Organizing Death: Remembrance and Re-collection

Abstract

Much writing on death contrasts its existential significance with our strategies of avoidance. These strategies, it is argued, are manifested in the practices and institutions of modern life and have led to the sequestration of death. This is felt to have separated us from something vital, a belief that seems to, implicitly or explicitly, rest upon claims of (lost) authenticity. But this seems a rather cool account that somewhat conveniently disposes of the dreadful effects of death and is at odds with our sense of its lurking inevitability. The tension between death as both sequestered and shattering is therefore the focus of this paper. It recognizes that death is both absent and present and that this condition is inadequately conveyed by its disposal in the modern organizations of sequestration. Rather, it sees death as being temporarily dispersed through a network of different relations. However, this network is unstable; what was (re)collected may be disturbed. Consequently, I show how our engagement with death is affected by this organization; death ‘moves’ us because of movement in this network. Therefore, I have two propositions: (i) that controlling and concealing death involves a process of organization and (ii) that death erupts when this organizing breaks down.

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