Psychoanalysis and the CorpseSUSAN ZIMMERMAN

THEORYassumes that in "recovering" the past werecast it so as to collapse the temporal distinctions between past,present, and futnre. The concept of chronology is itself a constrnc-tion that falters under scrutiny: in the practice of psychoanalysis,this is hoth a working assumption and a felt experience. For theanalysand, the past is reconstructed as an exercise in the future an-terior, that is, the hermeneutic act retrospectively alters the futureof the past, conjoining it reciprocally and unsequentially to thepresent. 1 From a poststructuralist perspective, language itself isslippery, precluding the possibility that "reality," however it mayhe fantasized, can he captured in temporally fixed and unitary rep-resentations. In hoth its therapeutic practices and critical applica-tions, then, psychoanalytical theory negotiates the multilayered,protean dimensions of time and language, resisting—partially andimperfectly to be sure—the categorical boundaries of the symbolicorder.

My own recent book, conducted in accordance with these as-sumptions, focused on representations of the corpse in the reli-gious discourse of medieval and early modern England, and on"impersonations" of the corpse on the English puhlic stage.^ Ichose to study the corpse because of its visible, material challenge,in any epoch, to concepts of unitary fixity. If the hody itself can besaid to serve as hermeneutic matrix for the subject's constructionof borders (outer and inner, visible and invisible, determinant andindeterminate), then the putrefying corpse constitutes a direct andapprehensible challenge to such constructions. As an entity thatslips hetween categorical signifiers, the putrefying corpse repre-sents the ultimate border problem.

What I would like to do here is explore the status of the corpsein early modern Christianity in terms of Julia Kristeva's theory of

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ahjection—a linkage that heretofore I have considered only hriefly.I will end with a speculation ahout how Kristeva's reconfigurationof the Freudian death-drive—and in particular her triangulation ofsex, leprosy, and death—resonates tellingly with the indeterminateghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet

In Powers of Horror, Kristeva addresses the signification of thecorpse as part of a larger speculation concerning pre-symholic, "se-miotic" experience in the development of the suhject.^ Kristeva's re-visionist project has a double action: in making her case for the hio-psychical forces at work in the infant prior to Lacan's Imaginary, ormirror stage, Kristeva simultaneously collapses the hinaries inFreud's discussion of the death drive (organic/inorganic, animate/inanimate).* As I see it, Kristeva's venture into the "semiotic" is anattempt to reconfigure the properties and potentialities of the mate-rial hody, or, stated more hroadly, to address the conundrum of ma-teriality itself. I would suggest that a similar conundrum is inscribedin the anthropomorphism of medieval Christianity, and that the Ref-ormation condemnation of the material idol (and hy direct and indi-rect inference, of the material corpse), represents an intenselyfocused attempt to dissociate materiality and generative power. Tostate the issue somewhat differently, it might be said that the onto-logical status of the material body, its status as determinate (dead) orindeterminate (generative) roils the ideological foundations of bothpsychoanalysis and Christianity.

The linchpin of Christianity is, of course, the mystery of an incar-nated deity, a man/god, who undergoes bodily sacrifice in order toearn for ordinary beings the right to transcend mortality, that is,death and putrefaction. The body of the dead Christ does not pu-trefy: Christ himself resurrects and trans^gures his body as a modelfor that of the redeemed heliever, whose own putrefied remainswill undergo a lesser kind of metamorphosis into an eternallychangeless state. Further, at least for medieval Christians, it was(literally) the body and blood of Christ, re-sacrificed throughouttime in the sacrament of the Eucharist, that enahled an inversion,as it were, of the Incarnation: the ingestion (or "sacramental canni-balism")^ of the god/man, the divine corporeal, in the corruptihlebodies of the faithful. Thus, as Caroline Walker Bynum demon-strates, medieval Christianity was profoundly anti-dualistic; bodilyprocess was inseparable from spiritual transformation.^ The conun-drum of the corpse was that it generated new forms of material lifethrough a process of disintegration or unbecoming at the same time

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that it served as the raw material for the transformation of the be-liever into a changeless, eternally static state. The spiritually real-ized self v\fas, in Bynum's phrase, a "psychosomatic unity,"' thecorpse serving as disturbing if compelling evidence of the genera-tive power of fragmentation.

The danger that reformists astutely identified in the Catholic hy-postatization of the hody was its implicit affirmation of this genera-tive power as a constituent property of materiality. For iconoclasts,such an affirmation diminished the antecedent, disembodied, im-material being of God the Father, whose identify as God proceededfrom his unique status as pure spirit. The proto-dualistic revisionsof reformist theology thus insisted on dividing body and spirit, ma-terial and immaterial, inanimate and animate, while subordinatingor discounting the problematic relationship of putrefaction to re-demption. Significantly, reformist tracts prepared for public con-sumption, such as the homily on idolatry (1563), attacked thesupposed perversity of Catholic anthropomorphism by singling outthe corpse as the only material entity that could fully demonstratewhat dead means. The corpse, axiomatically dead ("dead as stocksand stones"), became the transparent signifier for the deadness ofmateriality." However, it is noteworthy that in the English culturalimagination, the corpse refused to be "quiescent" (to borrow one ofFreud's adjectives for inorganic matter). Long-standing beliefs inthe power of the corpse to generate life from its putrefying liquids,to kill by contagion, to bleed, to walk, even to attack the living, re-mained manifest in resistance to reformist funerary and burial ritu-als, in local reports of appearances of the un-dead, and in fictionalrepresentations of corpses and ghosts, including those on the pub-lic stage.

In short, what I am outlining here is a tension in early modernreligious ideology between, on one hand, an incipient dualism, aneffort to reconceptualize the body in terms of boundaries thatserved to demarcate differences, and on the other, a continuing in-sistence on body boundaries as fluid, or subject to destabilization.This contestation centered on the proper interpretation of the mate-rial principle in the Christian system and ultimately on the signifi-cation of the corpse—specifically, the relationship of fragmentationto reconstitution (redemption) in a changeless state. For me, the is-sues at stake in this argument resonate strikingly with Kristeva'sprobing of the semiotic.

For Kristeva, abjection, experienced in the human subject as "a

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conglomerate of fear, deprivation and nameless frustration" (15),originates in pre-discursive experience ("these 'operations' are pre-meaning and pre-sign," "analogous to vocal or kinetic rhythm").«It is as if there is a later eruption in the speaking subject of a trans-linguistic "spoor of a pre-object" {PH, 73). This nameless "spoor"signals the "recognition of the want on which any being, meaning,language, or desire is founded" (5); it "stake[s] out the transitionfrom a state of indifferentiation to one of discretion (subject/ob-ject)" (32):

There would be a "beginning" preceding the word . . . In that anteriorityto language, the outside is elaborated by means of a projection fromwithin, of which the only experience we have is one of pleasure andpain. The non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would thus be un-namable, a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain. (61)

This unnameable border evokes the originary "processes of divi-sion in the living matter oi an organism"; further, these "bio-physi-ological processes" are "themselves already inescapably part ofsignifying processes, what Freud labeled "drives" [KR, 28). Thusthe undifferentiated "spoor" of a "pre-object" resonates "back" toorganic division while simultaneously anticipating symbolic dif-ferentiation.

But it is the corpse, a material entity inhabiting the symbolicorder yet unamenable to categorization, that effectively collapsesthe border between the symbolic and the organic:

decay does not signify death . . . refuse and corpses show me what Ipermanently thrust aside in order to live . . . the corpse, the most sick-ening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon ever5dhing . . .The corpse . . . is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life . . .The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. [PH, 3-4)

According to Kristeva, the danger of the corpse, of abjection, is thatit threatens to engulf the totality of the subject's identity as con-structed by the symbolic order, drawing one "toward the [semiotic]place where meaning collapses" (2), where the subject, "fluctuatingbetween inside and outside, pleasure and pain, would find death,along with nirvana" (63-64).

Thus Kristeva situates the simultaneous death of the symbolicorder and the subject at a bio-psychical border whose fluctuations,originary source of the subject's experience of pleasure and pain.

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end in "nirvana." The corpse serves as material witness to the am-biguous relationship hetween fragmentation and "nirvana" in thestructure of human life; abjection enables the subject to compre-hend the corpse in the self. Ultimately, of course, Kristeva's argu-ment ends with a paradox rather than a resolution. On one hand,"nirvana" suggests an ecstasy of oneness, a complete fusion thatgives the lie to symbolic differentiation as well as to the indetermi-nacy of putrefaction. But "nirvana" simultaneously suggests incor-poration, ingestion, a (further) tearing apart of the "fragment" thatis the self, the individual. The paradox lies in the simultaneous ec-stasy/terror of obliteration.

It should already be clear that Kristeva's theory connects in pro-vocative ways with that medieval orientation toward the Christianbody that the Reformation was so keen to eradicate. If the medievalChristian is a "psychosomatic unity," then the body must not onlybe redeemed, it must also be a part of the redemptive process. Thusthe reciprocity of body/spirit metaphors; the preoccupation withsuffering as sacrifice, mutilation, and dismemberment; the central-ity of the Eucharist as the literal ingestion of the god/man; the fasci-nation with states of transition, preeminently that of corpse; andthe transformative concept of redemption as fragmentation en-abling immortality. At bottom what is common to Kristeva's systemand the gestalt of medieval Christianity is a nondualistic approachto psychic/religious phenomena that eschews categorical clarifica-tions for the suggestive irresolutions of paradox. I find such con-junctions provocative and illuminating, although presumablyunrelated in historical terms. Thus my analysis of these temporallydiscrete discourses provides a particular kind of nonlinear linkagein which insights are a function of unintended reciprocations.

Such linkages help, I would argue, in understanding the horror/attraction of the ghost in Hamlet. When the ghost first appears, hecomes encased in armor, a "portentous figure," a "fair and warlikeform" (1.1.112, 50).'' He is, emphatically, a material revenant, a"thing" and a "nothing," a "fantasy . . . in complete steel" (1.1.24,25, 26; 1.4.52, my emphasis). As armored warrior, the ghost repli-cates the living King Hamlet, but this eerie if familiar image evokesan unsettling question: who/what inhabits this dead-Hamlet-armor? Or, to put it another way: what does the impregnable-look-ing casing hide?

What lies behind the armor is of course a corpse: if what makesHamlet Sr. seem alive is his battle-ready fierceness, then what

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makes him an "illusion" is the mystery within. The singularity ofthis revenant is that its indeterminate status as revenant, its half-life/half-death, is literally figured as a contradiction: steel exteriorvs. "no/thing," an apprehensible outside enclosing and containingan unviewable interior.

When Hamlet first sees the "questionable shape" (1.4.43), hewants to believe that it signifies an invincible, avenging power thatdefies the dictates of nature, but he soon becomes aware that theghost is his dependent, that the ghost's exhortation creates a symbi-otic relationship in which the son as avenger must prove thefather's invincibility. These reciprocal claims are threatening, for-bidden, unknowable: if the animated warrior king belongs to thePrince, so also does the corpse within the armor, the "no/thing"behind the mask.

Significantly, the ghost itself, in language echoing Hamlet's own,repeatedly references corrupt and corrupting bodies—the "gar-bage" (1.5.42) of Claudius's body preyed upon by Gertrude's lust,the "leprous distilment" (64) of the poison that renders the livingbody of the King "lazar-like," barked about "with vile and loath-some crust" (72). This image of leprosy would have a special horrorfor Hamlet: it is Hyperion the sun god horribly metamorphosed, hisonce idealized body seized by a kind of anticipatory putrefaction."O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!" (80): certainly the disfig-uring death of the sun king, but also the idea of this "dead corse"(1.4.52) resurrected "in complete steel."

Hamlet's deeply ambivalent response to the ghost resides, Iwould suggest, in his inability to reconcile its implicit contradic-tions: the seeming vitality of its determinate form (the ghost asidol), with the materiality of its unbecoming—the mindlessly gen-erative rot within, the undiscriminating deliquescence. Thus theapparition emblematizes an unfixable margin between life/death,process/stasis, partition/unity. Although it fully exploits the para-doxes of Christian belief and the tensions in the controversy overidolatry, the ghost is nonetheless not reducible to any sectarianstatus (Catholic/Protestant). It is a mystery in material form, a pal-pable impalpable, or, as Kristeva would say, "death infecting life. . . a border that has encroached upon everything" [PH, 3-4).

Interestingly, Kristeva's theory of abjection also comments (al-though never explicitly) on the function of the ghost in the repre-sentation of Hamlet's sexual imagination. Kristeva's vocabulary forabjection is of course itself sexual—the ecstasy of death ("nirvana")

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as an obliterating fusion/incorporation. But Kristeva speculates fur-ther that the abject originates in the violent separation of the infantfrom the womb, an explusion which leaves a trace or memory inthe subject of "the archaic mother," originary site of terror and de-sire. Significantly for Hamlet, Kristeva argues that the biblicalabomination of leprosy "becomes inscribed within the logical con-ception of impurity . . . [as] intermixture, erasing of differences,threat to identity": and that ultimately, "the fantasy of the bornbody, tightly held in a placenta that is no longer nourishing butdevastating, converges with the reality of leprosy" (101). Thus Kris-teva's identification of leprosy with originary defilement makes itpossible to triangulate the ghost/corpse, Gertrude, and Hamlet: thatis, the "leprous distilment" that disintegrates the sun-king is analo-gous to Certrude's lust, which transforms (in the ghost's furiouswords) a "radiant angel," to a creature who "prey[s] on garbage"(1.5.55, 57). By reinforcing Hamlet's own rage at his mother's un-fathomable desire ("To post / With such dexterity to incestuoussheets" [1.2.156-57]), the ghost thereby links leprosy, garbage, lust,and death—the component parts, as it were, of Hamlet's sexualimagination, inextricably linked throughout the play with his de-sire for his own obliteration.

But if the contours of Hamlet's dilemma are more sharply definedby Kristeva's conjunction of leprosy with birth/death, and I thinkthey are, in the end the paradox of Shakespeare's material/indeter-minate ghost eludes captivation. The brilliance of Shakespeare'screation—and, I would argue, of Kristeva's theory in an altogetherdifferent mode—is their power to probe the inexpressible, to bringus closer to the kind of intuition that fractures symbolic con-straints. In this instance, improbably, Shakespeare and Kristeva en-hance each other's expressive power, and thereby demonstrate thereciprocally illuminating relationship of art and psychoanalysis. Atthe same time, however, this very relationship underscores theslipperiness of all representation, as well as the impossibility of re-solving those psychic phenomena that most persistently compelus—the mystery of sex and death, the conundrum of the corpse.

Notes

1. Lacan puts it best; "What is realized in my history is not the past definite ofwhat was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what

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I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the processof becoming." See "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis," in AnthonyWilden, ed.. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanaly-sis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 63.

2. See The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre (Edinburgh: Ed-inbtnrgh University Press, 2005),

3. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:Columbia University Press, 1982). This essay represents the fullest elaboration ofKristeva's theory but it appears in other publications as well (see below),

4. See "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in Peter Gay, ed,. The Freud Reader(New York and London: Norton, 1989), 594-626. For a helpful commentary on La-can's notion of the subject's relationship to a "partial object" anterior to the Imagi-nary (developed, in part, in response to the work of Melanie Klein), see Wilden,160-65.

5. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays onGender ond the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1996),185.

6. The paradox of fragmentation and fusion pervades medieval ritual and ico-nography, as seen, for example, in the mutilation and miraculous reassembly ofmartyrs, the worship of relics as spiritually invested body parts, the representationof post-death purgation as bodily burning, the metaphors of bodily wasting andorgasmic transport in the writings of the mystics, and the representation ofChrist's redemptive fluids as bi-gendered (the blood of circumcision and crucifix-ion, the milk of lactating breasts). See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption,and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1995),

7. Resurrection of the Body, 11.8. See "Agaynste parell of Idolatry and superfluous decking of chtirches" in

The seconde tome of homelyes, 1563 (STC 136663).9. See Toril Moi, ed.. The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1986), 29, 94.10. Quotations from the play are taken from the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jen-

kins (London: Methuen, 1982).