Deleuzian Approaches to the Corpse - Serrano, Witkin, and Eisenmann

7/30/2019 Deleuzian Approaches to the Corpse - Serrano, Witkin, and Eisenmann

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Deleuzian Approaches to the Corpse:Serrano, Witkin and Eisenman

Gregory MinissaleUniversity o Auckland

Whereas memorial culture places the corpse in an aborescent hierarchy o values, Deleuzeand Guattaris rhizome undermines this image o thought. Te photography o Andres Ser-rano and Peter Witkin, and Peter Eisenmans Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, are rhizomes:they orm a productive network o chaotic, subterranean connections and ruptures dismem-bering the corpses traditional semiotics.

Southern trees bear a strange ruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,Strange ruit hanging rom the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene o the gallant South,

Te bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent o magnolia sweet and resh,

And the sudden smell o burning esh!

Here is a ruit or the crows to pluck,For the rain to gather, or the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, or a tree to drop,Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Bitter Fruit a poem by Abel Meeropol published in Te New York eacher, 1937; set tomusic or Strange Fruit, recorded by Billie Holiday, 1940.

Were tired o trees. We should stop believing in trees. Teyve made us suer too much. Allo arborescent culture is ounded on them, rom biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiul

or loving or political aside rom underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growthsand rhizomes.

Deleuze andGuattari, 1987:15.

Oten, the very structure o our sorrow is organized like a tree, rootsreaching down and soaring above with branches outstretched, markingmoments, qualities, social dierentiation, ragments we organize into

narrative order. How do we resolve the contradiction o the emotionalprotest inherent in Strange Fruit and the critical distance aorded byDeleuzes critique o arborescent traditions? In this essay, I attempt to


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take the vertical corpses hanging rom the trees and lay them to rest in thehorizontals o the rhizome. Tis essay does not deal with death, violence or

trauma, but instead, examines dominant traditions in art and philosophywhich construct the corpse as a conceptual and social category, one whichaims to marginalize the threat the corpse represents in a hierarchical systemo values. One such tradition associates the corpse with the tree. I examinethis tree in two directions: the tree as an image o thought o a lineage andcosmology (whose emblem is the ree o Lie); this is a vertical traditionpointing up to heaven; it oten depicts Christ as the risen (vertical) corpse.Te antithesis o this is the downward direction, yet it is also vertical,pointing to the all rom the ree o Knowledge. Te all is celebrated as aninversion o rational teleology by the Surrealists and others.

I go on to disassemble this verticality guided by Deleuze andGuattari, showing that there are approaches to thinking the corpse thatcan be characterized as rhizomic and transversal with rather more chaoticsubterranean connections and ruptures, approaches that undermine theenlightenment vision o the organic continuity o the tree which we use tointerpolate our hope in the transcendence o the corpse, ashioning it as theseed and ruit o the tree. With the rhizome, the tree which marks the paean

to the cult o the dead is cut down and truncated, eventually to dissolveinto the grasses o the earth. Te rhizome is also a shared grave that augursa dierent and more radical response to the corpse as an obscene plateau, asa thousand plateaus. With the rhizome all corpses are equal on a horizontalplane and share the grave o the earth with others. It cuts down the verticalcathedral o the tree and its hierarchiesthe corpse individuated by beauty,ame, social rank, blood, race or branch in the amily tree or the tree ohistoryvalues which attempt to make the corpse transcendent in death,

and to perpetuate those very ideological categories. Te arborescent corpseworks with binaries o high and low, individual and group, insider andoutsider, while the rhizome breaks down these distinctions. Its corpses are

joined underground.

Te Aborescent Corpse Points Up

One o the clearest traditions establishing the arborescent corpse

consists o images depicting the subject Noli Me angere(Dont touch me)where Christ is shown as a risen corpse revealed to Mary Magdalene. Teact that he is a corpse is emphasized by his request to her that she not

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touch him. An overwhelming number o paintings by Mantegna, Botticelli,Fra Angelico, Hans Holbein the Younger, itian, Correggio, Rembrandt,

Andrea del Sarto and others show Christ emphatically vertical, standingnext to a tree (in itians painting it appears to grow out o his head). Tisarborescent presence is no mere decorative ourish:

Te bodies o Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ together orma grain. From this grain, or, more specically, rom the seed at theireet a plant is growing. We see in this a theological interpretation othe crucixion o Christ is also depicted: Very truly, I tell you, unlessa single grain o wheat alls into the earth and dies, it remains justa single grain; but i it dies, it bears much ruit John 12.24. (Baert1970: 99).

Te grain is ormed by two gures on either side o a line, echoing

another longstanding visual compositional schema, the upright mandorlaor almond orm which shows the Virgin Mary presenting her ospringas a seed to the world. Christian iconography employs not only symbolsbut the diagrammatic essentials o their orm to create meaningul visual

compositions that are also intertexual, or interpictorial. In Mantegnaspicture oNoli Me angerea soaring yet withered g tree is overgrown witha vine and grapes which we ollow with our eyes raised up to its toweringheights. Te tree reerences Christs miracle o bringing the dead g treeback to lie, and the wiry vine o grapes eeds this arborescent rame withthe blood-wine o Christs sacrice.

In all cases, the tree is the vertical element which raises up eyes, heartand story and delivers lie into death and death into the hereater. As a

transcendent symbol o growth and ecundity, it acts as a mediating orcebetween male and emale elements, lie and death, corpse and live body,past aeons o prophecy and the present. What is interesting in these picturesis the verticality o the corpse and the tree suggesting that Christ is the newree o Lie and the corpse the seed. Te legend o the rue Cross holdsthat the wood used or Christs crucixion was taken rom three trees whichsprouted rom the seeds o the originary ree o Lie in the Garden o Eden.Tree seeds were placed in Adams mouth and were buried with him. From

his mouth, the seeds grew into three trees: a cypress, a pine and a cedar(Freeman Johnson 2005: 85-86). Te cross is thus a tree which reachesback to heaven. Te cypress, the unerary tree in a large number o cultural

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traditions, is the emblem o a heliotropic and anagogic structure on whichis pinned a hierarchy o values thrust vertically above the raw material o the

earth in a statement o transcendent aith in the air, in the rising spirit aboveboth earth and hyle, crowned by the resurrected corpse o Christ. Christdies on the ree o Lie, which sprouts rom Adams corpse and through thetree, he is reborn, the wood sprouts new growth.

Related to the tradition o trees sprouting rom corpses is a passagerom Isaiah:

Tere shall come orth a shoot rom the stump o Jesse, and a branchshall grow out o his roots. And the Spirit o the Lord shall rest uponhim, the spirit o wisdom and understanding (Isaiah 11:1-3)

Tis passage has been represented pictorially in numerous medievalilluminated books, and carved into a large number o sculptural relies inchurches and ound in embroidery. Te image portrays the corpse o Jesseout o which springs a whole amily tree o kings and prophets ending ina resurrected Christ at the top. Later versions depict Adam or Abrahamscorpse out o which spring his progeny, visually eulogizing the arborescent

ideology o linear growth and continuity, heaven bound. Christ is thenew shoot o the tree. Obviously related to these are secular versions oamily trees used or various ideological purposes, there was even an ofcialpictorial amily tree made or Adol Hitler using the tree to underline theTird Reichs belie in the perpetuity o the regime and its Aryan purity: theamily tree is instrumental in abricating illusions o immortality.

Using aspects o this arborescent tradition o placing the corpse inthe ree o Lie in order to have generations o cyclical return, it is possible

to read between the lines o the poem/song lyrics to Strange Fruitwithwhich I began.

Southern trees bear strange ruit,Te trees are xed in the soil o the south, a mother also bears children, andthe corpses are ruit.

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Genocide is in the system rom root upwards, an arborescent image mixedwith the genealogy o blood. It traces not only the generation o whitesupremacists who have committed murder but the generations o Arican-

Americans who were their victims.

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Black body swinging in the southern breeze,Te verse is eerie or the corpse moves by some inhuman hand or by agency

o nature; the rhythm permeates both the poem and song but also thebreath o the wind. Te wind is also cooling and welcoming, but not here,it is ghostly.

Strange ruit hanging rom the poplar trees,According to North American superstition, Christs cross was made romthe wood o the poplar tree, which always trembles because o this andadds a new meaning to the previous verse.1 Hanging is the keyword, orthe corpse hangs between strangeness and ordinariness, lie suspendedin vertical death, swinging rom lie to death, but swinging also with thepoplar trees trembling. Te arborescent myth o the rue Cross is re-traced.Te photograph o Tomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930 that

was cited by the songwriter as the inspiration or the song, does not showthat the victims died hanging rom a poplar tree.

Pastoral scene o the gallant south,A continuation o the rural and classical themes o idealism and decorum

as one might nd in ofcial pictorial art memorializing heroism andgallantry, yet here, introducing a series o ironies that could index whitesanctimoniousness screening grubby murder. Yet, in another direction,could some o this heroism be reserved or the victims o the lynching,continuing the bitterly ironic tone o the poem? In which case, the Arican-

American victims orm a tree o heroes corpses likened to a amily tree.

Te bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Te line is the clearest engagement with the notion o immense physicalsuering. Te bulging eyes strained by strangulation, the twisted mouthis a silent, rozen picture o pain, and the victim cannot scream, the noosesuspends him in the air where speech is to be ound, yet the noose allowshim only animal sounds. Te twisted mouth is a triple articulation: thevictims gasps; the witnessing lynch mob enamed by their own passionsmade animal; and the poets witnessing, silenced, as death silences, yetspeaking through this poem, which is also a twisted kind o mouth (the

singer oStrange Fruitalso has a twisted mouth). Te corpse is thus amongstthe living, as it is in the living as memory, as silences and as twistedutterance. Te poem was made into a song. Te poets voice which cries

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out like a long delayed reaction to a stied cry o pain is orced throughthe singers throat, his silenced voice, the photographers, the victims, is

carried through her voice. Te tree denotes a genealogy o enunciations.Te arborescent imagery conveys this twisted mouth, gnarled and distorted.Although the poet diligently avoids the word corpse, the poem IS a corpse,magically brought back into our presence when re-enunciated.

Scent o magnolias, sweet and resh,Tis is another silence which speaks, this time through olactory sensibilitiesusually invoked as an idyllic scent denoting also, the idealism o a southernemblem, the magnolia tree, which is, indeed, a mighty tree, its waxy, darkgreen leaves ocked with heavy, creamy white owers and with a dizzyingragrance: this is a sticky, aesthetic construct o white history which the poet

wants distance us rom, it has suddenly become morbid and sickly.

and the sudden smell o burning esh!Tis is one o the most serious contrasts in the poem, where redolence andeven decadence descend into an animal vomit. It also indexes an ancienttopos o cooked and uncooked, civilization and taboo (and cannibalism)

respectively. Burning (re) indexes the semiotic chain breath, breeze, wind,and word in Jewish lore. Burnt esh is also an oering to God. Hence, thispart o the poem is highly cosmological and religious in its imagery.

Here is a ruit or the crows to pluck,Te contrast here is between eye and ruit. Te crows present more black/

white imagery but also are a ravaging ock, and we revisit the ruit again, ashelpless ruit which are to be plucked yet so are eyes (bulging eyes). Pluck

suggests the plucking out o the eye: i thine eye oends thee pluck itout and the eye or an eye o the Old estament. Again, the witnessingeye is implicated as much as the eye o the victim plucked by the crows.Tere might also be a reerence here to the set o racist laws the Jim Crowlaws enacted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to keep Arican-

Americans subjugated and marginalized, the legislative ramework or thesocial engineering o white supremacy which exploits the ruit o the tree.On another level, ruit rom the tree reerences Adam and Eves eating o the

ree o Knowledge and their all rom paradise.

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For the rain to gather, or the wind to suck,Storm clouds gathering. Bueted by the elements, the crying rain (rom

the eyes, rom the sky) gathers our mourning, the juices o the ruit areexploited, the souls are swallowed up into the air (o the crows); the deathin the air is also articulated by the sucking ater the last breath o lie,the last exhalation through which the soul is evaporated, leaving the husko the body. Te suck is an inarticulate contrast with the poem and anonomatopoeic intervention denoting bodily processes, all are a relinquishedto the air.

For the sun to rot, or the trees to drop,Tese are inversions, the sun is cleansing but here jaundiced and deling,speeding the decomposition o the body, unlocking the trees to give uptheir ruit in an anonymous process o simply dropping and, perhaps, asuggestion o washing ones hands o blame. But the tree is a ree o Lie andthe victims grasp on it has been loosened nally to release the corpse intothe horizontality o the earth.

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Te cycle is enunciated o cyclical renewal wherein there is a crop, perhaps acrop o revenge (the taste is bitter and again cannibalism is reerenced). Tecrop is a symbol o sustenance and ecundity transorming the ruit into alegion o buried seeds, watered by blood at the roots, coming ull circle. Tecorpse is both husk and seed playing a humble, abject yet privileged partin a system o transcendental renewal which takes as its emblem the tree,the plant, the ruit, the crop, the ower, interspersing them with truncatedvisions o living bodies becoming corpses, becoming dispersed. Te bitter

crop is cyclical; the cycle o death will be repeated as seeds, to crop, to growtrees and more corpses to drop into the earth.

Te Arborescent Corpse Points Down (As Well as Up)

Te contrasting imagery and poetry oBitter Fruitis lodged in thetracery o the tree which is both a symbol o death and renewal, but thepoet later opted to describe the tree without any irony. In a poem entitled,

Te House I Live In, Meeropol depicted the lineage o tyranny that the treerepresents:

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Bigot-treeIs a poisonous growth

Arising out o the swampO IgnoranceAnd PrejudiceFrom its twistedBranchesFreedomIs lynched.2

Tis is an inverse image o the tree, shown not as aiding the cycle oregeneration but as reproducing an immortal evil. Even the poets hatred orthe tree here is entangled in an arborescent discursivity which can be tracedback to the original sin, where the poisonous, twisted branches o the treereerence the all rom paradise. Even the way in which the poem is written,vertically, with short lines and single words suggests a tree structure with theBigot tree at the top, and the lynched hanging on to its bottom. But thepoem also suggests that reedom is made into a corpse by being lynched bythe Bigot-tree, the poet apportions ancestral and genealogical malice to the

tree, and in the opposite direction, suggests that, like trees, ignorance andprejudice are generational.

Te hierarchical arborescent image o thought organizes heaven, helland purgatory. Satan has his ranks o demons, as god has his ranks o angels.Tus, the tree is both ree o Lie and the ree o Knowledge, the reason or

Adam and Eves downall and the supporting structure or the crucixion,antechamber to eternal lie. Is it is both triumph and downall. Tis is whyin European art the ree o Knowledge is oten shown as a corpse reduced by

the snake-demon to a skeleton tree which causes Adam and Eve to becomemortal.3

In Bitter Fruit, Blood at the leaves and blood at the root is anexpression o the genealogy o inherited bigotry and murder extending bothabove ground (a amily tree marking both present and uture growth) andunderground hiding roots deep in the past. Te tree, like heaven and hell,uture and past, is hierarchical above and in the subterranean below, earthmerely the middle registers o the cosmology. Te tree is inverted, both

giver o lie and bringer o death, on a vertical axis intersecting the line othe earth. Arican-Americans were hanged by the neck rom trees but thisis not a meaningless expedience acilitating a lynching but a harsh reality

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secreted in an arborescent tradition o thinking which stages murder in aninstinctively intelligible context. Tis consists o banishing the victims o

a conspiring mob to the anonymity o the city margins at the edge o theorest. Tis no-mans land is the context or an arbitrary execution whichdenies human rights or due process, and suggests an animal in the orestunworthy o noble reection, hunted and made into a trophy. Te treerepresents the temporary suspension o the rule o law (Agambens the stateo exception), which institutionalizes and ritualizes murder. It gives murderthe semblance o a tree: natural justice inherited rom our athers reachingback to the original sin, with the same undertones o predestination whichthe murderer may imagine militates against charges o premeditation. Forthe perpetrators o a lynching, well versed in arborescent and agriculturalpractices and ideologies enshrined in the Bible, the lynching is a spontaneousoutburst o righteousness veiling bigotry; the makeshit arrangementunderlines the absence o reection, holding out the possibility o erasureboth or the murderers and or their memories o the corpses. Te corpse isa ruit that will all to the ground in an unmarked grave and rot in a naturalprocess o decomposition eacing identity and this natural cycle will erasethe deed o murder.

Te tree can help to drain the trauma arising rom a contemplationo guilt or premeditation in this murder or the witnessing o it by allowingsuch trauma to branch o into an arborescent transcendence. Whatcould be more natural than the corpse without an identity, an animalsacrice purging the community o its sickness (in the ree o Lie model),yet allowing it to wallow in its vision that original sin is inevitable andpredestined (the ree o Knowledge model)? Here, the corpse and the treeare both one, without sense, understanding or judgement. Both the ree o

Lie and the ree o Knowledge let all murderers o the hook in a sense,either by urnishing them with the belie that the tree restores lie in a cycleo regeneration, or by oering the delusion that there is no choice, that Manis born to sin and the tree has generationally always produced such thoughtand action, and always will. Here, the tree is the visual, diagrammatic indexo murder as a hierarchically intuited and inherited practice stretchingback to the dawn o time: blood on the leaves and blood at the root, aninevitable and sel-justiying cycle. Te heart o the poem is rent with the

tension between the ree o Lie and the ree o Knowledge and the corpseis locked into the tyranny o this eternal war.

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Extending this are some kinds o modernist traditions o art andcritical theory which aim to shock and reveal the cruelty and sadism o

humanity in contrast to its religious transcendence. Tis anti-aesthetic,downward thrust is represented by Batailles basseuse and Bakthinscarnivalesque, or example, both o which substitute the vertical, anagogicalprojections o the celestial or the transgressive pleasure to be derived by ourdemonic all. Te antithesis uses the same vertical axis o transcendence,but heads down. Here at the bottom is a celebration o animal instincts,cruelty, violence and the corpse. In art, the tradition is represented by Bosch,Breughel, Caravaggio, Lautramont, de Sade and others. What is cast asidein Kristeva, thrown away, or what alls o, is celebrated in this downwardmovement:

Te corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to all) [] is cesspool and death.Without makeup or masks, reuse and corpses show me what Ipermanently thrust aside in order to live. Such wastes drop so thatI might live, until, rom loss to loss, nothing remains in me and myentire body alls beyond the limit-cadaver. (Kristeva 1982: 4).

Kristevas daring expos o the constructions, artistic, social andcultural, by which we make the corpse acceptable, reveals to us our reusalto accept our all, the decomposition o the dead body, the death that isslowly happening in us as we speak. Instead, we choose to repress and throwaside thoughts about this physical reality.

One way in which to break the cycle o reusing to think about thereality o the corpse is to revel in orms o art and philosophy which ocuson it. Te corpse becomes the symbol o everything cast aside by bourgeois

society, it becomes a club to beat out the clichd sentiments and intellectualormulas we use to banish the unacceptable: another way to go back toancient conicts o Eros and Tanatos. Here, Batailles inter-repulsionand Kristevas vertigo are equivocal expressions o extreme emotions, anattraction to death as pleasure, or pleasure unto death. Inter-repulsion isattraction and repulsion together, and they are ormed into a vertigo simplyby putting desire next to its opposite, death, and by inverting the verticalthrust o the transcendent into the ground: the anagogic becomes the all,

and the all a journey to ecstasy. I the corpse has allen and its husk isthrown away, and we reuse to recognise its true import and excrete it romthe city, Bataille and Kristeva show us its immanence as decomposition and

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abjection by lionizing mud and aeces, blood and semen, de-idealizing anyresidue o transcendence in immanence. Yet, this anti-aesthetic is, however,

only a dubious tactical weapon against a hierarchical and patriarchal systemor it provides a oundation or this very hierarchy, adding new subterraneanlayers to it, rather than branching out horizontally beyond an inverserelation.

Ultimately, then, the celebrated transcendent corpse o spirit and airand the immanent corpse o rotting esh are antithetical to each other, butcooperative in creating a hierarchy o heaven and hell. Whatever direction,elevated or bassesse, both are energised by paroxysms o pleasure pointingabove and below through which the dead body is simply used as a pokercard which can be viewed as both upside down and the right way up,simultaneously. Tis is another image o vertigo. Such traditions o thought,though useul antidotes to the poison o religious paradigms o power, re-instantiate these paradigms by creating a hierarchy o sensations and aects,casting aside transversal series o sensations and critical engagements thatare neither disgust nor adoration, nor reaction.

Mantegna, Bosch, Breughel, Caravaggio, Bataille, Kristeva et. al,present the arborescent model o the corpse as a base via negativa, as a denial

o a soaring, heavenly grace promised to us by the rotting seed corpse, andyet they bring the transormation o its opposite into sharper relie. Corpseas base materialism or window to the soul, the duality is locked by thelove-hate axis. Tis dualism is clearly transposed into material orm by thetradition o the ransi omb memorial.

Te ransi omb is a tradition o tomb architecture that articulates aproound hypocrisy bordering on schizophrenia. It is usually built using twocofns one above the other, except, like a double decker we can see a sculpture

in each chamber, one the corpse as shining apparition o the deceased inidyllic sleep, the other, usually underneath, shown as a decomposing corpseeaten by worms, bugs and other esh eating organisms. Tis also led to thedual ocus momento mori a sculpture with two aces either back to back orsplit down the middle, where we see a rotting corpses head on one side, thereverse or opposite o which is a portrait o the corpse as beauty in death.

Perhaps the only way out o this duality is to cut down the ree oLie above the ground and to dig out its roots below, the ree o Knowledge,

and chop it up, and dismember it roots and crown, and place it into ahorizontal eld, either to eed the grasses or to create a new orest. At leastin the orest, verticality is swallowed up in a multiplicity and the cosmogony

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o the vertical totem pole, which locks us into raising up our eyes andlowering them again, is levelled. Tis unremarkable plain is not brought

into motion by desire channelled into vertiginous ights or alls but consistso recognising these orces when they come into play, not as belonging tothe phenomenological I who experiences them but through a kind oindierence to any etish and a partiality to them all. Here, there is a calm

which nds its co-presence with the corpse.Tere is an argument in Krauss (1985: 39-40) that Batailles inorme

(ormlessness) and bassesse, rather than inverses o patriarchal hierarchy,present to us a horizontality o thought, an undoing o dialectical conceptsand conventional denitions o knowledge, scuppering transcendence.But both bassesseand inormeare structured by binary opposites: verticalup-vertical down, orm-ormlessness, human-animal, consciousness-subconsciousness, animate-inanimate, light-shadow, and heaven and hell.Batailles Captain Ahab xation on destroying hierarchies o power andidealism using the cannon re obassesseand inormealso, necessarily, positshigh meaning/low meaning (bassesse) and meaning/meaningless (inorme).One side o the binary continually brings to mind the other as unsaidpresence, as parergon. Although Krauss promises a horizontal alternative to

the vertical axis she only manages to set up this series o binaries, reafrminghigh and low, ecstasy and abjection, reinstating verticality through doubling(Callois and Lacan), or by inversions o the positive and negatives o lightand dark in photography. For her, the uncanny is simply a place o doubling

where these binaries are preserved. Unortunately, the corpse is implicatedin this paradigm o reversals and doublings as seed/waste.

In what ollows, I begin to explore ways o going beyond this wholeedice o thesis and antithesis structured on binaries which ensnare the

corpse. Instead, I will conceptualize the corpse as a semiotic system linked tomany others, rather than being locked in perpetual dualisms and hierarchies.Krausss system o binary opposites reinscribes the corpse as individual ideal

with one oot in heaven, the other in hell, transcending disintegration. Alsoimplicated in these binaries is a phenomenological counterpart or double

who is also an individual witness o these series o schisms. Instead, it ispossible, perhaps even necessary, or the corpse as concept to be truncatedand dismembered using a disjunctive deconstructionism, and strewn across

an immanent, horizontal eld to be joined with many others, to create arhizomic mass grave in the midst o the living.

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Rhizomic Corpses Point Everywhere

It is important to keep in mind that while the rhizome is able totruncate and dismember the arborescent model associated with vertical,

anagogic transcendence and demonic all, and bring it into a horizontalimmanence, this necessarily involves undermining the very binary betweenthe arborescent and the horizontal. Te rhizome unravels the dualism andoperates more transversally, prompting the hierarchical structure o thebinary to shudder.

Rhizomic corpses are a subterranean network o loosely associated,arbitrary multiplicities. Yet the rhizome here is also a range o intensityandco-present intensities and their ranges, where the virtual can orm intoopportunistic, timid beginnings breaking up blockages or owing aroundthem. Consciousness is a distributed system, it has no organ or area in thebrain which produces it, as such, it is an assemblage o relations, aects,reections and transormations which ashion the earth as it is ashionedby them. Te corpse is distributed along these pathways and intersections;it has a site only temporarily, or it is also ormed as a series o sites andperspectives. Enacting the corpse, not passively receiving it, consists o being

actively involved in a series o relations, a dynamic intensity continuingbeore us and ater us, need not be a xed emotion or semiotic systempreordained or us, inherited by us to step into.

Andres Serranos Faciality/Deacialization

Andres Serrano took a series o photographs o dead bodies in amorgue. Although, at rst, it seems banal to discuss photographic style

in view o the subject matter, this does have important implications orhow we as viewers construct the corpse, rather than regarding it as given,as some presence, as a thing in itsel, as i it were possible to subtract anypossible approach or intentionality towards it. Serrano brings two semioticsystems under scrutiny with his staging o the corpse, signiance andsubjectication,4 the ormer, reminiscent o the majesty o a cedar, thelatter the violent crash o a machine, a car, a plane, a motor bike on its

way to somewhere else. Serranos Morgue is a series o interruptions o

lie, which cut it up as the camera aperture cuts up the visual eld. Tiskind o photography is more like collage; the corpse is opened out intoragmentations o violence. Te series sets up two visual styles, the rst is

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peaceul and arborescent, and the second tears this down brutally. With therst kind, Serrano presents the corpse as waxy,5 as a blanched ungus in

medieval bandages and shrouds, draping a mimetic and parasitic aestheticupon the corpse, a transormation rom polished marble sculptured corpseinto corpsed sculpture, sculpted esh that spirits away its decomposingnature, ramed by immaculate drapery and the promise o art. Tis is a vertiginous beauty o orm and surace in death. Tecolours in these photographs are muted, beige and gold, with asheso moon-white mime (Deleuze 1987: 167), holy linen and swaddlingclothes, the chiaroscuro o Caravaggio and Ribera. Against this semioticsystem or strata is the subjectication instantiated by the other kind ophotography, which he sets in contrast to the aorementioned ocus onaciality in death. In this other system, aces are not identiable, charredbeyond identication or through lacerations, blood spattered esh and

bandages, there is only a map o signs o motion and disruption, cuttingup visual ows. Whereas in the rst system o representation, we see

Andres Serrano, Te Morgue, Fatal Meningitus, 1992. Courtesy the artist

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the corpse through the hierarchies o art, in the second, photography isused as an invisible yet magniying window-lens, or a concealed surgical

mirror onto torn and seared esh, yet nevertheless its cropping andocus, the signatures o the art o the photograph, tell us o the reedomo capture, choice, precision and control which are withheld rom anddenied to the corpse. Tere are a number o photographs which insertthemselves between these polar semiotic systems, and which combinesome o their properties.

Te cropping technique makes us conscious o the cropping othe body by violent death. Te dismembered integrity o the corpse isalso a technique o photography which always cuts up the visual eld,presenting it as already made, an illusion o the integrity o aciality.Serrano presents an analytic o the immanence o the arbitrary, theaccident, the mishap, the ate o the ill ated. From the point o viewo arborescent projections, there is a binary ormed by this rhizomaticdisintegration but rom the point o view o a rhizomatic organizationo presentation, the binary is absorbed and broken down into a larger,asigniying eld rom where new combinations o meaning arise.

We become aware o conventions o power instantiated in

representation and we can observe how they are able to conditionour response to the corpse. Serranos cropping and dismemberment

work against the binding tropes o signiance (teleological signiyingsystems) and subjectication (the consciousness o the transcendentalknowing subject) by which we are conditioned to organize the bodyand its unctions. Such a questioning o the visual strategies o aciality,subjectication and signicance can jolt us out o our unthinkingcompliance with such systems. It may even allow us to ocus on

producing other kinds o experience, what Deleuze and Guattari reer toas the Body without Organs, or in this case, the corpse without organs.Even though there is nothing in Serranos work that presents us with thismode o production, there is some opening up, an cartwhere the workbegins.

Serrano plays o the binary o aciality (vertical construction)versus the aceless (horizontal disintegration into other ows). While theace reveals otherness, gender, race and age, the aceless corpse suggests

it could be anyone, me, you, or all o us. In this sense, the absence o theace reveals to us our will to impose aciality even upon the aceless:

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It is precisely because the ace depends on an abstract machine thatit is not content to cover the head, but touches all other parts o the

body [] Te question then becomes what circumstances triggerthe machine that produces the ace and acialisation. (Deleuze andGuattari 1987: 170).

Tere is a aciality even in the hands. One particular photograph bySerrano in the series ocuses on a pair o hands with ngers threaded intoeach other like underground roots. Here again, there is a resemblance to amarble nish which recalls sculpture, particularly Rodins. I am thinkingspecically o Rodins Te Hand o God and the Hand o the Devil,representing a pair o hands sculpting a gure. Tis is autonymy, thesculpting o another sculpture that seems to emerge rom the sculptedhands. Te sculptural hand reers to Rodins hand as the genesis o thesculpture: he is its maker. Te hand produces the hand in which a bodyemerges. Tis shiting metamorphosis o autonymy seems continuallyto be the object o Rodins ocus, and involves a consciousness aectingand being aected by the haptic materiality o the sculpture.

It is a chiasm o touching and being touched by the sculptural

orm, but with Serranos dead hands the corpse appears to hold itsel,is touching and being touched by itsel. Te dead material o Rodinssculpture and Serranos dead hands seem to share an identity, or

while both are inert, something in us arises which continually orcesa aciality, a genealogy, a purpose upon them. Rodins Hand o Godreerences not only the mythos o man rom clay but also the holdingo our bodies with our hands, and the exploration o others bodiesthrough the blindness o touch. Te chiasm created by holding ones

let hand with ones right negates the subject/object dualism because weare both holding and being held, active and passive, eeling and beingelt. Serranos photograph appears as a tragic manquo this reciprocity.Rodins sculpture represents the chiasm o touching and being touchedproducing a sculpture, a sculpture touching itsel, the chiasm as aproductive ipseity and autogenesis.6 Serranos photograph and Rodinssculpture make us conscious o the productive chiasm we orce upon theinanimate, the aciality we orce upon such images.

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Andres Serrano, Te Morgue Part II (Death By Natural Causes), 1992Courtesy the Artist

Witkin and Dismemberment

Te integrity and coherence o the corpse, its sacred unity, isdismembered and mutilated in Peter Witkins photography, as i to answer

Guattaris plea:

We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses,our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries [] We want tosee rigid, imprisoned, mortied bodies exploded to bits, even icapitalism continues to demand that they be kept in check at theexpense o our living bodies (Guattari 1996: 32).

Guattari sees the repressive regime o signiance as perpetrating rigid,imprisoned, mortied bodies, a system o recreating value systems based onthe notion o unity. Tis desiring ater dismemberment orms interesting

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parallels with the Surrealist method o collage, where the body or thecorpse is cut up and recombined. Precedents or this may date back to the

mass dismemberment and disguration o war. For example, Amy Lyordexamines the displays o surgical objects and body parts modelled in wax inthe Muse du Val de Grce, an army medical museum but also a militaryhospital which received many wounded in the First World War. Te glasscases here aligning the hospital walls were hierarchical and organized alongscientic taxonomies, an arborescent model on display, used to imposeorder over the chaos o mass slaughter all around. Interestingly, the authorgoes on to claim that Louis Aragon and Andr Breton, who were postedat that hospital, were inuenced by these medical displays, and suggeststhat the dismemberment o the corpse or the living body, which so oteneatures in Surrealist art, orms a continuity with the display o body partsin these kinds o collections. She claims that the dismemberment o corpses

was also used by the Surrealists as a way to critique the rational order osigniying systems. Robert Desnoss Penalites de lEner ou Nouvelles Hebrideis clearly sensitized to these possibilities, the writer:

[] urges us to see his city as a place littered with ragments o

human esh: over there, a phallus stuck through with a needle;elsewhere, ears, mouths, and eet. Body parts ll the streets o Paris,and in Desnoss city they have learned to speak (Lyord 2000: 58).

Te spectacle o the distributed body parts o the corpse was usedby Desnos as a way to restructure language, the imperatives o traditionalgrammar and the conscious mind. But raising Surrealist dismembermentto the realm o aesthetics, as Lyord does, is to underestimate and

misinterpret the anti-rationalist, anti-aesthetic anarchism o theSurrealists. Aestheticization aims to create an art which is somehowa mimetic reection o meaning, beauty and truth; attributing suchhumanistic, progressive values to Surrealist dismemberment smoothesover its more problematic nature, its radical extremism, bitter pessimismand its arbitrariness. Representing the dismemberment o the corpse

wasand isa way o cutting up notions o natural and aesthetic order,rationalism, truth and goodness, all used into one unity, a unity which

is, in a sense, a corpse. Dismemberment and re-assemblage open upa rhizomatic realm o possibility eecting the potentialization o thepossible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a closure,an impotence. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 190).

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Dismemberment, then, is a more radical project than creating anew aesthetic, something which might be compared to rearranging the

urniture. It challenges the very notion o aesthetics. Te dismemberedcorpse (as we can see in Desnoss work, and in Serrano) deconstructsour conditioning which instinctively always seeks to rejoin the partso the corpse in the visual eld, in the world, in our imaginations, andin a semantic system which makes us eel that there is a purpose toeverything, a grand design, which is also, not incidentally, an aestheticdesign. Seeing dismemberment as a well-meaning moralistic and hu-manistic critique o society and its values, a way to reresh aesthetics,reinstates rationalism, truth, beauty; it is another way to manuacturethe transcendence o the corpse.

Instead, dismemberment challenges a whole series o values: themyth o the centre, the rational seat, the sacred body as temple, andquestions the ree o Lie or Knowledge rom which is supposed tosprout the symmetries and hierarchies o consciousness and perception,and rom which the aesthetic, religious, moral and epistemological unityo bourgeois society extend. Dismemberment has the potential to makeus aware o the rational traditions o organization though which the

body, alive or dead, is homogenized and made known to us. Foucaulttheorized that it is the human body which is subordinated by architec-tures o control:

Te human body was entering a machinery o power that exploresit, breaks it down and rearranges it. A political anatomy, which

was also a mechanics o power, [creating] subjected and practisedbodies, docile bodies (138).

Although the breaking down o the human body described by

Foucault resembles dismemberment, there is the rearrangement o thebody into a xed unity which coheres with cultural, scientic, politicaland rational principles o control societies to sustain relations o power.Even the micro-perceptions o our own body image are regulated bythis control. It might be said that part o the control that is exercisedefciently over our bodies is invisible to us because we assume its tran-

scendent unity; its composite nature disappears rom sight at the mo-ment o our looking at other bodies in the world, objectiying them andconstructing their aciality. We assume it is natural or ready made or usto nd in the world without our authorship. However, the dismembered

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corpse in art has the power to question this instantaneous process opiecing together aciality, because it can mobilize a critical distance, and

make us aware o the pieces that will not come together. Can we becomeaware o our cooperation with the subjugation o the human body bydismembering the conceptual unity o the corpse which we reproduce asa sign o societys power over us?

We have seen a kind o dismemberment in Serrano i we considerthe whole series o Morgue works (rather than any one photograph) asragments o a corpse and o corpses. Te series thematizes dismember-ment on many levels, but the relationship between these levels is notmimetic or analogous, or these qualities lead us to build up a rationaland aesthetic unity which ultimately reerences some positivist telos. Weare let without reassurances and any ideal reconciliation or resolution(tamed death as Aris calls it.) Instead, we are let with questions andsel-analysis, estranged rom the comorts o a amiliar world and our

way o thinking, i we choose to recognise it and to continue along theselines o recognition.

In Peter Witkins Feast o Fools, 1990, eet, hands, arms, torsos arecut apart and displayed on a dining table surrounding the blindolded

corpse o a baby, all presented in contexts o eating, grapes, shellsh,vines, a pomegranate torn open at the side (an obvious reerence to theresurrection o Persephone and clearly sharing a resemblance with thechild whose abdomen has been stitched up.)7 Te picture suggests boththe subtraction rom greater semiotic systems and the promise o therecombination o these systems into other systems. And who is to saythat these dissociated limbs and body parts were ever part o one bodyinstead o a mass o them? Tis suggests a radical intersubjectivity o

vocabularies. In Witkin, each body part is a semiotic system interlock-ing with, sharing the eld with, other body parts within the picture andoutside o it, reerencing the viewers own body and its parts. In boththe image and the viewer there is a disintegration and recombination othe body, it is no longer a simple exchange o the viewers embodimentdoubled by the gure depicted. Reerring to Witkins work, Schwengerstates that within these closed chambers the integrity o the body andthe integrity o the image are simultaneously dismantled (2000: 407).

But how does this simultaneity work?Witkin demonstrates a rupture in the symmetry which couples

the material substrate o art (dead matter) with the material substrate

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o the corpse (dead matter). He does this both literally and abstractlyby dismembering the symbol: dead matter=dead matter, corpse=corpse,

death=death, by disturbing each equivalence, creating a dissonance withthe appearance o the thing and what it is supposed to stand or, whichcan never be known. One o art and cinemas great achievements is toshow us worlds unrealisable in the everyday, which old us within theunperceivable, thereore allowing us to perceive (MacCormack 2004).

We do not perceive i we merely accept traditional ways o respondingto the corpse as a perect simulacrum o the viewing body. Witkin prob-lematises this mirror and suggests that it may, indeed, not be possible.Such art ruptures aith in the mimetic telos that art shows us the trutho things as they are and as we observe them, an ideal unity that may betraced back to the Hegelian concept o classical symbolism, where thecontent and orm o art are united in their articulation o the spirit orconcept. Instead, we are ree to adopt a critical distance, allowing or amultiplicity o connections and contradictions and the spontaneity odierent modes o production. Mimesis is the cement that is used toreinorce traditional models o perception in order or the discursivity othe corpse to persist as a corpse, as given, rather than as a mode o pro-

duction which can explore unpredictable emotional ows, perceptionsand assemblages.

Witkins body parts are truncated sentences, ideas, the relationsbetween them, complex thoughts, emotions, horrors that can be recom-bined into any event. I his work is mimetic at all, it is because it reectsback our desire to integrate, rationalise and create identity and meaning,although there is nothing in his pictures which inherently calls or suchorder, and this resistance brings our call to order crashing down. Tere is

always seepage rom any packaging o meaning in his work because it isscattered with lacunae. And, o course, this is no mere mimesis becausethe critical distance, the sel-analysis which occurs while viewing objectsin the world is a psychic reordering o categories in the viewer which arenot reected in the work, only initiated by it. Te work suggests that

we have the power to recombine the corpse, lie and thought in a Bodywithout Organs in a delicate balance between the striations o semioticsystems but reaching out beyond them to other orms o psychic organi-

zation on a plane o consistency.Witkin dismantles the given by questioning the codiying o the

body and our desire to construct aciality in order to show us the pos-

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sibilities o re-assemblage. His work continually attempts a rhizomic de-centralisation o the signiying eld so that the punctum, corpse, body,viewer are strewn across it as a distributed system working as a mul-tiplicity, rather than a hierarchy o ocal points centred on the corpse

where its eyes, ace, torso, ngers, hair are used to assemble taxonomies

o the human being. Tere is a reexive movement in Witkins workwhich reveals the possibilities o the visual language we use to organizethe experience o the body and the corpse and the ways in which wemay conceptualize the encounter. Instead o using the logic o mimesisand resemblance, Witkins antastical contexts and bizarre juxtapositionsencourage us to become aware o our saccades, the rapid rhythmic wan-dering o our eyes rebounded o a wall that does not return our gaze

with its resistance. In Witkin, we disgorge our sel-unity into the nexus

o body parts depicted, we question reality, belie, destiny, and our en-counter with the work is a powerul, productive intensity, which we canchannel into other activities.

Peter Witkins Feast o Fools, 1990. Courtesy the artist.

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Te body is only ever partially known to the sel. One can not seeit rom all sides at the same time or think o all its dierent processes

and aspects at once, and so there is always a mental image or dominantset o images or expositions o ones body or the body o the other atwork, which is continually changing over time. Witkins dismember-ment is similar to the art o Cubism: both show us the body or bodyparts as a series o snap shots, moments or Abschattungen (proles) othe thing, corpse, object, by which we assemble that object and subjec-tivity itsel Tis goes urther than the claim that art simply doubles thecorpses decay to reect our own, or the medium. Instead, i the corpsein Witkin or in Serranos work reects back anything, it is not a mir-ror image o the corpse or our bodies, but an understanding o how weconstruct that image as a series o ocal points, ragmented experiencesand memories, through the perception o various intersecting semioticsystems and narratives o desire. Tis undamentally questions mimesisbecause this kind o art, as Danto writes, gives us not merely an objectbut a perception o that object; a world and a way o seeing that worldat once, the artists mode o vision being as importantly in the work as

what it is a vision o (Danto 1989: 231).

Witkin cuts up the instinctive visual language we employ as a re-ex or a lower-order perception that slips under consciousness to makeus reach back nostalgically or the natural order and its dependence onthe clichs o coherence. He oregrounds our habitual processes o per-ception, breaking them up. He makes me think, or example, when Iremember seeing the corpse o my ather in an open cofn several yearsago, that I remember the parts o the corpse, not every part, and thatI build up an overall picture o the corpse experience rom these dis-

membered parts, each o which has a dierent signicance, emotionalregister, sensation, and percept. Reclaiming these processes o sensationand making them objects o perception, taking them away rom theshadow o the tree, allows me to move on emotionally and intellectuallyto reincorporate them into a new intensity and, in a sense, to move be-yond the xation that the mental image needs to be a mimetic reectiono the decaying corpse. Instead, I begin to recreate the corpse and itsdisparate elements in a new corpus o thoughts and ideas rom dierent

perspectives, without the compulsion o my habitual emotions and re-sponses which tug at my sense o aciality and subjectication, my own,to authenticate an exact, ritual memorialization o the order and timbreo the experience which is another circular mimesis.

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Tis newly discovered recombinative power is not exactly a tran-scendent dream o hope or a joyous metaphor o rebirth, although one

is entirely ree to interpret it as such. For me, this is a rhizome con-necting then and now, and the whole relationship is a continuing re-conguration. It couldbe viewed as a orm o decay rom the originalather (yet another binary) to the micro-revisions o hindsight, but I

would rather see it as reconguration o immanent intensities then andnow. And this is precisely pertinent to breaking the tautological mime-sis o death=death, and decay=decay in art, to orm other possibilities:deconstruction=reconstruction, memorial=the reconguration o mem-ory, and memory=the reorganizing o past imaginative intensities with

which we can communicate with others. Against the trace o mimesis, itis the cultivation o dierence in itsel.

In Witkin, the corpse is organised in such a way as to make usaware o the relativity, perhaps even arbitrariness, o systems o signia-tion and presentation that dominate our reception o the corpse andare responsible or making us subjects. Te signiying chains o parts othe corpse or body are cut up to create other narratives, yet in so do-ing, Witkin disassembles traditional notions o aesthetic unity, harmony

and peace which contain and channel trauma, and by which we expelthe dead body and its materiality as waste material rom the polis. Wit-kins dismembered bodies level top-down and bottom-up signiying andcognitive chains, transorming them into recombinative sites or nodes(leg, arm, oot, torso), reorganizing organs and limbs and the etishesassociated with them (penis, breast, eet, eyes), thus supplying the op-portunity to contemplate transormation as contemplation. Witkin andSerrano take us out o the customary and its unthinking investment in

hierarchical values and relations o desire. Witkins photographs are anetwork o signications and proles, a rotating assemblage that tellsus about our desire to assemble, to work up a thousand saccades into acorpse. Te truncated corpse is a levelling plane o immanence, its partsrecombined to deny striations and charms, ormulas and clichs.

Psychogeography and the DeadTe Holocaust Memorial Berlin

I conclude with some remarks about the inter-operative, recombinantpotential o these various traditions o enacting the corpse with reerence to

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the monument to the murdered Jews o Europe in Berlin. Tis eld o 2,700concrete slabs provides the space or a discursivity between the tree and rhi-

zome traditions o organizing experience attending the corpse. In Peter Eisen-mans monument, the rhizome sprouts out rom above the ground to orm apetried orest where we immerse our bodies in the landscape o the corpse,treading on the horizontal ground where memory smoothes into experience.But this is not a regressive mimesis: a dead monument to the dead. Nor is thisa tree-like monument which territorializes the land around it and towers overit, casting the shadow o a despot. Rather, it is a multiplicity where new expe-riences are created in its spaces. One tree is vertical but a orest is horizontal.

We may wish to make a multiplicity out o the tree by taking various tracingsrom it or peopling it with a genealogy o corpses, but the orest above andthe rhizome below are polyvocal. Tis does not mean that a multiplicity is anamorphous and conusing melee; it does not lack precision or intelligibility,especially i we are mobile with it, as we are walking through the monument.One does not walk in some external circumambulation around a vertical pole;

we walk through the monument, we are in it, it wraps over our aces. Usingthe principle o psychogeography so valued by architects, we create our ownroutes through the structure o thepolis; we perceive as we walk, and this, in

turn, aects our perceiving. It is a mutually reinorcing relationship, idealisedby the Situationists, but here radically altered and disjunctive with its context.It is a special kind o walking which one adopts, that opens and closes upviews as one becomes aware o ones step, the rhythm and visual ow careullymoderated by the grid-like spacing where reedom emerges within predestina-tion. While the space o the concentration camp was the site or a massica-tion o bodies, the monument opens up to a reedom o movement whichconsists in the ability to take any route within this massication and control,

as a signature and experience. It inverts centeredness (it is a centre in the citybut there is no centre in it) as it inverts the visitors centeredness. It brings tomind the distributed system o the brain, the neural network that producesconsciousness beyond any specic, physical centre as a series o cooperativeintensities and their relations that spill over into the world. Not only do wecreate our own routes, we become aware o our will to create.

Adrian Parr, who has written one o the most sensitive and insightulaccounts o how this monument works with the conscious walking body in its

midst, writes that this grid undermines the tyranny o a regulatory repetitiono elements. Te memorial derives rom an intensive topography as Eisenmaninuses lie back into the lieless order o the grid (Parr 2008: 158).

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Furthermore, Eisenman critically engages the memorial typology othe vertical structure set against the horizontal ground plane that together

work to produce a homogenous entity (158). Te result is that Eisenmansmonument is used sel-reexively:

[] to release a eeling o groundlessness and vertigo. Te limitso phenomenologically engaging with the 19,000-square-metersite, by relying too much on personal perception simply strips itsintensive topography bare, or here there are a variety o intensitiesand aects comingling with each other (158).

Te monument reuses to be reduced to a stereotype o a monu-ment. Lie lters through its space. It does not create a tracing o death

within the city revisiting the mythos o mimesis in art, that materialinertness must stand or the inertness o the dead, the death=death re-dundancy. Rather, it invites a series o intensities and aects to producea looking orward and reexively at the same time, while breaking downbinaries o subject and object, private and public, which intersect in thebody o the monument.

We might glimpse another visitor through the gray concrete, aash o red, a camera perhaps, and the risson o the unexpectedhere,there, gonedismembering the wall o solitude and quickly restoringit. Tere is a hard and implacable solidity, and an irrepressible uidity.It seems to reveal our own phenomenology o the body and space to usas we walk, intuitively questioning notions o the sel and identity. Andthen there are broader reections which allow this sel-reexive node tobranch out. How does this analysis o architecture and moment, public

space and memorial culture, address the persistently deerred corpse inthis experience? Again, we can ollow a thread or two let by Parr tonegotiate the labyrinth o the monument:

Te deeper in you go the quieter it becomes, the buoyancy o thestreet sounds slow to a murmur as a gray narrow silence inuses thebelly o the site. Trough the language o abstraction, Eisenmandrags the ull weight o those anonymous bodies o history up rom

below the depths o the earth enticing the visitors to take the placeo those selsame bodies by descending to where they were onceburied (Parr 2008: 159).

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In the monument in Berlin (part o it is below the level o theland), we are both in a orest and underground in rhizomic connections.

All directions become canals o concrete, we are in an underworld, weare buried or we are not yet born. Te belly in this quote not only re-minds one o ancient resurrection myths, Jonah in the whale and Adam

with the seeds o the ree o Lie placed in his mouth, or Witkins body

parts on a dining table, but also other traditions o ingestion which

equate digesting with processes o mourning (Parry 1985). Yet the bellymetaphor also suggests immanent lie in death. Another way to experi-ence the monument as a kind a Body without Organs, connected byphysical, intellectual or emotional ows. Berlin is pushed to the periph-ery o consciousness as a parergon marking its way back in. It is this very

wavering o the places identity which provides me with the suspensiono my own identity. As Deleuze writes, We speak o our sel only invirtue o those thousand little witnesses which contemplate within us; it

is always a third party who says me (Deleuze 1994: 75).It begins to rain. It gathers us as we look up rom our corpse o

corpses, through whose drenched eyes we view the grey and territorial-

Monument to the murdered Jews o Europe, Berlin

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ized sky. Bueted by the unexpected orce o spontaneous emotions andsensations that intensiy into something much vaster than sadness, the

rise and all is broken by the hard, gray concrete. I am alive in the deadstone, but there is something o it in me. Here, there is no rank, age,able-bodiedness, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. We do notxate on the ace but blend a multiplicity, some strains o which conveythat I am one and many, a monism and a pluralism. Te corpse, the oneand the many, is a cultural productsong, sculpture, painting, architec-tural monument, image o thoughtand has its origin in us. We are itsauthor and in it we assemble our death by ashioning the earth to showthe world within it. It reveals to us structures o regress, and disclosesthe modes o our productivity which undermine them.

Notes

1You will never see a poplar tree perectly still [] the tree is perpetuallyagitated or trembling because o the terrible use made o it at Golgotha (Kidder 1900:226).

2 Undated poem in the Meeropol Collection published in Kovale Baker 1977:54-55.

3 Whereas the skeleton is a orm o the corpse which represents death unequivo-cally, the corpse in art is ambiguous because we can never be sure that it may be a sleep-ing gure.

4 Here, I insert the corpse into the theoretical approach taken rom Deleuze andGuattaris essay Year Zero Faciality (1985: 167-191).

5 Tis reerences but tries to overcome Krausss conceptualization o the corpseas doll, as an uncanny event prolonging the binary animate=inanimate (Krauss 1985:62).

6 Te chiasm reerences Merleau-Ponty, and autogenesis the autopoiesis o Va-rela and Maturana.

7 In some cases the artist takes photographs o corpses, or their parts, ound inmorgues, and reassembles these photographs with other photographed objects, eitherusing multiple negatives, or montage, oten scratching, toning or bleaching the suraceor a worn eect. Te technique cuts up photographic elements and reassembles cut-upbody parts into a new continuum. In contrast, Serrano cuts up the continuum o thevisual eld while photographing cut up body parts or parts o a whole. Both artists seemto rearrange the syntax o the corpse, as i creative work and acts o dierentiation canbe used as talismans against the gure o death.

Reerences

Baert, Barbara. 1970. Noli me angere. Mary Magdalene. One Peron, Many Images.Leuven: Leuven UP.

Danto, Arthur C. 1989. Philosophizing Art. Selected Essays. Berkeley: CaliorniaUP.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1987.A Tousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.London: Athlone.

___, 1994. Diference and Repetition. rans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia

University Press.Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: Te Birth o the Prison. New York:Random House.

Guattari, Flix. 1996. In Order to End the Massacre o the Body. rans. JarredBecker in Guattaris Sot Subversions, ed. Sylvre Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).

Johnson, Richard Freeman. 2005. Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval EnglishLegend. Rochester, NY: Boydell.

Kidder, H. R. 1900. Why the Poplar Stirs. Superstition o Miners in Michiganin Te Journal o American Folklore, 13(50): 226.

Klaver, Elizabeth. 2004. Images o the Corpse: rom the Renaissance to Cyberspace.Madison: Popular Press.

Kovale-Baker, Nancy. 2002. Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan): PoliticalCommentator and Social Conscience inAmerican Music. 20(1): 25-79.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. Corpus Delicti, in October. 33: 31-72.Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers o Horror.rans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia

UP.Lyord, Amy. 2000. Te Aesthetics o Dismemberment: Surrealism and the

Muse du Val-de-Grce in Cultural Critique, 46, rauma and its Cultural Ater Efects 46:45-79.

MacCormack, Patricia, ed. 2004. Senses o Cinema: Special Issue o Perversion.http://archive.sensesocinema.com/contents/04/30/perversion_intro.html.

___. 2005/6. Necrosexuality, in Rhizomes11/12 http://www.rhizomes.net/

issue11/maccormack/index.html (Accessed 27/05/2009).Parr, Adrian. 2008. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and

the Politics o rauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.Parry, Jonathan. 1985. Death and Digestion: Te Symbolism o Food and Eating

in North Indian Mortuary Rites in Man 20(4): 612-630.Schwenger, Peter. 2000. Corpsing the Image in Critical Inquiry, 26(3): 395-413.

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Documents

Deleuzian Approaches to the Corpse - Serrano, Witkin, and Eisenmann