number of causes. The problem of what to do with all those dead bodies is becoming a major conundrum for the families involved as well as for policy makers and governments. Natural and anthropogenic disasters, together with increasing incidence of major pandemics of infectious diseases is making finding a solution ever more difficult. A problem which is made worse by ever-increasing draconian rules about what can and cannot be done when disposing of a body.Currently, there are two basic choices, either bury the body in the ground where such action is permitted or cremate it and dispose of the ashes in a culturally and legally acceptable fashion. Generally, both options are becoming prohibitively expensive. The cost of land and the burgeoning demand for land to be used for industry, agriculture, urbanised centres or leisure activities is making burial no longer an option for most people. Japan has long led the world in incineration technology and it has also led the world for many years in cremating its dead. Virtually all Japanese are now cremated, the funeral process involving a mixture of high technology and unique routines steeped in history. Despite widespread concerns that cremation can cause environmental pollution and may damage public health as a result, it is still deemed less polluting than burial. It is likely that countries around the globe will increasingly adopt a policy of cremating their deceased citizens and would do well to follow the lead in this respect being shown by Japan.