Abstract

In this essay, I begin with a genealogy of the various life/death dispositifs, shaped by religious, state, military and entrepreneurial agencies. I then turn to literatures in which a variety of aesthetic subjects and aesthetics frames (for example those mobilized in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown) provide the discursive impertinence one needs to shape perspectives on life and death that escape the proprietary grasp of authoritative agencies.

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