Abstract
Counter to Bruno Gulli’s claims, above, the dead do in fact continue to labor. There are always active remainders; traces of a life once lived: “The social corpse is imbued with presence and personhood.”2 For some, the dead body provides a kind of serene comfort and reassurance that, even if not all is right in the world, there is at least some verisimilitude of a comforting presence. For others, the dead body is a source of terror. Either way, the lifeless body labors—it produces something—even if that something is only an affect or an affectation for abjection. Bodies continue after death to produce attachments, aversions, and other emotions.
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Notes
Bruno Gulli, Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 2.
John S. Baglow, “The Rights of the Corpse,” Mortality 12 (2007): 224.
Victor Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience,” in The Anthropology of Experience, eds. V. Turner and E. Bruner (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 33–44, 419.
Cremation Association of North America, Final 2005 Statistics and Projections to the Year 2025: 2006 Preliminary Data (Chicago, IL: Market Research and Statistics, 2007).
Lisa T. Cullen, Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death (New York: Collins, 2006).
Oliver McRae, “Deathcare: Past, Present… and Future,” The Director, July (2004): 35.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle Trans. K. Knabb (London, UK: Rebel Press, 1967), 9.
Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. C. Turner (London, UK: Verso, 1998).
Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
David Harvey, “The Body as an Accumulation Strategy,” Economy and Planning 16 (1998): 406.
Robert P. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 65.
Antonius Robben, “Death and Anthropology: An Introduction,” in Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader, ed. A. Robben (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 1–16, 7–10.
James W. Gentry et al., “The Vulnerability of those Grieving the Death of a Loved One: Implications for Public Policy,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 13 (1994): 135.
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 22.
David W. Moller, Confronting Death: Values, Institutions, and Human Mortality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 97.
Bronna Romanoff and Marion Terenzio, “Rituals and the Grieving Process,” Death Studies 22 (1998): 699.
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London, UK: Verso, 2002), 10–11.
Mark Worrell, Dialectic of Solidarity: Labor, Antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2008), 264.
William Bogard, “Empire of the Living Dead,” Mortality 13 (2008).
Charles Kettering, “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,” Nation’s Business, 17 (1929): 31.
Laura E. Tanner, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 222.
Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
See, e.g., Elizabeth Kulber-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner, 1997).
Edward Ball in Mark Worrell, “The Cult of Exchange Value and the Critical Theory of Spectacle,” Fast Capitalism 5, no. 2 (1999).
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© 2011 Monica J. Casper and Paisley Currah
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Sanders, G. (2011). The Gimmick: Or, The Productive Labor of Nonliving Bodies. In: Casper, M.J., Currah, P. (eds) Corpus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119536_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119536_13
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