Abstract

In this essay, Bonnie Honig asks whether our responses to death might rework, rather than re-suture or remove us from, the humanist symbolic order that death calls into question. She pursues this question by examining two texts - Sophie's Choice and Antigone. While she sees Sophie's Choice ultimately as performing a resuturing of the symbolic order, in Antigone, Honig finds an intimation of "forms of corporeal care" that may have allowed the actors in the drama, had they not been prohibited in the case of Polynices, to rework the symbolic order in which they were enmeshed. Such corporeal practices of service to the dead do not remove themselves entirely from capitalist economies of use and instrumentalization as attempted by Anne-Lise Francois' anti-humanist ideal of "recessive action," one of Honig's touchstones in the essay. However, Honig suggests that the option of service to the dead--of "being of use"--may "disrupt the binding humanist binary of dignity versus use" and serve as an important site of agonistic political engagement.

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