Abstract
As we live and die through the continuing pandemic, one particular affect that relates us globally is of the dead awaiting their funerary repose. Assessing the pandemic, Arif (2020) in an early reflection proposes that we might benefit in our assessment of the ‘bio-social’ of the pandemic by admitting to the sovereignty of the virus. Borrowing this premise, I suggest further that the sovereignty of the virus is acutely manifested in the commingled presence of the living and unreposed dead in the temporary, improvised morgues. Although the continuing pandemic is quite unprecedented, it can be partially recognised in knowledges gained in mourning that register how disasters force a ‘descent’ (Das 2006) and ‘fall’ (Rosaldo 2014) into accepting improvisation of life and death forms. This descent and fall can be towards an abyss risking the very continuum of life, but what we also gain from discerning the relation of mourning with knowledge is that life can be regained at many levels of the fall. Just as the unreposed dead manifest the sovereignty of the virus, I suggest this descent and fall can be ethically attested in improvisation as the social surface of regaining life. It is my contention that this full-time improvisation, which in turn must be its own source, energy and end, must operate facing the unreposed dead. Deriving and extending from my own work of studying the dead, the present essay shows this improvisation and regaining of life through two brief assemblages of bacteriophage virus and media morgue. The relation of mourning and knowledge is built through the essay to arrive at the conclusion that the classic trope of life cycle in anthropology has to be seen as part of a complex texture of the social where vitality and the unreposed dead are concurrent and overlapping.
Highlights
As we live and die through the continuing pandemic, one particular affect that relates us globally is of the dead awaiting their funerary repose
Our present pandemic situation is that where passage into a new day must become possible even when the dead cannot be directed to their well-known zones of funerary repose
It is not a surprise that the morgue, a modern social and architectural institution that moderates and fills in for this out-of-place-ness of the dead, has come to be, as a temporary improvisation, one of the central descriptors of the unfolding of the pandemic. Responding to this metamorphosis of our global condition into the pandemic requires that we look at mourning and its relation to knowledge to recognise this disaster through the events of other disasters, be them personal or collective or any other way in which disasters can be
Summary
The combination of being home-bound and being driven to (and away from) news sources to get updates of the novel coronavirus’ deadly spread is a relatable moment for most people of the world in the first half of the reduplicative year 2020. It is not a surprise that the morgue, a modern social and architectural institution that moderates and fills in for this out-of-place-ness of the dead, has come to be, as a temporary improvisation, one of the central descriptors of the unfolding of the pandemic Responding to this metamorphosis of our global condition into the pandemic requires that we look at mourning and its relation to knowledge to recognise this disaster through the events of other disasters, be them personal or collective or any other way in which disasters can be. The words ‘fall’ and ‘descent’ do not just relay different conditions than those laid by Badiou for an event to be recognised; on an encounter, they announce an imminent and despairing repetition of death This is where Das and Rosaldo’s ethnographies based on the biographical and the autobiographical narratives, respectively, hold insights that bring to the fore what mourning does to the knowledge of the world. In the case of media, I will show that media, being that great specialist of showing and stating deaths and disasters, reveals in the making of temporary morgues the overlapping of death between home and non-home
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