Relevant Utopian Realism: The Critical Corporeality of Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti

In a video interview published in the 12 November 2010 online edition of Die Zeit, author and jurist Juli Zeh responds to reader questions about her literary work to date, including her most recent novel Corpus Delicti. When asked whether the dystopian society she portrays in the novel might become reality, she is quick to make clear the novel’s foundations in present-day Germany: “Ich habe dort eigentlich nichts erfunden” (Horn). She claims to have condensed today’s tendencies into a “Gegenwartsverdichtung” that functions as a fictionalized diagnosis of society. The 2009 novel describes a Germany governed by a totalitarian health dictatorship in the near future. Through the vigilant monitoring of its citizens’ physical well-being, the state has successfully eradicated the public of disease, achieving, as reviewer for Die Zeit Evelyn Finger succinctly terms, the “Zurichtung des privaten Körpers im Namen eines Staatskörpers.” Based on its primary premise, the novel could indeed be read as a dystopia: the utopian fulfilment of the absolute eradication of private pain and suffering becomes a nightmarish scenario of public control. The secondary plot line reveals a more traditionally utopian undercurrent, for the rebellion of the private body against the “Staatskörper” is clothed in notions of personal freedom and the triumph of the individual over the system. But both the desire to free society of disease as well as the rebellion against the destruction of private freedom that comes as a result originates in the same notion that individual bodies contain political potential, particularly when collectively understood. This dilemma is central to the following analysis.

Corpus Delicti presents the reader not with a singular notion of utopia or its derivatives but with a “swarm of individual Utopian details” related to the envisioning of a political system based on the body’s deprivatization as well as the rebellion against that system based on the body’s reprivatization (Jameson 218). Taken together, the ultimate flaws in both the systemic as well as the rebellious leverage of utopian multiplicity support Finger’s rather contradictory claim: in her apocalyptic-like characterization of the voluntary eradication of private rights, Zeh “polemisiert [...] gegen eine postutopische Epoche, die sich zu viel auf die Überwindung der Utopien zugutehält.” Zeh critically invigorates the utopian form through the use of negativity, which expresses itself in the novel through refusal and ambivalence, in order to prompt readers to reflect on the concept of today’s postutopian era, an era that she sees to perpetuate positivism in the name of noncritical progress, whether that progress maintains the system or sparks the rebellion. Pure individual experience that prompts absolute refusal destabilizes that positivism. That experience is to be described as one of intimacy with the self.

This article begins with a brief examination of Zeh’s belief in the public-political accountability to readers of authors and their texts in order to unlock the contemporary political relevance of her “Gegenwartsverdichtung.” This relevance is further illuminated by a discussion of negativity and critical thinking based on Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). The analysis then turns to the destruction and reassertion of the private body in favour of the public body politic in Corpus Delicti. It outlines how the body functions as a tool for the normalization of individual and social morality, whether this morality is couched in terms of public good or private freedom. The deprivatization of the body by the system as well as the reprivatization of that same body by the rebellion are both derived from the same root that asks citizens to support a notion of a progressive status quo. The critical impulse that works against this false progress is found in the very individual, personal, and intimate experience of the body, which functions as a refusal of normalization. When read in tandem with Zeh’s nonfictional writings, which outline the importance of literary discourses in engaging critical thought in the contemporary German readership, the novel divulges precisely the manner in which literary utopia today can unseat the normalizing demands made by public spheres on the individual.

In their...