From Subject to Corpse

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to interpret modern burial practices through Foucault’s and Agamben’s interpretation of the term biopolitics. Foucault understands biopolitics as power, whose ultimate concern is to strengthen life. Death is thus the point which eludes power, but this does not mean that power does not attempt to control and discipline it. Burial is an attempt at doing just that. At the same time, it is also an attempt to manage the symbolic identity of the individual, which is, according to Foucault, a product of modern power. In the second part, I demonstrate the similar but simultaneously opposite status of homo sacer and the corpse. Both are situated on the line between life and death. First due to symbolic death, and second due to biological death. If homo sacer is marked with a bare life, then the corpse is marked with a bare name. The horror of the corpse is thus hidden in the surplus of the symbolic, which demands pacification through burial.