Abstract

At first look, it might seem that the papers in this section concern themselves with the edges of life, with the places where human beings are not yet or cease to be, with extreme states of pain or of unconsciousness at the outer reaches of bodily experience. However, the collective effect of these studies is to take apart any such idea of clear markers for the beginnings, the endings, or the extremes of human presence. They erode any stable boundaries between birth and death, between conscious and unconscious life, between what stays animate and present in a shared cultural imagination and what, however corporeal, can be made to disappear.

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