Examination of Sophocles’ Antigone reveals how the corpse remains a historically, culturally and politically inscribed subject. To leave Polynices’ corpse, by Creon’s decree, to the open air to be consumed by carrion is e!ectively to erase Polynice’s status as an Athenian citizen and transubstantiate the materiality of the corpse into one that is immaterial and non-human – that of a slave. Antigone’s refusal to leave the unburied remains of her brother - a refusal that has been traditionally romanticized as an act of rebellion against authoritarian control - circumscribes and rei”es class boundaries between the free, the civilized, and the unfree, uncivilized slave. In e!ect, Polynices’ unburied body unearths the ways in which a “western, hegemonic canon” has e!ectively buried a history of chattel slavery that has made much of this cultural output possible. An engagement with particularly notable ruminations on Antigone, such as Hegel’s and Derrida’s, serves to exemplify how the “gure of Antigone has been appropriated in ways that consolidate, rather than disrupt, a tradition of thought that evades its own implication in slavery and colonialism.

The struggle to “adapt” to the presence of the corpse serves as the central turning point for this investigation into the theatrical encounters with the corpse in the early modern anatomy theatre. Beginning with novelist W.G. Sebald’s claim, in The Rings of Saturn, that the art of anatomy was a way of “making the reprobate body invisible,” Alvarez queries how the corpse as the central “gure of this theatrical space challenges conventional modes of theatrical looking and how the particular viewing procedures invited by the anatomy theatre, as a theatrical space, effectively make the body “unseen.” Using Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys’ documented encounter with a corpse and the early phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai’s writings On Disgust, Alvarez attempts to account for the “perceptual and interpretive black hole” that the corpse presents in this schema. The corpse’s “radical actuality” and, paradoxically, its “surplus of life” act as a cipher that cuts through the virtual space constructed by the anatomical demonstration, undermining the gravitas of the scientific gaze that has acquired its weight in contradistinction to the theatricality of the event. But the corpse’s “radical actuality” and its “surplus of life” introduces a danse macabre of theatrical looking that moves between absorption and repulsion, reversing the otherwise consumptive gaze of the onlooker.

Much of the current research on the constitution of subjectivity has been grounded on attempts to conceptualize the body without collapsing into reductive materialism or, to the contrary, theorizing a completely historical subject in the hope of doing ontological and ethical justice to formative specificity. With the rationalism-empiricism struggle put to bed by Kant’s transcendental turn and tucked in tightly by Hegel’s dialectic, the twentieth century was greeted with a maelstrom of world wars and efficient technology which produced the greatest number of corpses in the shortest time in world history; and still, to use Hegel’s famous saying, thought stood “at the crossroads of materialism and idealism.” Wrestling with articulating the interpenetrating quagmire of consciousness and body marked the beginning of twentieth century thought. For instance, Freud’s science of childhood development aligned emerging aspects of subjectivity with the very development of the body itself. In another effort, Husserl identified eidetic constructs which structured experience and, most importantly for our purposes, he distinguished between the phenomenal lived-body of the Lebenswelt known as Leib, and the anonymous thing-like quality of the body known as Körper. In this context, the corpse is the very opposite of the body insofar as the body is the site of the unfolding of subjectivity whereas the corpse seems to be the limit of subjectivity: a spatial-temporal marker of a subject which was. For instance, although it has been suggested that the corpse has somehow been emptied of subjectivity, is it not just as likely that it is we who are emptied before it? What is it about the corpse that disgusts us, intrigues us, fascinates us and reveals us to ourselves? The notion of the ‘uncanny’ is frequently invoked as a placeholder for the specific and irreducible character of such threshold experiences (such as encountering a corpse). But what is the structure of the uncanny? Moreover, what are the broader considerations regarding limit experiences as integral to the constituting of the subject?

This paper examines Jean-Michel Basquiat’s obsession with the marginal and the obscene - understood literally as the ob-scene. The context of a graffiti art, and particularly the glyphic character of graffiti art, allows the work to defy the ordinary logic of the picture frame in order to figure, rather than represent, indeterminate into it. Thus, Basquiat characterizes death and the dead body not in the light of a transcendent space but as prolonged into the depths of an alterity, an ob-scene in the sense of an alter-side that belongs to the scene.

Whereas memorial culture places the corpse in an aborescent hierarchy of values, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome undermines this image of thought. The photography of Andres Serrano and Peter Witkin, and Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, are rhizomes: they form a productive network of chaotic, subterranean connections and ruptures ‘dismembering’ the corpse’s traditional semiotics.

Through a cultural hermeneutic interpretation of the cadaver in the history of modern medicine, this study will argue that at least some medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of death denial. This analysis will draw on four major sources of evidence to support this contention: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western medicine, (b) diary entries by medical students taking a course in gross anatomy, (c) responses to a 2005 panel on cadaver dissection held at Daemen College, and (d) interviews with Guenther von Hagens, the creator of the “BodyWorlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the purpose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the data suggest that medical education works implicitly to manage death anxiety through a set of defenses which conceal the nothingness of death. Namely, by making death into a concrete event, preserved for example in the form of the cadaver or plastinated corpses, and by speaking rhetorically about death as a mechanical process, the medical model of death conceals the existential terror that comes with the lived experience of death as the termination of existence.