The session I attended at the Nonhuman Turn Conference was focuses around death, from aspects about modern video games to corpses to the meat industry. While much of the talk was highly theoretical and I was definitely found myself getting lost in the jumble of names of philosophers and theories, I still walked away with some interesting points.
My favorite lecture was the second of the series, titled "The Corpse and Other Posthuman Non-Objects" given by Sarah Juliet Lauro. She focuses on the theories of objects and broken objects, relating it to the way we see and give meaning to corpses. She talked about both Graham Harman's and Martin Heidegger 's ideas about broken objects, Harman saying that all beings are broken equipment whereas Heidegger outlines what makes an object broken or unhandy. Next she tied this into Bill Brown's theory that objects comes to represent human-subject relationships therefore when an object is broken, it proceeds to change that relationship.
By making sure to outline the difference being the corpse as object and the being of the corpse, Lauro emphasized the way which we must view the physical body as simple as object, and not a representation of the death of that person. This ultimately led up to her final point, and the one that really stuck with me; the fact that the living viewer makes the corpse, something inherently unhandy, handy again through its subject-human relationship. She justified this by showing up paintings, mummies, and other representations of death in which humans represent the corpse in symbolic or meaningful ways. Therefore, she concluded that the corpse is only unhandy when out of the reach of human eyes because we constantly are finding ways to make death and the corpse meaningful, finding ways to make it useful again.
Her final point really stuck with me in light of my research on taxidermy because I've been really interested in the relationship humans have with the death of animals and the reasons that the recreation and representation of animals comes to hold so much meaning. I was also thinking about the way in which taxidermy becomes uncanny, presenting something that is familiar to us, but at the same time it is never quite right. I think that taxidermy definitely draws upon Lauro's point that humans always find a way to make the corpse handy because through the taxidermic process, we are giving meaning to animal bodies and using them as a tool to understand something about not only the animal, but our own human nature.
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