Toward the Futures of Flesh: An Introduction

Abstract

If truth in art is elusive, truth in life and politics should not be so; it should be sought after and located despite its multicenteredness, declares the dramatist Harold Pinter in his Nobel acceptance speech, delivered in December 2005. In his poem called “Death,” which is the epilogue to his lecture, Pinter, “as a citizen,” pronounces the dead body the ultimate reality. The tortured, violated, victimized, racialized, or Orientalized flesh that haunts modern politics, Pinter asserts, is not a matter of fantasy or subjective evaluation. Although today’s dominant Western political discourses have taken pains to highlight the value of democratic institutions, civil liberties, human rights, and respect for life, there exists one compact and forceful nucleus that disproves their claims and presents a different version of reality: the changing, decaying flesh of the tortured body. By underscoring the callousness of the Western gaze, the poem draws attention to the expendability of flesh today; dead bodies are reduced to dispensable waste matter, worthless and superfluous items one needn’t even bother to count. At the same time, the corpse, paradoxically, acquires the power to transform the ruthless voice of the speaker into a voice that cares. The repetitive and nonsensical “who?/where?/how?/by whom?” journalistic questions with which the poem opens become in the last stanza statements suggestive of the impending need to attend to the corpse, as they retain the grammatical form of a question yet lack a question mark.

“Death”

Where was the dead body found?

Who found the dead body?

Was the dead body dead when found?

How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother

Or uncle or sister or mother or son

Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?

Was the body abandoned?

By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?

Did you declare the dead body dead?

How well did you know the dead body?

How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body

Did you close both its eyes

Did you bury the body

Did you leave it abandoned

Did you kiss the dead body

—Harold Pinter