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oapen-20.500.12657-577782023-03-21T12:30:16Z Unburied Bodies Martel, James R. Dead -- Social aspects Dead -- Political aspects Dignity bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JF Society & culture: general bic Book Industry Communication::J Society & social sciences::JH Sociology & anthropology::JHB Sociology::JHBZ Sociology: death & dying bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HP Philosophy::HPS Social & political philosophy 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. 2022-08-05T12:45:57Z 2022-08-05T12:45:57Z 2018 book ONIX_20220805_9781943208111_7 9781943208104 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/57778 eng application/pdf application/epub+zip Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 9781943208111.pdf 9781943208111.epub Amherst College Press Amherst College Press 10.3998/mpub.10214671 10.3998/mpub.10214671 bd61c84b-c01e-472d-a7b1-a72ad38700ed 9781943208104 Amherst College Press 154 open access
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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.
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