All things spectral

Olga Cielemecka

The question of the nonhuman, once a fairly peripheral one, hasrecently become one of the central interests of philosophy, feministtheory, reflections on technology and science, literature and visual arts,music and dance. The concept of the human, now ‘erased, like aface drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1970: 387), seemsto be inevitably evolving towards its posthuman, superhuman, ortranshuman form.

We can distinguish at least three, not only overlapping, butrather radically entangled, fields of inquiry in which this turn to thenonhuman is being realised within feminist theory. The first one,which could be called an anthropological field, is looking intopossibilities of destabilisation of the concept of the human. Itopposes the classical, Cartesian and Kantian, tradition of thinkingabout the human as a self-assertive, complete subject of knowledge, alawgiver and master of nature. At the same time, it opposes thestructuralist and post-structuralist tendencies in which the human isreduced to a mere product of discourse, subjugated to structures andforces of language or power – forming a nonsensical subject chainedto an inhuman signifier (see for example Deleuze 2004, Lacan 1986,Foucault 1970). It aims at an affirmative approximation of the humanto the material non- or in-human forces that form and constitute it.

The second field is outlined by ethical questions which arise fromthe recognition of an inseparability of the human and the nonhuman.Previous definitions of the human are recognised as powerful tools ofdiscrimination, violence and exclusion; the moment one is denied herhumanness, she becomes expelled from the community and is

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unprotected under human laws. Theodor Adorno described thisprocess in a brief yet powerful image:

The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of afatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with whichhe repels this gaze – ‘after all, it’s only an animal’ – reappears irresistiblyin cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again andagain to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal’, because theycould never fully believe this even of animals (2005:105).

The third field is delimited by ontological investigations. It iscomposed of questions regarding time and space, the nature ofbiological and physical processes, and all kinds of different beings,from electrons, brittlestars, and lab rats to fungi. The aim of theseinquiries is to shift the understanding of matter, reality, time, life,nature, and agency, and elaborate what I would call the newmetaphysics of material change or becoming.

The problem of the animal, material, microorganic, technological,environmental, inorganic, and so on, has begun to occupy a significantplace in research in many different contexts and disciplines, bringingrevelatory, often also potentially revolutionary, recognitions andtheoretical proposals. In this paper, however, I would like to offer ananalysis of what seems to constitute a gap in our inquiry about thenonhuman, that is, the question of dead bodies. On the one hand,there is a significant amount of research and reflection on death anddying, mourning and remembrance, rituals and traditions concerningdeath. On the other, the problem of the body is of great interest inboth critical social theories and philosophy. The question of deadbodies – the very abject: skulls, ashes, bones, hair, bodily fluids – hasobviously been at the centre of research for physical anthropologists,archeologists, and museologists. Importantly, the first impulses to theethical turn in what could be called ‘dead bodies studies’ came fromrepresentatives of these disciplines. Nevertheless, it seems to me thatthe question of dead and ‘formerly-human’ matter is rarelyapproached by theorists of the nonhuman.

The status of dead bodies is deeply troubling, their presence isdisturbing. Remains are both human and nonhuman; somehowthey challenge and perturb the difference between the two. Theyaccompany us, the living, but at the same time we wish to delegatethem to enclosed, ordered spaces where they, as we believe, shouldbelong. Dead embodiment is radically inert and vulnerable, deprivedof interests, will, desire, power to oppose, rebel or express itsharm. This is one of the reasons why re-thinking the dead body is

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important: it can be seen as a model, and a radical threshold, of anabsolutely bare, unprotected, defenseless form of (non)life. By usingthe word ‘vulnerability’ here I have in mind a kind of ‘vulnerability’that is not anthropomorphised, in other words, where the humanability to suffer does not constitute a prototype or a frame of referencefor understanding the term. This state of vulnerability inherent to thedead body provokes questions regarding ethical obligations andpolitical possibilities to speak and act on behalf of the others; of howto express a harm which is not our own; it questions the limits ofpolitical representation, of resistance and of language. For deadbodies, just like all the other bodies, are never completely free fromthe power that subjugates, interprets, colonises, and producesknowledge. Giorgio Agamben once wrote:

What do we owe to the dead? ‘The work of love in recollecting the onewho is dead’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘is the work of the most disinterested,free, and faithful love.’ But it is certainly not the easiest. The dead, afterall, not only ask nothing from us, but they also seem to do everythingpossible in order to be forgotten. This, however, is precisely why the deadare perhaps the most demanding objects of love. We are defenseless anddelinquent with respect to the dead; we flee from and neglect them(Agamben 2011:39).

The dead body, as that which is radically spectral and elusive and yetstill persistently material, inhabits a border of the human–nonhuman,communicable–unspeakable, the sacred and the abject. It challengesthe above stated divisions or dichotomies; it queers certainties by itsboth evanescent and irreducible presence. It introduces the questionsof negativity, disappearing, and non-being, and by doing so challengesmaterialist reflection to leave the realm of the present and, withoutfalling back into traps of dualism, to confront itself with that which isundergoing dematerialisation and the process of becoming absent.When writing about ‘queering certainties’ I wish to queer the conceptof ‘queer’. I would like to suggest that queering is an ethical movementof always disturbing hierarchies and identities whenever they becomepetrified, self-content, stable, and by that run the risk of becomingoppressive.

How can we, the living beings, become attentive listeners to thenondiscursive, ontologically weak speech of the dead? In this paperI argue for a materialistic hauntology, an ethical stance towards bodiesthat are in course of dematerialising, but that still matter. First, I willproblematise the question of the nonhuman and the place that thedead body may occupy in the context of the re-conceptualisation and

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displacement of the human. I would like to make reference toneo-materialist feminist approaches and pose the question of howdeath could be defined in the light of this influential theoreticaltendency which focuses on the concepts of life, vital forces, becomingsand resists the ‘apocalyptic tone’ which, as it is claimed by some,1 isfound in a large part of contemporary philosophy. The second part ofthis paper consists in an attempt to map out the geographies of thedead by highlighting two dimensions: on the one hand, what is dead isstill present and cannot be completely extirpated. Dead bodies share acommon space with the living: the dead and the living are entangled,inseparable, they cross each others’ limits. On the other hand, deadbodies are not free from regimes of bodily colonisation, of knowledgeproduction and politics. By approaching this dual topography of deadbodies’ materiality, a certain movement comes into view – a movementcomposed of circulation and suppression, quasi-presence and veiling,limitlessness and limitation, unconcealment and concealment. Next,I turn to three different philosophical propositions in order toelaborate the problem of dead bodies in both its ontological andethical aspect. I will refer to Judith Butler’s concept of ‘grievability’,Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the ‘remnant’ and Jacques Derrida’s notionof the ‘spectre’. These authors unmask the logics in which to declaresomething nonhuman constitutes a gesture of domination andviolence, and offer instead alternative orders, or economies, of thehuman–nonhuman relation. Butler’s troubling question of why certainlives are grievable while others are not, will be rephrased and repeatedin the context of the ways in which human remains are treated.Through an interpretation of Agamben’s and Derrida’s respectiveconcepts I will seek the possibility to formulate a certain position orattitude towards dead bodies which would respect their weak presence,their dematerialisation and persistent materiality, their mystery andvulnerability.

The nonhuman matters

How can we place the question of dead bodies in the horizon of a nowtrembling, if not altogether abolished, distinction between human andnonhuman? How can we approach the problem of the dead in itsmateriality? In ancient Greece sema was a word which was used todesignate a dead body. This word signified both a ‘tomb’, and a ‘sign’or a ‘trace’ at the same time. Thus sema indicates the threefold –material, discursive and spectral – status of a dead body. In search forthe material and de/material, human and nonhuman traces that death

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leaves, I will first look into emerging feminist possibilities ofunderstanding the human, matter, and dying.

The question of the nonhuman has found an importantarticulation in feminist theories of new materialism. Thinkers whocould be classified as representatives of this tendency emphasise theformative role of inhuman vital forces in the production ofsubjectivities (forces of becoming, materialisations, time-space-mattercouplings, material transformations2) and the agential character ofvarious forms of life: animals, environment, viruses, atoms, plants,weather and so on. Matter is being endowed with agency and power,while the human is situated in a flux of nonhuman entanglements thatare constantly reshaping, transforming, and producing the new. It mayseem that in the light of this vitalist materialism, which elevates thequestion of life to the rank of the main theoretical problem, thequestion of death is unavoidably marginalised. Nonetheless, death canbe located in the context of neo-materialist concerns, assumptions andrecognitions, as Rosi Braidotti’s (2006) and Karen Barad’s (2010)reflections on this problem demonstrate. Furthermore, a neo-materialist approach helps to make apparent that the non-anthropocentric ontology of the subject is from the outset tied upwith ontological and ethical problems.

Rosi Braidotti (2006) views the displacement of the human fromthe privileged place once granted to him by Western philosophy,religion and science, and the human’s subsequent transposition intothe field of the nonhuman, as a revolutionary paradigm shift – apromising event. According to her, the nature of the universe is pluraland transformative; it is a flux and in constant change. Humans arealways immanently submerged into this dynamic material reality whichis composed of operative forces of becoming. They themselves areliving clusters of forces, propelled forward, into a larger life, by the vitalpower of potentia. But how can nonlife be posited within this project?The ontological primacy of generative powers of life, assumed byBraidotti, does not cancel the problem of death but rather calls for itsrevision.

Braidotti diagnoses nihilistic undertones circulating in a largenumber of texts pertaining to what we see as masculinistpoststructuralist philosophy3, in which questions of death dominateand outnumber those regarding life.4 In opposition to this ‘necro-philosophy’, Braidotti offers a project of an affirmative politics of lifeitself. Life – being ‘a vital force’, ‘cosmic energy, simultaneously emptychaos and absolute speed of movement . . .’ (2006: 216) – is not aquality that belongs to a specific, individual ‘me’. It is an impersonal

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power of being and becoming. Analogically, death, being the end of asingular life, is first and foremost a transformation at the level ofenergy flows; one among infinite changes of matter, a mutation withina structure. It is yet another metamorphosis: ‘becoming a skeleton,larvae, bacteria’ (Braidotti 2006: 252). From this perspective, dyingamounts to an unavoidable process of life passing, and death is amoment in which a subject merges ‘with the web of non-human forcesthat frame her or him’ (Braidotti 2006: 252). Therefore, life and deathare not equal forces, like Empedoclean powers of creation anddestruction or Manichean good and evil. Death, as Braidotti puts it, is‘yet another form of interconnectedness, a vital relationship that linksone with other . . ., a point in a creative synthesis of flows, energies andbecomings’ (2006: 235). It is one of the aspects of life, one of itsmanifestations. New forms of life constantly appear and substitutethose that die and rot away, forming a never-ending cycle. Inasmuch asa decomposition of an individual self is part of this cycle, ‘death freesus into life’ (Braidotti 2006: 211), that is, it gives way to a life biggerthan individual consciousness, Life as the eternal and cosmos. In that,death wholly succumbs to Life.

By these means Braidotti places the phenomenon of death withinthe ontological field established by material, inhuman forces of life.Life is always striving for a life larger than itself; it is an unsaturated,unstoppable, vibrating desire for more life. This movement ofenlargement and intensification necessarily passes through theoccurrence of the death of an individual being. Yet the problematicaspect of this theoretical model, I believe, is that it annuls the status ofdeath as one’s ownmost by rendering it nothing more but a projectionof our human narcissistic selves. ‘Death doesn’t concern us’ – theEpicurean solace somehow echoes in Braidotti’s reflections as sheviews death as a regrouping of matter, a moment which is necessary forthe force of life to endlessly expand its territory in order to find,through excess and exuberance, the possibility of imploding andspawning a plethora of new life forms. Life feeds off deaths.

In my view, however, the attempt to approach the question of lifeand death in the nonhumanist vein does not imply the necessity ofdiscarding the human perspective altogether: the problems of theattachment to life and the fear of dying, feelings of loss, melancholiaand grieving do not need to be ranked as nothing more than ananthropocentric, neurotic anxiety that is therefore downplayed.To express my point I draw on Georges Canguilhem’s (2008)understanding of life in which life is a constant formation of forms(2008: xix). The questions generated by human thought, the anxieties

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and concerns that are salient for humans, are nothing else butsuch forms – products of vital and non-individual, chaotic anduncontrollable forces that precede them. ‘Doubtless, the animalcan’t resolve all the problems we present to it, but this is becausethese problems are ours and not its own’ (xviii) – though that does notmake ‘our’ problems and concerns ‘cultural’ as opposed to ‘animal’ or‘natural’ phenomena. On the contrary, they are simply ways in whichhumans try to orient themselves in the surrounding reality,manifestations of life always already grounded in the nonhumanstream of vitality that is responsible for their emergence.

The subordination of death to the omnipotent forces of life is notnecessarily the only standpoint that could be offered within theframework of feminist new materialism. I now turn to Karen Barad(2010) who, following Derrida’s Specters of Marx (2006), takes on anaudacious enterprise to ground hauntology, the ‘ontology’ of weakforms of being, on empirical evidence. Barad (2010) refers to thedouble-slit experiment which demonstrates that matter behaves likeparticles, unless it behaves like waves – waves and particles possessingdifferent characteristics and being of different kinds:

Suppose that the which-slit detector is modified in such a way that theevidence of which slit the atom goes through . . . can be erased after theatom has already gone through one of the slits. It turns out that ifthe which-slit information is ‘erased’ (that is, if any trace of which slitinformation is destroyed and the question of which-slit is once againundecidable), then a diffraction pattern characteristic of waves is onceagain in evidence . . . It turns out that it doesn’t matter at what point theinformation is ‘erased’– in particular, it could be erased after any givenatom has already gone through the entire apparatus and made its markon the screen, thereby contributing to the formation of the overallpattern!

This result is nothing less than astonishing. What this experiment tellsus is that whether or not an entity goes through the apparatus as awave or a particle can be determined after it has already gone throughthe apparatus, that is, after it has already gone through as either a wave(through both slits at once) or a particle (through one slit or the other)!In other words, it is not merely that the past behaviour of some givenentity has been changed, as it were, but that the entities’ very identity hasbeen changed! Its past identity, its ontology, is never fixed, always opento future reworkings! (Barad 2010: 259–260).

This scandal of science has far-reaching philosophical consequences: itundermines the concepts of identity, substance, entity, object-subjectdichotomy, one-ness as well as two-ness. This is because the ontological

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status of substance can be determined only after a double-slitexperiment has been performed. The concept of substance as self-identical, pre-determined and present is debunked. By this, cracks andfissures appear on the surface of the dominant, well-established ways ofthinking allowing for the ‘ghosts’ to show up. These ghosts are, inDerridian terms, plus d’un – that which is always more and always lessthan what it is, a thing always dislocated, and disjointed (Derrida2006: 2). If matter is both waves and particles, is Schrodinger’s cat bothdead and alive? – Eschewing the metaphysics of presence through theontologisation of quantum physics, Barad points to an importantquestion concerning the spectral, without abandoning the materialistperspective her reflection opens up. It is a possibility to think throughthe problem of how the dead and non-present matter. On the basis ofquantum physics, she remodels the classical understanding of time,space and matter. They turn out to have an indeterminate nature,neither linear nor fixed. Against classical ontology, ‘exorcised byghosts’ (Barad 2010: 260), science provides instruments to understandtime, space and matter as nonexistent outside of phenomena, in whichthey all meet together, radically interconnected.

As a result, the past can no longer be seen as that which is simplythere, behind us, as much as the future is not merely latent, awaiting itstime to come: ‘what seems to be out front, the future, comes back inadvance: from the past, from the back’ (Derrida 2006: 10). If there isno here-now, then the subject is no longer seen as separated fromtime, which is no longer flowing independently, chronologically, andobjectively. The conjunction of different time vectors, this distortedtime, requires an ethical commitment, given that the past is never trulygone – all enfoldings of matter bear its traces like scars left on thebody. Equally, the future is molded by both material returns of the pastand by our present ethical interventions and decisions. Differentdimensions of time form what we are, and that entails responsibility:‘our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannotbe disentangled from who we are’ (Barad 2010: 266). The past cannotbe closed, nor can it be erased; it is impossible to redeem or atone it,expiate or repair it, but the contraction of time makes the past and thefuture still reconfigurable. The question of how we reconfigure themlies within the sphere of our responsibility; it opens up the field of theethical and the ‘future’:

To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertainor reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to beresponsible, to take responsibility for that what we inherit . . ., to

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acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of thepresent, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self),to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come(Barad 2010: 264).

Such a reconceptualisation of time enables us to think about deadbodies in a different way: they are no longer simply materialremains – traces of the formerly human, but in their ‘spectrality’they are intertwined with the ‘present’. They partake in a formationof a material constellation of time, they influence the ‘now’ andsimultaneously become ‘reconfigured’ by it.

This can be further illustrated by an example provided by AlondraNelson (2014). In her research on family narratives and the identityof black Americans, Nelson makes reference to a discovery of a formermunicipal cemetery for the African population, which was uncoveredin 1991 in Lower Manhattan. In reaction to this finding, a group ofAfrican American activists demanded for these human remains betreated respectfully. With particular regard to the DNA testing thebodies underwent after their exhumation, the activists opposed anyforensic analysis which would classify the remains solely through thelenses of narrow typologies such as race or sex. In hopes of regainingthe individual stories of enslaved people – those that up until now had‘no history’ of their own – they called for the kind of analysis thatwould allow for a reconstruction of the life stories of the slaves,determine the diseases that they suffered from and the causes of theirdeath, and unmask the conditions of their lives and work. The activistslegitimised their claims by calling themselves ‘descendants’ of theslaves whose grave had been uncovered. This strategy was adopted bythem from American first nations struggles for repatriation and burialof their ancestors, but there is an important difference in theserespective approaches. In the case of the Descendants of the AfricanBurial Ground, kinship was not determined by ties of blood or geneticrelationship, but rather, it became a political gesture – a demandmade in the name of the abandoned and forgotten bodies. In that thespectral bodies of slaves become included in the current strugglesagainst racism for justice, visibility, and recognition.

Geographies of the nonlife

Is it because of the indeterminate, non-contemporaneous, anddiscontinuous status of dead bodies that they haunt us? The deadbody displays a peculiar mode of appearance – a paradoxicalphenomenality, insofar as whenever it appears it is never what it

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appears to be; it has both lack and excess accompanying it (plusd’un – less than human, more than inhuman). Being a remainder ofsomething other-than-human, it attests to a mystery, or, perhaps, tonothingness.

The human/nonhuman nature of that which is dead is somethingthat deeply troubled Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica (1981:2900–2901) he wonders at length whether hair and fingernails keepgrowing in heaven. This apparently trivial question deeply botheredThomas because hair and nails constitute an irremovable corporealcontamination; they are a material trace which ‘corrupts’ the realm ofspirituality – one that only gods and humans (their souls but notbodies) were allowed to access. Perhaps what haunts Thomas is thehuman still deposited in the nonhuman, the earthy and bodily withinthe angelic, body-less spirits in heaven. There seems to always besomething that remains after all the divisions – between human andnonhuman, death and life, existence and nonexistence – and itcannot be eradicated.

Human remains are material objects, be they ashes, corpses,bones, skulls or teeth. Scattered around they invade our space; they arebreathable, visible, touchable, present. How does grass dare to grow onmass graves? Why is this living hell, called Auschwitz, so calm andquiet? How do flowers blossom so beautifully, growing in the shadowof a nuclear power station, in a garden nurtured by a dying man?5,

6

The materiality of the dead body leaves traces, regardless of whether itis quickly removed and disposed of or whether it decays slowly. Itinscribes itself on the ground, environment and people: on the bodyof the place. For many decades that followed the liberation of theBirkenau Nazi extermination camp, the terrains of the camp wherepretty much neglected as a site of memory and instead used bythe local farmers as pasture lands. Cows fed on grass still covered inhuman ashes and drank water from the ponds in which water stillgurgled.7 In the early 2000s, Elzbieta Janicka, a Polish literaryscholar and artist, made several trips to former extermination andconcentration camps. What she brought back were uncanny,minimalistic photographs of the sky. Against the often kitschrepresentations of gas chambers and melancholic images of sunsetsover the barbed wire,8 Janicka decided to capture the dense emptinessof the air once (still?) filled with particles of the bodies of thedeceased. On the one hand, dead body is volatile and boundless,re-integrated with the processes of nature, with the earth and thesky. However on the other, its fate is meticulously controlled; itsappearance is regulated, spatially distributed, visually restricted to

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enclosed spaces (be they coffins or display cases) and limited in time(like the images of the corpses shown on TV which are supposed toshock, but not overwhelm, the audience).

In posing questions concerning the dead body the followingissues meet: the material aspect of human remains (what is the ethicaltreatment of dead bodies?), the visual aspect (which corpses andremains can be displayed: exhibited or photographed; which deathscan be televised? and which should be hidden from sight?), thepolitical aspect (which bodies are grievable?), the spatial (for example,bodies in museum settings, post-genocidal spaces, issues of repatriationand reburial) and the temporal (time of mourning, time ofremembering), questions of possession and right (who should takecare of the remains? who has the right to them?), questions ofrepresentation (who is allowed to speak in the name of the dead? togive testimony? to mourn? and, on the other hand, whose sufferingdo dead bodies represent – which nation, which group has the right toclaim their harm as its own?). I will go on to look into some of thesequestions in more detail.

The unburiable

Judith Butler, primarily in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War(2009), investigates the logics responsible for rendering certain liveshuman while others do not count as such. She approaches thisproblem through the concept of grievability. Grievability is a conditionwhich allows for a life to be apprehended as attributed with an intrinsicvalue, which implies that its end in death will be perceived as a loss.Such a life is human in a sense that it deserves protection and respect.From this, a paradox emerges: not every human life is human, noteverything that lives gains the status of a life. Some human lives passthe mobile border between human and nonhuman; a border behindwhich a gray zone of life unprotected and ungrievable is situated. Or,as Butler puts it, ‘there are “subjects” that are not quite recognizable assubjects, and there are “lives” that are not quite – or, indeed, arenever – recognized as lives’ (2009: 4), ‘without grievability there isno life or, rather, there is something living that is other than life’(2009: 15). Some lives leave a mark, their absence is visible – others areomitted.

Whether or not a living being is recognised as a life depends onthe organisation of the field of visibility and normativity, with which weare equipped. Butler calls this a frame – a cognitive scheme thatregulates and structures what can be perceived and how it can be

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perceived. Frames are responsible for setting our ‘scope of vision’,whether or not we see a particular body as injurable and vulnerable toharm, suffering and humiliation. Frames constitute interpretativeguides to cognition, intelligibility and moral judgment. They seek to‘contain, convey, and determine what is seen’ (Butler 2009: 10). Thereare certain bodies which are gone from the horizon: lives that inhabitthe limits of humanness and thereby, the margins of the frame. Thereare bodies that are ‘unframed’: lives that remain unseen, that do not fitin the frame, that are not in the picture. There are other bodies thatare ‘framed’, bodies that are ‘set up’, those that cannot set themselvesfree from the interpretative frames imposed on them. In that last sensethe meaning of a ‘frame’ reveals its semantic closeness to a ‘falseaccusation’ (see: Butler 2004: 5–13).

As certain lives do not fit the dominant frame, analogically,their death is not recognised as death. Some of the examples Butlergives to support her point include queer victims of the September 11terrorist attacks, and AIDS epidemic victims in Africa. These deathsremain unnoticed, tabooed or overlooked. The same happens in thecase of deaths that are politically ‘inconvenient’, for instance civiliancasualties of a military conflict. In this light, grieving presents itselfnot as a privately experienced process, but a politically framed act.To grieve publicly, openly, to assert a right to grieve, constitutesa claim to public visibility and recognition (see also: Butler 2010).In Precarious Life, Butler looks into obituaries as one of the instrumentsof public grieving. An obituary honours the kind of life which isvaluable, fully human. A death of such a life is allowed to be publiclyperceived as a loss. Certain other lives, however, cannot becommemorated with an obituary as they are deprived of the right tobe grieved:

There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United Statesinflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there wouldhave had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing andpreserving, a life that qualifies for recognition. . . . The matter is not asimple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does notqualify as a life and it’s not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if notthe unburiable (Butler 2004:34).

The question of grievability and how it is bound up with the logics ofproducing life as either human or nonhuman, becomes even morecomplicated once we focus our attention on the status of a dead bodyas such. Corpses are both human, hence rites and ceremonies whichindicate their quasi-sacral character are found all over the world, and

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non- or in-human: for whatever the specific feature that makes ahuman human, after his or her death, is gone. Dead bodies possess nosoul, consciousness, language and no physical vulnerability either. Allthat there is left is perishing matter. And yet corpses are subservient tothe same power mechanisms that subjugate the living bodies: someare perceived as more human than others. Some are grieved after,some remain unburiable. How does this condition of being unburiableintersect with questions of race, ethnicity, geographic proximity ordistance, wealth, religion, political ways of defining allies and enemies?Which bodies remain abandoned and why? Which are reified andwhich humanised?

What a radically and literally unburiable body could be becomesevident in the case of human remains housed in museums andresearch facilities across the world. These remains serve scientific andeducational purposes; they are artifacts. A mummified, curled up bodyin a glass case, an aboriginal skeleton in a natural history museum,a skull – a trophy for a collector, a polymerised corpse grotesquelyposed in an exhibition hall.9 Although clearly being human bodies,they are not buriable because they are contextualised by frames thatprevent them from being apprehended as such. But frames, as Butler(2009) tells us, are never static constructions, but rather dynamicstructures open to leakages, subversion, re-interpretation and shifts.The claims of aboriginal communities for repatriation and reburial ofthe remains of their ancestors held in retention in ethnographicmuseums and anatomical collections is but one example of how adifferent frame can be employed, so that certain unburiable bodiesbecome grievable again, and for grief as a political act to becomepublicly recognised.

Nonetheless, the attempt to apply Butler’s idea of ‘grievability’ tothink the status of human remains has its limitations. That is due to thefact that grievability is in the first place an instrument which servesthe aim of exposing mechanisms of exclusion with regard to humanlives that are not seen (or framed) as fully human. From thisperspective human remains would solely constitute reminders of alife now gone. The way human remains are treated reflects the value oflife, the dignity and the grievability of the life that has by nowevacuated the body. By reframing corpses, by re-making Antigone’sclaim to public grief10, a life symbolised by its remains can becomerehabilitated, re-inscribed with value. However, what I would like topursue is to think about corpses in a light of a yet different economybetween human and nonhuman that has as a starting point not lifethat is gone, or its value, but a material appearing of a dead body.

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The remnant

Giorgio Agamben, in his exploration of the conundrum of the human,discovers a certain mechanism of power which is always operating onsubjects in such a way that it installs a mobile distinction betweenhuman and nonhuman within a human subject (2004:15). Agambenwrites that ‘the division of life into vegetal and relational, organic andanimal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobileborder within living man, and without this intimate caesura the verydecision of what is human and what is not would probably not bepossible’ (2004: 15). In consequence, ‘the truly human being’ isnothing more but ‘the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in whichcaesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displacedanew’ (2004: 38).

According to Agamben, anthropogenesis is founded on a violentgesture of power, in which the nonhuman is transcended andabandoned in order for a human being to be articulated, and whilethe latter is endowed with certain rights and values, the nonhuman isdeprived of them. Now the Italian philosopher is trying to explore thisplace, border or caesura, where this operation of power takes place. Inorder to do so he descends to the lowest level of ‘humanity’, a ‘degreezero of humanity’: a sphere inhabited by a life dispossessed from anyvalue or protection. What is found in this zone is a figure of a humanradically excluded from the human. One of the names that Agambengives it is homo sacer. Another is Muselmann.11 The sphere in whichthese liminal figures dwell constitutes a lacuna, a no-man’s land, or achiasm where the human and nonhuman get confused, where theliving and the dead are hard to distinguish from one another.12 In theface of those whose humanity has been completely denied anddestroyed, Agamben comes up with a paradoxical formulation that ‘theword “man” applies first of all to a non-man’ (2008: 82). That meansthat a position occupied by a radically dehumanised being coincideswith a sphere where ethics begins. This position, in Agambenianphilosophy, is called a remnant. The remnant thus stands in a placeof a gap between the human and the nonhuman, subjectification anddesubjectification, the survivor and the one who perished, one whospeaks and the mute one, the destructible and the indestructible.

The function of a remnant is to give testimony, which means: toprovide a circulation between that which is impossible to be said (harmwhich is unspeakable, voices that are silenced) and what, precisely byvirtue of its unspeakability, must be said (an ethical obligation to spellout the harm, to make it audible, to demand for it, in the name of the

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other, to be recognised). Interpreted this way, a position of aremnant – as testimony, and not as a piece of evidence – could beassumed by the actual ‘remnants of Auschwitz’. I would like to refer toone particular object, namely, human hair deposited in Block Number4 of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Hair – which belonged toJewish women and that was shaven off after the victims’ deaths – wassubject to many emotional debates both in Poland, and abroad(particularly in the context of a discussion whether or not to displaythe hair in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington). Onthe one hand, many believed it disrespectful to display human hairpublicly and felt strongly that these remains should be buried; on theother, there were voices which expressed the opinion that the hairshould be conserved for as long as possible as it was the most powerfulsymbol and, at the same time, a material proof of the atrocities thathad taken place. Further controversy surrounded the methods appliedto conserve the hair: the cruelty of vacuum cleaning, washing andother techniques of maintaining these human remains. Eventually, in2003 the officials of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum decidedthat all conservation efforts would be stopped and the human hairwould be allowed to decay completely (Zawodna 2013: 406–408).The director of the Museum explained that to intervene and try tosave the hair would be a ‘brutal and morally unjustified disturbance’(Gera 2011) of these human remains. How can we talk aboutbrutality and injustice in a context of remains, of dead bodies ortheir parts? How does this refusal to disturb and try to save humanremains intersect with the project of ethics that Agamben is trying toconstruct?

A remnant is where a response to the violence of the productionof the human–nonhuman dichotomy can be formulated. Human hairsurvived the death of the people it had belonged to, the women thathad combed it, braided it and washed it, but it is not only a reminderattesting to the human life, suffering and death; rather attributing itwith vulnerability and positioning it as an object of care andconsideration is to accept the moral obligation towards that which isontologically paradoxical and meta-physical. Spectral, nonhuman ethicsrejects the temptation to assume the human to be its unique subject,and it repudiates the operation of anthropomorphisation as a meansto expand the field of ethics and encompass the non-human subjectswithin it. Human remains of the victims of genocide matter – not onlybecause once they used to compose a human body. In a similar modeanimals matter not because they are similar to humans in multiple ways(they communicate, suffer, experience loss, attachment and love),

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but despite the fact and because of the fact that their ‘nature’ escapesus, and cannot be described, understood, fully (re)presented. Thehuman ceases to serve as the benchmark against which we measure,judge and decide what is grievable, vulnerable and in need.

The ethics that has the remnant at its core delimits a spherewhere things may appear non-understandable, concealed, suspendedbetween the human and the nonhuman. It allows for things orbodies in their non-normativity or non-humanness to come toappearance on their own grounds, in their own ways and forms, andspeak their own languages – or remain silent. In the light of this newethics such bodies would be, as Agamben puts it, ‘unsavable’ or‘irreparable’.13 For to repair something one first needs to recognise itas damaged, and to save someone one first needs to regard them asperplexed.

Spectral appearances

That which appears in a weak form, on its own conditions, is spectral.A spectre is:

some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, andboth one and the other . . . an unnameable or almost unnameable thing:something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, something, ‘this thing,’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looksat us, that concerns us . . . (Derrida 2006:5).

This difficulty to name this ‘thing’ touches upon the limits of ourcomprehension. For a spectre, as Derrida tells us, will never reveal itselfto a ‘spectator’: whether a scholar, a reader or an expert (2006: 11–12).Spectators do not believe in spectres in the first place, and theirattachment to ‘the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal,the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, beingand non-being’ (Derrida 2006: 12), past and present, human andnonhuman, normal and abnormal, prevents them from speaking toand with spectres. A spectre is a ‘paradoxical incarnation’, elusive,evanescent, incomprehensible; and yet, a spectator would intend tounderstand, categorise and ‘frame’ it. Like Hamlet who demandsto know to whom the skull belongs, and to whom the gravebelongs – because ‘to know is to know who and where, to know whosebody it really is and what place it occupies – for it must stay in its place’(Derrida 2006: 9).

A being is spectral as long as it escapes the sight adjusted bycognitive categories, schemata and frames with which a spectator is

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equipped. All bodies that challenge visibility and cognition in that wayare spectral: disabled, queer, harmed, killed bodies, animal bodies,dead bodies. To spectralise would then mean to appear in a form thatthreatens the distinction between ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’. Spectralbodies are hard to classify – is this body male or female? Human ornot? Dead or alive? The appearance of spectral bodies thus offers apossibility to open up the field of ‘unsavability’ – for they do not needto be saved, adjusted, normalised, regulated and maintained. Towithdraw the epistemological ambitions to know what they are, andto constrain the will to assign them to a proper place, would amount tothe emergence of a hauntological ethics. For hauntology is a sphere ofresponse to the appearing of the spectral. In this, it is different fromontology whose aim is to know what exists and how it exists.Hauntology, on the contrary, recognises beings in their chiasmicstatus; it founds a gesture of openness towards that which presentsitself as split, displaced, discontinuous, both inappropriate and‘inappropriable’.

Conclusion

The concept of ‘remnant’ and the concept of ‘spectre’, in Agamben’sand Derrida’s respective philosophical projects, are both bound upwith the problem of defining the human, on the one hand, andquestions of justice and responsibility, on the other. Mobilising areflection regarding the dead body I have intended to ‘materialise’these concepts: to embody, or incarnate them. The dead body seems tome to be the most radical possible form that these notions couldassume.

Beyond the sphere of humanness, where dignity, values andrights, sacredness of life or grievability are attributed to lives, thereis another locus, one that is inhabited by beings excluded fromdefinitions of the human, or those that find themselves right at theborder of these definitions. In consequence of that exclusion, theirlives are not lives, and their deaths are not deaths – rather, they occupythe zone left in between life and nonlife, death and nondeath,human and nonhuman. This interval is what Agamben calls the‘remnant’. In Remnants of Auschwitz he asks: if a human is that animalwhich is defined by its ability to speak, what or who are humans that donot speak (like the Muselmanner in concentration camps)? The deadbody is nonhuman in that sense: it constitutes the limit of speakability,a break in communication – it is speechless and unresponsive.How can we pay justice to and be responsible for that which never

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answers back? Whose speech is incomprehensible? How can we testifyin its name?

Derrida demonstrates that an ethical response is formulated inthe face of a ‘spectre’ – something that may arrive from the past, orfrom the future. Barad reformulates this idea in a neo-materialisticvein; by debunking the linear understanding of time sheconceptualises it as time of perpetual materialisation, materialpractices and material bodies, in which past, present and futurecoexist and mutually influence each other. The ungrievable bodies ofthe past call for justice, response and recognition; and the future canstill be ‘remade’.

What I have been advocating is the ethical project which has as itssubject ‘all things spectral’ – bodies that are not understandablethrough dominant frames and norms, bodies whose shapes, colours,pasts and presents do not fit in; bodies which are dislocated towardsthe field of the nonhuman. A response to these bodies would consist inrendering inoperative the schemata that we use to comprehend,divide, normalise, value, accept or exclude, and finally, to appropriate.In this way this theoretical proposition is also trying to stay faithful toone of the spectres of Marx, namely, the one which equates the end ofappropriation to the beginning of justice.

Notes1. Jacques Derrida recalls: ‘the eschatological themes of the “end of history”, of the

“end of Marxism,” of the “end of philosophy,” of the “ends of man,” of the “lastman” and so forth were, in the ’50s, that is, forty years ago, our daily bread’(2006:16). In 1980 Derrida referred to this tendency as the ‘apocalyptic tone inphilosophy’. See: J. Derrida (1992), ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted inPhilosophy’, trans. J.P. Leavy Jr, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward,T. Foshay, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 25–72 and J. Derrida(2006).

2. Theorists who could be classified as neo-materialist reformulate the understandingof matter in such a way that it is no longer seen as a passive mass to be given aform, but rather is in the course of constant materialisations or becomings.Material objects do not precede the observable phenomena but are always alreadyin material constellations which they both form and are formed by. See:R. Braidotti, (2006), K. Barad (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: QuantumPhysics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress; D. Coole, D., S. Frost (eds.) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, andPolitics, Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press; R. Dolphijn, I. van der Tuin(2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor: Open HumanitiesPress.

3. In Rosi Braidotti’s understanding the poststructuralist erasure of the subjectreflects a masculine fear of disappearance, while the preoccupation with deathapparent in this philosophical tradition is coupled with male fantasies and

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a death wish. See: R. Braidotti (2011), Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and SexualDifference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press.

4. For Braidotti’s argument against nihilism latent in poststructural philosophy, see:R. Braidotti (2011); (2006) Transpositions; (2007) ‘Bio-power and Necro-politics’,Universiteit Utrecht, http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/r.braidotti/files/biopower.pdf (6 July 2013).

5. See: D. Jarman (1996), Derek Jarman’s Garden, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press.6. I am aware that these questions are formulated from the ‘human’ perspective and

only salient for human animals. It is probable, though we cannot be absolutelycertain about it, that other forms of (non)life, nonhuman animals and plants,minerals or dead bodies, when confronted with death, dying or a deceased body donot feel sorrow, melancholia, pity, anger or disgust. However, the materialist andposthumanist approach that I chose to take in this article, for me does not annulthese ‘human’ feelings and concerns. This is because, following G. Canguilhem’s(2008) reflection, I see these ‘anthropocentric’ questions and problems asexpressions and forms created by the vital, nonhuman forces that exceed thehuman. They still matter even if they have no meaning or importance for other-than-human forms.

7. More on the treatment of the human remains of the Shoah victims inKL Auschwitz-Birkenau and KL Kulmhof in the post-war period, see:M. Zawodna (2013). I would like to thank Marta Zawodna who generously gaveme access to her yet unpublished work.

8. Part of Janicka’s project consisted in collecting postcards of concentration campsthat are sold at souvenir shops. Her collection includes a significant number ofimages undeniably bordering on kitsch, including those portraying sunsets overbarbed wire.

9. I am referring to exhibitions of real anatomised human corpses such as Body Worldsand other, similar ones. Methods of preparation and ways of exhibiting the corpses,the predominantly commercial character of these exhibitions, as well ascontroversies regarding the origin of bodies exhibited were subject to numerouspress articles and scholarly papers. See for example: T. C. Jespersen, A. Rodr-Guez,J. Starr (eds.) (2008), Anatomy of Body Worlds: Critical Essays on the PlastinatedCadavers of Gunther von Hagens, Jefferson, NC: McFarland; N. Durbach (2014),‘“Skinless Wonders”: Body Worlds and the Victorian Freak Show’, Journal of theHistory of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 69:1, pp. 38–67; R. Deller (2011), ‘Dead meat:Feeding at the anatomy table of Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds’, Feminist Theory,12:3, pp. 241–261.

10. I refer to Sophocles’ tragedy ‘Antigone’ and Judith Butler’s interpretation of it inher book ‘Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death’. When Antigone decidesto bury her brother Polyneices against the official prohibition, she claims her rightto public grieving and stands up against the forms of power which deem certainlives ‘unburiable’.

11. In the context of Nazi concentration camps, the term Muselmanner was used torefer to inmates in a state of extreme starvation, who became inert towards theconditions they were forced to live in, and who gave up effort to survive. Primo Levidescribed them as: ‘the drowned ones, (. . .), non-men who march and labour insilence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. Onehesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face ofwhich they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand’, in P. Levi (1996),

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Survival in Auschwitz, trans. S. Woolf, London, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster,p. 90.

12. According to Agamben, a Muselmann drifts in a zone between life and death, he is aliving dead who reveals a hiatus between bare human life and the dogma of dignityand sacredness of life and death that are to define a human. This gap becomesapparent in a Muselmann as he ‘is the non-human who obstinately appears ashuman; he is the human that cannot be told apart from inhuman’ (2008:81–2).See: G. Agamben (2008), especially pp. 41–86.

13. See: G. Agamben (1993), The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press, especially chapter X ‘Irreparable’ (pp. 39–42) andthe appendix (pp. 89–106) and G. Agamben (2004).

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