Mortal questions

Abstract

Drawing upon resources from philosophy, sociology, history, and anthropology, this paper explores the possibilities of attending to geographies on the other side of life. After an introductory review of work on deathscapes and extant geographical reflections on absence and loss, the paper turns to consider three horizons in which geographers might extend their interrogations of different mortal conditions: mourning, the spatial politics of the dead, and corporeality. The paper concludes by reflecting on the disciplinary possibilities of responding to these empirical concerns at a time when we are often asked to cultivate all manner of lively geographies.

Keywords

absence death deathscapes ethics exposure finitude memory mortality mourning

I Introduction

… the dream-waking relationship of the far-off which is inherent in every nearness, even in the most tangible and obvious. (Broch, 1995: 33)

To read the growing body of geographical literature attending to death, burial, loss and mourning, is to recognize that people’s relationships to death and the dead are spatial, as much as temporal, phenomena (Kong, 1999, 2012; Yeoh, 1999; Teather, 2001; Johnson, 2008; Maddrell, 2009, 2011; Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010; Young and Light, 2012; McNiven, 2012; Philo, 2012). This is a spatiality at once real and imagined, articulated in the social practices surrounding memorialization as much as it is inscribed in religious narratives or discourses of mourning. The metaphor of the journey or voyage, for example, has long been associated with death – from the payment of Charon to cross the Styx, and the ancient Egyptian journey through Duat, to the ship-burial funeral rites of the Vikings (see Taylor, 2003; Pearson, 2005). We can also think of the notion of death as a border, partition or threshold to be crossed, as both departure from and return to the earth, but also as entry into a new world (Ariès, 1981; cf. Canetti, 1973). We often talk of death in terms of proximity or distance, as something that is ‘near’, ‘close’, or ‘far’. This image of death as a journey, threshold or space of proximity might also be recognized in contemporary discourses surrounding the phenomenon of near-death experiences (Murray, 2010; cf. Metzinger, 2010, on out-of-body experiences).

Geographical work on death, dying and mourning has most clearly revealed the irreducible spatial dimensions of these relations through the study of social practices. The phenomena of burial, pilgrimage, mourning, memorialization, and diverse religious practices inscribe experiences of death within a spatial history. These different socio-spatial practices have been considered in terms of the composition of different ‘deathscapes’ – spaces and landscapes of emotional intensity through which the dead continue to be ‘with’ us. As outlined below, this ‘with’ is both elusive and insistent; it is spatially manifest in the separation, exclusion and demarcation of certain deathscapes, and in those practices of visitation, journeying and haunting through which different forms of absence are given intimate proximity and meaningful presence. As such, a number of spatial considerations of mortality and finitude have helped problematize a much-rehearsed sociological narrative concerning the dead or death in Western societies as ‘taboo’, structurally invisible, inaudible, and distanced. As I want to argue in this paper, it is not that this narrative of a distancing of death is somehow essentially false but rather that it might veil how the spatialities surrounding death describe both an irreducible distancing and an insistent form of proximity. In short, in addressing this ‘undiscover’d country’ we are at the same time exposed to a ‘geography that touches all of us’ (Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010: 6).

The disciplinary background of work on the other side of life includes Richard Francaviglia’s reflections on ‘necrogeography’ (1971) and Canadian geographer J. Douglas Porteous’ (1987) coining of the notion of a ‘deathscape’. More recently, the latter term has been most closely associated with the work of Lily Kong. For Kong, deathscapes, such as cemeteries or memorials, need to be understood in terms of the social geographies of the worlds within which those spaces and landscapes are composed, and whose social relations they help (re)produce. In this respect, studying different funereal practices (cremation, burial, ritual exposure), memorial practices (monuments, spontaneous and domestic shrines, ritual and religious acts, photographs, online memorial spaces, etc.), or emergent therapeutic practices (e.g. death cafés), allows ‘insights into issues of racial and class segregation and hegemonic notions of gender roles’ (2012: 416).¹ Kong also stresses the value of interrogating deathscapes as contested sites that draw upon and mediate specific cultural, aesthetic and spiritual norms, shaping and staging interactions between space, ideology and memory.

This attention to the practices that constitute historically and geographically specific deathscapes has been developed in Avril Maddrell and James Sidaway’s edited collection, Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. Many of the chapters in this text draw upon the currently dominant socio-therapeutic model for thinking about bereavement practices and relations to the dead, namely the ‘continuing bonds’ approach through which the dead continue to live on and with the living (see Walter, 1996; Klass et al., 1996).² Of particular importance in this text, however, is the significance of different sites and spaces as active conditions for memory-work and mourning, whether in the rise of spontaneous memorials, or new environmentally-inflected burial practices (Gittings and Walter, 2010; Clayden et al., 2010). Similarly, in her earlier study of the Witness Cairn on the Isle of Whithorn, Maddrell reflects on the performative, material process of placing stone upon stone as a fragmentary and intensely spatialized composition of memory:

The memorial pebbles witness the continuing significance of the deceased for the living, are indicative of the desire to make an act of remembrance [and] to tie that remembrance to this particular place. (Maddrell, 2009: 685; emphasis added)

As intimated, above, the spatialities of remembrance and mourning are also phenomenologically grounded through the significance of particular objects which act to sculpt, express, signify or apprehend particular memories and losses: stones, grass, trees, flowers, shadows, light, sounds and silence. For John Wylie, for instance, one can consider the abstraction of perspectives from memorial benches to offer ways of approaching absence, love and loss (Wylie, 2009). Likewise, Cloke and Pawson argue for attention to the complex assemblages of materials, nonhumans, and place-specific agencies in the composition of different sites of memory, noting how trees such as the yew, willow or cypress carry particular ‘Christian symbologies of death as funerary symbols evoking notions of grief, mortality, and regeneration’ (Cloke and Pawson, 2008: 110; cf. Ginn, 2013).³

Across these reflections of personal loss and bereavement, the significance of particular memorial spaces reveals the insistent and ongoing proximities that shape our continuing relations with the deceased (Maddrell, 2013). But consideration of the experiences of absence, loss and finitude has also gone beyond the specific concerns with bereavement detailed above. As such, the paper now turns to consider how the kinds of mortal questions being raised by geographers encompass a much wider series of concerns and empirical horizons. For example, reflections on absence, erasure, decay and loss have included interrogations of objects (DeSilvey, 2006; Patchett and Foster, 2008), landscapes (Sidaway, 2009; Dubow, 2011; De Silvey, 2012; Ginn, 2013), ruins (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Edensor, 2005), literature (Dubow, 2007; Romanillos, 2008, 2013; Wylie, 2007), art (Harrison, forthcoming), the phenomenon of ‘missing people’ (Parr and Fyfe, 2012; Parr and Stevenson, 2013) and species extinction, vulnerable ecologies and nonhuman lives (Romanillos, 2011; Yusoff, 2012; Buller, 2014). A number of these concerns might also be usefully considered as part of a more sustained interrogation of ‘spectral geographies’ (Maddern and Adey, 2008; Matless, 2008). Whilst the above writings speak to diverse empirical contexts, and draw upon different kinds of conceptual resources, what is often at stake in these texts is a deconstruction of the habitual categories, methods and concepts through which we might address or grasp the paradoxical proximities of absence and death. In responding to the specific qualities of mortal conditions and experiences, it would seem that it is important to cultivate appropriate kinds of conceptual resources that hold on to, rather than resolve or subsume, these difficult geographies.

As I want to explore now, it is for these reasons that the writings of Jacques Derrida are such an important source in approaching these questions, even if the precise spatial considerations of his work have perhaps not been explicitly articulated. Indeed, Derrida’s work has already been germinal for a number of geographical reflections on the spaces and times of absence, loss and erasure, as well as on the kinds of representational problems in their address. Merle Patchett, for example, draws upon Derridean reflections on the ‘monstrous’ in her studies of the materialist cultural geographies of taxidermist practices. For Patchett, the figure of the monster puts into question those logics of identity, nomination, and taxonomy that shape the archive as an epistemological resource (Patchett and Foster, 2008; cf. Dixon, 2008). Referring to what she describes as the ‘necro-ornithology’ of monstrous birds, Patchett (2012) unpacks the value of attending to object-based archives, and the ways in which discarded, decaying or forgotten objects might be resurrected or performatively enrolled as witnesses to different cultural geographies. In so doing, Patchett also raises some of the methodological problems associated with the study of objects or spaces undergoing entropy or, to use the language of Derridean thought, of the difficulty of working with and responding to objects ‘under erasure’ (Patchett and Foster, 2008: 105). This entails recognizing how those entities which we posit in their fullness and plenitude are never immune from processes of internal and external decay (cf. Negarestani, 2010), nor uncontaminated by processes of fragmentation.

For Kathryn Yusoff, a number of similar concerns materialize when thinking about ecological archives in the context of the phenomenon of species loss and extinction. In considering those undisclosed losses of species that have no place in ecological heritages, Yusoff notes: ‘the absence has no mark, because that which existed and then ceased to exist did not make it into the ledgers of classification and nomenclature’ (Yusoff, 2012: 579).⁴ There is a certain blindness to absence and loss which Yusoff diagnoses at the heart of the bio-taxonomical projects of species conservation. It is a blindness constituted by the very visibility of the archive, because only those existents that are disclosed by the archive are ‘able to be lost’, precisely on account of the particular kind of ‘presence’ that their enrolment into the archive affords. These reflections raise questions about the very possibility of addressing absence, loss and death from within archives and familiar modes of representation.

A number of these concerns find echoes in Trevor Barnes’ recent Progress Review papers on the history and philosophy of geography (2008, 2009, 2010) in which he touches on notions of corporeal mortality in relation to the disciplinary archive. In these papers, the deaths of a number of geographers leads Barnes to consider the material and corporeal bases of the archives that we inherit and cultivate, their fragility and finitude, as well as the modes of writing – such as the obituary – through which the discipline constitutes itself and distributes academic value and recognition (Barnes, 2009). Across his reports, Barnes recognizes, and stresses, that ‘philosophies and ideas are embodied in the histories of the humans who make them, including their finitude’ (2008: 650). This awareness of the corporeal finitude and transience of those who compose the history and philosophy of geography leads Barnes towards a phenomenological ground from which we might better apprehend the finite compositions of geographical knowledge and experience. But it is a ground that arguably does not address the ways in which a thinking of corporeal finitude might put certain norms of phenomenological thought into question. In this respect, Barnes ends his first progress report with an appeal to the facticity of lived experience: ‘It is the history of living experience to which we should attend; that is where life, including the life of the history and philosophy of geography, lies’ (Barnes, 2008: 655). This statement may appear self-evident, but perhaps this injunction to attend to the plenitude of lived experience is itself an index of the difficulty of apprehending those experiences of loss and fragmentation that exceed the resources of phenomenological access.

In short, what we are exploring here are questions over the methodological and representational problems that arise in the geographical apprehensions of death, absence and finitude. These difficulties have been brilliantly explicated by Paul Harrison in a series of papers (2007, 2008, 2009). In particular, Harrison raises the question as to the methodological fidelity of approaches that attend to experiences of corporeal finitude, vulnerability and loss from the perspective of engaged, intentional actions. Can one attend fully to the vulnerable finitude of social existence by way of a study of lively doings and practices? How might we respond to the limits of representation and discourse in ways that do not see in those failures problems that can be simply overcome or resolved? More broadly, how might we attend to the phenomenological and experiential dimensions of finitude given its phenomenological inaccessibility? Indeed, as Simon Critchley stresses in Very Little…Almost Nothing: ‘there can be no phenomenology of death’ (1997: 26). An awareness of the impossibilities surrounding our apprehension of death is shared by thinking as diverse as Epicurean philosophy, the analytic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the phenomenological thought of Martin Heidegger (Philodemus, 2009; Wittgenstein, 2002; Heidegger, 1962). And yet, finitude is nonetheless phenomenologically inscribed, perhaps even constitutive of lived experience (see Howells, 2011). In these respects, finitude insists or persists in that paradoxical dimension articulated so lyrically by Herman Broch in The Death of Virgil: an immanent nearness and singular proximity – irremediably so – but also as far-off, invisible, impossible, always to come.

To turn to another lyrical image, we could describe this constitutive insufficiency through Maurice Blanchot’s phrase ‘the gaze of Orpheus’ (Blanchot, 1989). The Greek mythology surrounding Orpheus centres upon Orpheus’ descent into the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice. Blanchot’s phrase refers to Orpheus’ fatal turning to look at Eurydice before they had both returned to the upper world. In Blanchot’s hands, it is an image that foregrounds the dissolution and incapacity of our phenomenological and discursive perspectives to fully grasp, render visible or constitute as present ‘absence’ and ‘loss’. But at the same time, it also dramatizes a kind of proximity that circumscribes an intimate nearness – that insistent calling, desire or yearning to face the dead and the absent or speak with them. The ‘gaze of Orpheus’ names that felt impossibility of keeping one’s back turned, of forgetting, not looking, or remaining silent.

In the face of these difficulties and demands, a number of papers have argued for the value of deploying particular modes of writing – tentative, experimental, poetic, personal, reflexive or creative – as a means of attending to and coping with forms of experience, loss or absence that precisely pull and push at these limits and demands of representation. In ‘Shadows on the Path’, for example, Sidaway reflects on how ‘as it proceeds, the paper wrestles with finding an adequate voice’ (2009: 1094). In his paper on the practices of gardening, landscaping and everyday apprehensions of absent presences, Ginn (2013) offers a writing that seeks to hold on to the ‘awkwardness and reserve’ of research attending to the fragile and transient composition of memories. In their recent work on missing geographies, Hester Parr and Olivia Stevenson (2013) also draw attention to the ‘transformative potential’ of different kinds of ‘trauma stories’. This writing grapples with the anxiety of turning trauma into consumable narrative, but also affirms the hopeful, therapeutic potential of addressing traumatic experiences. Finally, Harrison (2007) considers those elliptical and fragmentary forms of communication through which our vulnerable exposure to others, our very sociality, are evidenced – nonrelational experiences that nonetheless leave their mark upon us and that incite a response. But perhaps any apprehension of death and finitude is caught in these paradoxical spaces and aporetic tensions from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Indeed, this paper argues for the value of holding on to these aporias and paradoxes (between proximity and distance, self and Other, the visible and the invisible, action and passivity), rather than seeking to overcome or resolve them.

In what follows, the paper draws together theoretical resources from sociology, philosophy and anthropology in order to explore the mortal questions surrounding mourning, burial and corporeality. The three sections below consider, respectively, the structures of communication through which we might address mourning and absence, the ambiguities surrounding the politicization of mourning and the spatial politics of dead bodies, and finally the ethical implications of addressing corporeal vulnerability. The paper concludes by reflecting on what is at stake in addressing these kinds of questions at a time when geographers are increasingly incited to filter both social and more-than-human worlds through a kind of normative vitalism.

II The work of mourning

[C]ulture itself, culture in general, is essentially, before anything, even a priori, the culture of death […] There is no culture without a cult of ancestors, a ritualization of mourning and sacrifice, institutional places and modes of burial, even if they are only for the ashes of incineration. (Derrida, 1993: 43)

As mentioned in the introduction, it is often said that in late 20th-century and early 21st-century industrial societies, people are sheltered from death and from thinking about death. Death is said to be ‘repressed’, or considered a ‘taboo’ subject (but see Walter, 2008). A particularly clear formulation of this narrative of death as sociologically and spatially ‘distanced’ can be found in Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying. There, Elias argues that ‘the sight of dying and dead people is no longer commonplace. It is easy in the normal course of life to forget death’ (1985: 8). For Elias, a consequence of this cultural ‘repression’ is that before the dying finally depart the world of the living, they have already undergone a ‘social death’ due to their exclusion and isolation within medicalized environments.⁵ Elias considers this exclusion, in classical sociological fashion, to be the result of a general cultural fear of the ‘proximity of the dying’ (1985: 9). And it generates a specific problem: the dying become lonely. ‘Never before have people died as noiselessly and hygienically as today in these [industrial, developed] societies, and never in social conditions so much fostering solitude’ (1985: 85). The consequence of these forms of exclusion is the emergence of a particular emotional state – embarrassment: ‘A peculiar embarrassment felt by the living in the presence of dying people’ (1985: 23). For Elias, this emotion derives from a discursive or representational lack: we don’t have the words to communicate with the dying. ‘They [we] often do not know what to say’ (1985: 23). By stressing the significance of this discursive insufficiency, Elias’s work reveals how questions about our apprehension of mortality or relations to death tend to be framed as a question surrounding the conditions and structures of communication, an approach continued in the later writings of Jacques Derrida and also in the work of Judith Butler.

For Elias, this discursive deficit or failure carries normative weight because it acts to further isolate the dying from compassionate care: ‘At present those close to the dying often lack the ability to give them support and comfort by proof of their affection and tenderness’ (1985: 28). In short, this discursive failure acts both as symptom and cause of the distancing and isolation of the dying, when the ethical imperative is to develop a compassionate being-with and affective proximity with the dying Other. Elias’s solution to the problem of this estrangement of the dying person from the world of the living is a hope that society will learn from the past and develop a new stock of conventional and ritualistic statements through which sympathy and empathy can be properly communicated, and that ‘might make it easier to cope with the recurrent crises in life’ (1985: 24). Rather than seeing in the failure of people to find the right words a manifestation, precisely, of the care or love for the Other, Elias considers it to be symptomatic of a narcissism through which individuals carry on forgetting death (and are thereby able to banish the idea of their own mortality). As a positive example of what he means by ‘conventional turns of phrase’ that would allow communication with the dying, Elias discusses a valedictory letter sent in 1758 by King Frederick II of Prussia to his dying sister. Elias’s argument is that, although the substance of the letter is composed of conventional courtly phrases – ‘would that Heaven might grant the wishes of your recovery that I daily send there!’ – it would nonetheless be received as a sincere expression of undiminished affection.

Frederick does indeed use conventional terms to express his feelings. But he is able to use them in such a way that the sincerity of his feelings is apparent, and we may suppose that the recipient of the letter felt this sincerity. The structure of communications was such that those to whom they were addressed could distinguish between sincere and insincere uses of the courtly phrases, while our ears no longer discern these nuances of civility. (1985: 26)

In his account of the courtly norms of communication, Elias reveals that the success of those phrases relied upon a specific performative context through which the addressee of those utterances could guarantee their meaning and their affective force. In Elias’s eyes, the above communicative act suggests a countermeasure to the patterns of isolation and distancing he diagnoses in contemporary Western society; it raises the possibility of a model of communication in which feeling can be compassionately passed on, and in which the distance between individuals can be overcome through the support of textual convention.

To return to Derrida’s writings, however, the performative logic at work in Elias’s discussion repeats a number of assumptions that are open to deconstruction (Derrida, 1984). As Derrida argues in ‘Signature, Event, Context’, the notion of a successful performative act, in which meaningful affective dispositions might be properly ‘transmitted’ between author and addressee, relies upon a metaphysics of presence and a bounded image of the space of communication. In particular, Derrida suggests that such a model systematically ignores or represses the constitutive role of absence, dispersal and death within the conditions of communication. For Derrida, absence, which at its limit is understood in terms of the dead Other, is not something that can be bridged or filled in through the deployment of language, but is itself inscribed or exposed within its very structure: ‘absence in the field of writing is of an original kind if any specificity whatsoever of the written sign is to be acknowledged’ (1984: 314). Crucially for Derrida, absence, here, is not conceived as a ‘modification’ or extension of presence, but, more fundamentally, as a radical rupture – a ‘break in presence’ (1984: 313) – manifest through the possible deaths of author or addressee, and which is announced by the very repeatability of the written material itself: ‘A writing that was not structurally legible – iterable – beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing’ (1984: 315). To take this constitutive absence ‘inscribed in the structure of the mark’ (1984: 316) seriously, and to recognize the ‘essential drifting’ (1984: 316) of communicative acts beyond the lived co-presence of intended contexts, is to realize that we cannot insure ourselves against the possibility that our words might fail to reach or touch the Other, for example by turning to new kinds of conventional discursive techniques. For Derrida, because neither the co-presence of author and addressee nor the context necessary for a successful performative can be presumed as given or guaranteed, ‘all conventional acts are exposed to failure’ (1984: 323; emphasis in original). In short, while Elias laments our discursive failure to properly communicate and be compassionately present-alongside dying Others, Derrida suggests that this insufficiency might not be simply a symptom of contemporary circumstances but an index of the unsettling force of absence inscribed within the conditions of communication through which we are able to negotiate dying and death at all.

Reflections on the discursive insufficiencies or complexities of responding to the dying Other are extended in Derrida’s later writings on ethics, friendship and mourning (Derrida, 1993, 1996, 2003; cf. Critchley, 1999). Whilst Derrida attends notably to the paradoxes of mourning the dead, rather than Elias’s concern for the experiences of the dying Other as such, his deconstructive writings question the conceptual possibility of discriminating categorically between discourses for the dead and responses to the dying, precisely because of a kind of anticipatory mourning at work in the very conditions of communication. As Derrida puts it, the name itself acts as a:

foreshadowing of mourning because it seems to me that every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity of a name that survives whoever carries that name. […] Being called, hearing oneself being named, receiving a name for the first time involves something like the knowledge of being mortal and even the feeling that one is dying. (2002: 389)

In the collection of essays and eulogies in The Work of Mourning, Derrida explicates the specific paradox he considers to be bound up with any act of mourning. For Derrida, above all we have to respect, recognize and respond to the absolute singularity of the Other whom we mourn.⁶ With this imperative, Derrida is particularly careful to not trespass over this singularity by turning to those stock, conventional tropes through which the dead might be named, accounted for and formally remembered. Further, Derrida also draws attention to the potential violence at play in any act of public mourning – the violence of speaking in their place, for them, after them. This is the risk of appropriating or obliterating the Other within discourses that might impose upon their lives beliefs and meanings that were foreign to them. At the same time, and recalling current sociological models of bereavement in terms of ‘continuing-bonds’ (see Maddrell, 2013), Derrida also highlights the risks of certain kinds of conventions of discourse and narrative as a means for achieving a ‘completed’ or ‘finished’ work of mourning. Here Derrida seeks to guard against the closure of forgetting which an apparently ‘successful’ form of mourning might present. But these cautionary and respectful approaches to the absolute singularity of the Other might lead us to that complete failure or refusal to mourn, to find the words, that is so condemned by Elias. And it is precisely this other possibility – silence – that leads Derrida to immediately posit a second imperative: one cannot remain silent, one cannot refuse to mourn. If to speak is to risk effacing the Other by way of discourses that seem to stand in their place, then to not speak is to guarantee that effacement, to obliterate the Other even more completely.

But questions about how one should mourn are often secondary to, or pre-figured by, the very possibility that one is able to mourn at all. As Judith Butler makes clear in her discussion of the ‘war on terror’ in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence:

Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a liveable life and a grievable death? (Butler, 2006: xiv–xv)

Butler’s arguments turn upon a particular understanding of the conditions that make mourning possible, and again develop an account of the kinds of communication that structure public representations and understandings of vulnerability and mortality. By considering the work of mourning as a public phenomenon, Butler is able to consider mourning in terms of a politics of speech-acts in which the ability to mourn can often amount to a claiming and affirmation of lives and deaths, identities and nationalities, that are structurally erased and de-valued by contemporary geo-political conditions. In this context, Butler suggests that ‘we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building’ (Butler, 2006: 34). Recalling Jacques Rancière’s discussions of the distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2005), for Butler:

the public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown. The limits of the sayable, the limits of what can appear, circumscribe the domain in which political speech operates and certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors. (2006: xvii)

In Butler’s discussion of the forms of mourning at work in the ‘war on terror’, the public sphere is conceived as a mechanism for establishing, among other things, whose deaths count as deaths: ‘the conditions under which a grievable life is established and maintained’ (Butler, 2006: 38). A number of geographers have developed these reflections on mourning as a political horizon by attending to the consequences of particular kinds of public mourning that subtend geographically uneven distributions of vulnerability. For example, Kris Olds, James Sidaway and Matthew Sparke (2005) argue that the kinds of mourning that took place in the Western media response to the aftermath of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 26 December 2004 need to be seen in terms of a logic of ‘uneven raciological valuing’ (2005: 475). These narratives of mourning presented anonymous and ‘disembodied nonwhite death [which contrasted] with the intimate, enduring and often personalised attention to the deaths of white people’ (2005: 475). As they argue, it is important to disclose those forms of geopolitical amnesia, or invisibility, through which certain kinds of lives and deaths are constituted as grievable. This is not a question, then, of how to go about mourning well or appropriately, but over the very possibility of mourning at all.

Similarly, Gillian Rose (2007, 2009) has provided a series of important reflections on the geographies of mourning produced in UK national newspapers after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. As she notes, a specific textual-visual practice emerged in response to these disasters in which the faces of those killed were habitually used as a means of conveying and distributing particular notions of innocence, responsibility and remembrance. Most importantly, as Rose demonstrates, the ‘work of mourning’ mediated through these visualities acted to instil particular geographical imaginations and normative conceptions of social difference. Whilst the very possibility of mourning was granted to some and not others, the textual-visual compositions also drew upon and enforced stereotypical gender roles concerning ‘feminine’ emotional lamentation and ‘masculine’ heroic sacrifice. In this respect, Rose is especially concerned about the cultivation of certain emotional responses to the images of suffering and trauma disseminated after the bombings and raises the politico-aesthetic question concerning the appropriate modes of representing loss, particularly as regards the possibility for mourning to descend into a celebratory pathos. In this light, Rose diagnosed how newspaper representations of the disaster conjured a particular kind of readership, one that was invited to only ‘feel’ the trauma in an immediate and affective register, and in such a way as to preclude more critical modes of response that would ‘read’ these representations precisely as propositions about who counts and who (should) care (Rose, 2009: 53). What is raised by Rose’s concern here is an important conceptual point surrounding the political dimensions of mourning, as it troubles the implicit presumption articulated by Butler that ‘mourning’ itself somehow carries progressive possibilities for acknowledging our shared vulnerabilities or troubling logics of individualism.

III Burial and the spatial politics of the dead

In this section I want to explore two sides to what might be described as the spatial politics of the dead. First, I want to briefly consider the ways in which the dead have been historically put to work in the service of particular cultural, social and political ends: as vehicles for the reproduction of social power and distinction; sites for the articulation of territory and property; and forces for symbolic identity at different scales (state, polis, nation, etc.).⁷ This brief longue durée perspective allows us to place some of the recent politicizations of the dead, and related mourning practices, in a broader historical context that can reveal some of the complexities and ambiguities surrounding ‘mourning’ as a political process. The second part of this section considers what happens when states do not seek to ‘use’ the dead for particular ends, but rather set out to fully silence and erase the dead precisely because their material existence testifies to state violence. If the first part of this section attends to the ‘positivities’ surrounding the mediations of the dead, then the second part attends to the multitude of negations – of state and corporate violence, armed conflict or environmental destruction – through which the dead might be understood as suppressed witnesses and potential political actors.

As noted, to study the spatial history of the dead is to become aware of the countless uses to which the dead have been put. A particularly clear example of this use-value of the dead for the sake of wider political projects can be found in Nicole Loraux’s fascinating account of Athens, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (2006). In this work Loraux provides a careful analysis of a particular kind of Athenian discourse – the funeral oration or epitaphios logos delivered at the public funerals of the war dead. One of the central claims of her work is that the epitaphios logos was a discursive practice that played a crucial role in shaping the identity and civic imaginary of Athens as a democratic polis vis-à-vis other Greek cities. Composed in a prose that was delivered in ‘lay’ public language, the oration could be seen as a democratic discourse addressed to all. Delivered by a speaker officially appointed by the city, the speech acted as a form of collective praise that helped constitute the very public, and civic values, that it was addressing: ‘From epitaphios to epitaphios, a certain idea that the city wishes to have of itself emerges’ (Loraux, 2006: 42). More broadly, the epitaphios logos as delivered by Athenians came to construct particular national imaginaries: ‘Homage to the dead and celebration of “the entire nation” went hand in hand’ (Loraux, 2006: 49).⁸

As Loraux demonstrates, Athens was distinguished from other classical war city-states in breaking with the practice of burial on the battlefield, instead repatriating the dead to the Kerameikos (Loraux, 2006: 47), after a period in which the ‘remains of the dead were exposed in the Agora’ (Loraux, 2006: 50). This placing and exposure of the dead in the central public space was paradoxically not designed to facilitate mourning. As Loraux points out, the public funeral and the practices of war with which it was bound were gendered affairs, and practices of mourning and lamentation were conceived as ‘feminine’ responses, granted only a secondary and subordinate role (Loraux, 2006: 53; cf. Roman mourning practices as discussed in Hopkins, 1985: 217–26).

Because of the personal and private bonds with the dead which mourning articulated, its repression amounted to a political procedure in which any personal relations to the dead were distanced so as to subsume individuals within broader symbolic structures. The military ‘glory’ of the dead was therefore detached from belonging to a particular citizen, family or social position, and was instead subsumed within the wider, anonymous identity of the polis. Recalling the discussions above concerning the different kinds of discursive articulations between the living and the dead, Loraux explores how the funeral practices and orations of ancient Athens tended to repress familial acts of mourning, pathos and lamentation (thrēnos), in favour of celebratory eulogies delivered as a discourse of egkōmion or praise through which a particular sense of Athenian citizenship could be affirmed: ‘in burying its dead, then, the Athenian community appropriated them forever, and […] all distinctions, individual or familial, economic or social, that might divide Athenians even in their graves [were] abolished’ (Loraux, 2006: 52).

If burial of the dead can be understood in terms of the construction of an ideal conception of the city, burials have also long been used in the articulation of territorial claims. One thinks here of those burial sites and funeral practices written about in Old Testament literatures that align with claims about spatial ownership and inheritance. As Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues, ‘the territorial potency of burial places expresses the claims of the descendants of the dead to the land in which their ancestors are materially present […] burial places themselves might function as or signal boundaries, coding the land of the living as a mortuary landscape’ (2010: 4). Classical, anthropological and archaeological literatures provide a vast catalogue of instances in which mourning the dead becomes inseparable from the entrenchment and reproduction of social difference and inequality (see Herodotus, 1968; Ariès, 1981; Loraux, 2001). As the classical scholar Keith Hopkins reflects on Roman funeral and mourning practices, there is a ‘close connection between the right to mourn and the right to inherit’ (Hopkins, 1985: 221). Examining the different kinds of burial afforded to different citizens,⁹ the emergence of ‘burial clubs’, the creation of trusts, and the complex competing claims of the living over the estates of the dead, Hopkins considers how ‘funeral rights are more elaborate when death involves the redistribution of the dead person’s wealth’ (Hopkins, 1985: 221).¹⁰ One may wish to extend this perspective, and reflect on how mourning involves the redistribution, claiming, and shaping of a wide range of different kinds of inheritance: economic certainly, but also social, cultural and political capital are appropriated and (re)produced. It is with these wider appropriations of the dead in mind that we might give pause to some of the implicit claims put forward by Butler that ‘mourning’ and experiences of loss can be taken as modes of affection that can precipitate progressive and compassionate futures (see also Yusoff, 2012: 581).

In exploring the spatial politics of the dead we also need to consider the very materiality of the dead body over which one mourns, the spaces through which, and by which, it is given or creates significance, as well as the kinds of discourses and representations that name, constitute and maintain relations with the dead. These relationships have been unpacked in a more contemporary example of the politics of the dead. In a recent article Craig Young and Duncan Light (2012) draw upon Katherine Verdery’s seminal The Political Lives of Dead Bodies to uncover the relations between space, ideology and memory deployed through funereal architecture and memorial practices in Romania. Young and Light trace the mobility and agency of the corpse of Dr Petru Groza in post-war Romania between 1958 and 1990, revealing the different kinds of state and religious appropriations of the body for particular ideological purposes, or what Verdery (1999) calls ‘dead body politics’ (cf. Jassal, 2014). The authors are particularly interested in stressing the material agency of the corpse as a site of ongoing memory work, crossing national, private, religious and public domains.¹¹ Work on these historical and geographically diverse ‘dead body politics’ demonstrates that the phenomenon of mourning inhabits an ambiguous and contested space through which the spaces of the dead intersect with plural forms of memory-work, malleable narratives and appropriations, both public and private.

Of course, as Butler reminds us, the denial or erasure of mourning can itself be understood as a political act, precisely because it discounts and silences certain kinds of lives and deaths, distancing them from the public sphere. In this context, the dead carry political force because to recognize, remember and respond to those dead whose mourning is proscribed or silenced by the state – as in the famous case of Antigone (Sophocles, 2004) – is to challenge the legitimacy of those political distributions that differentially allocate valued life and valued death. But the material existence of the dead also carries political force when their presence testifies precisely to state-sanctioned violence and atrocity. In recent history, one thinks not solely of the geopolitical invisibilities at work in the ‘war on terror’, but also of the politics surrounding the desaparecidos in Argentina (see Domanska, 2005), or the continuing projects to recognize and map atrocities committed by Franco in Spain (Tremlett, 2006; see also Preston, 2013).¹² In these contexts, the ability to mourn and attend to graves continues to be politically contested, precisely because it is to be engaged simultaneously in acts of testimony and witnessing that are bound up with the disclosing of violence and crimes of the state.

The compelling work of Eyal Weizman and others associated with the ‘Forensic Architecture’ research project has expanded the critical possibilities for undertaking research in this context, re-claiming the notion of forensics as a critical, counter-hegemonic tool for exposing different kinds of state, corporate and environmental violence (see, for example, Forensic Architecture, 2014). As the recent exhibition ‘Forensis’¹³ wonderfully demonstrates, this work involves a wide range of forensic methodologies, from formal archaeological exhumations to the developing of a critical forensic gaze in the reading of digital images and satellite photography of the surface of the earth in order to map drone strikes or environmental destruction. To draw on Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover’s (1992) biographical account of Clyde Snow – a pioneer forensic anthropologist who worked on the forensic analysis of the skull of Joseph Mengele and on the analysis of individuals murdered by the Argentine military junta – there is a testimony of the dead that can be brought to presence in criminal courts and forums of human rights law, and which the Forensic Architecture project seeks to extend.

As detailed by Weizman in his introduction to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, forensics derives from the Latin forensis, ‘pertaining to the forum’ (Weizman, 2014: 9). The critical forensics developed by the theorists, artists, filmmakers and architects of Forensic Architecture sets out to intervene in, and expand upon, the ways in which material objects, traces of violence and destruction, and other kinds of evidence might be publicly articulated in different forums to enable the ‘gathering of political collectives’ (Weizman, 2014: 9). Crucially, this critical forensics faces a number of methodological difficulties such as that of access, given that the evidence to be gathered is often located in liminal spaces such as war zones. In these contexts we are presented with ‘deathscapes’ that are not about the cultivation of memory or identity, but which refer to landscapes of negation where the material realities of death and loss are themselves erased. As such, another significant methodological difficulty presented by this research concerns ways of exposing and revealing processes of negation and destruction that are manifest often only in fragments, fractures and traces, and which require particular kinds of expertise in order to translate the ‘language of things’ into evidence.¹⁴

As Weizman puts it, the political practice of a critical forensics does not work ‘on the solid-ground of state-sponsored science but rather on weak signals, often at the threshold of visibility, pushing against the flood of obfuscating messages, of dominant narratives, fabricated noise, and attempts at denial’ (2014: 29). This work once again reminds us of the representational difficulties surrounding apprehensions of death, absence and loss, whilst stressing the environmental and humanitarian significance of exposing and re-presenting different kinds of destruction, violence and vulnerability within public forums. In the final section, below, the paper turns to a different scale – that of the body – in order to explore some of the ethical implications surrounding apprehensions of vulnerability and corporeal finitude.

IV Corporeality, finitude, ethics

… for we all reside in an unfortified city in relation to death. (Philodemus, 2009: 87)

In his classic collection of essays, Mortal Questions, the analytic philosopher Thomas Nagel opens by considering death and weighs up various logical attitudes over our relation to it. Recalling elements of Epicurean thought, Nagel posits that given the plenitude of our conscious lives, it is impossible for us to experience a limit or end as such. We live in life, and cannot jump outside of it to imagine its end. As he puts it: ‘A man’s [sic] sense of experience […] does not embody this idea of a natural limit’ (2008: 9–10). It is perhaps worth pausing here to consider the phenomenological difficulties of addressing finitude, as if our own mortal conditions are themselves at a threshold of visibility. This might prompt us to reflect on how an experience and conceptualization of finite limits can be effectively communicated given these logical difficulties. Responding to this question would be an important element in any unfolding of the task that Torsten Hägerstrand considered so important for geography: to ‘teach the lessons of finitude’ (Hägerstrand, 1976: 334).

However, Nagel’s response to this analytic conundrum is quite extraordinary – the positing of a logically indefinite supply of life, one that is only externally or arbitrarily curtailed. In this light, ‘death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods’ (Nagel, 2008: 10). It is worth stressing that, despite its analytic logic, this conception of life as an indefinite resource stands as the obliteration of any kind of existential or embodied apprehension of finitude. It configures mortality as that which befalls a homogeneously active and healthy body, rather than as a constitutively significant spatial and temporal process striating our lives, bodies and social relations. In so doing, is Nagel’s logic not also suggestive of broader cultural sensibilities towards corporeal finitude and, specifically, of the vulnerable, ageing body? Simon Critchley, for example, has discussed these sensibilities in terms of a ‘metaphysics of money or medical science’ (Critchley, 2009: xvii) which he diagnoses in those industries that set out to extend life, to hide or slow the ageing process, or which promote the joys of cultivating a healthy body.¹⁵ It is possible to read Nagel, here, precisely as the philosophical counterpart to those refrains of the biomedical and cosmetic industries that set about reconfiguring our vulnerable bodies in the hope of a longer, livelier, if not immortal life.

Experiences of decline and corporeal finitude, increasingly important within the context of ageing populations (Davies and James, 2011), can again be considered in terms of the broader paradoxical spatial tensions between proximity and distancing discussed earlier in the paper. Research into cosmetic, health and life-style industries has explored, for example, how bodily practices, technologies and representations cultivate and manipulate anxieties over ageing and decline (see Morton, forthcoming) – processes that themselves reveal the insistent impression of corporeal finitude, even if this is by way of a disavowal. At the same time, the ageing body and the traumas associated with different kinds of psychic disorganization or ‘cerebral suffering’ (Malabou, 2012; cf. Parry and Dabrowska, 2011) are also subject to forms of socio-spatial expulsion that configure those corporealities as ‘abject’ and beyond the horizon of valued, shared human experience. It is in this context that it is worth turning to Harrison’s reflections on the ways that corporeal finitude is often addressed within the social sciences.

As if mirroring the reductive and clinical nature of standard biomedical science, corporeal vulnerability more often than not appears as a problem to be solved rather than as an inherent – and inherently significant – condition of existence. (Harrison, 2008: 426)

Throughout his papers Harrison turns to those modes of phenomenological breakdown, which could perhaps be described, following Jessica Dubow (2007, 2011), in terms of a negative phenomenology: experiences of radical passivity, exhaustion, insomnia, dreamless sleep, unproductive corporeal states, and stuttering modes of speech. In these cases, the notion that one could offer a phenomenological account of these experiences is radically questioned, precisely because in these experiences the intentional subject or a reflexive consciousness is not present, or able, to provide a phenomenological articulation. The subject exhausts itself in these instances. And yet, they nonetheless precisely take place, and in that respect insistently demand a phenomenological response (on these methodological difficulties see Harrison, 2009: 988). What might it mean to consider finitude not as a problem to be solved but, in Harrison’s terms, as a ‘non-eliminable aspect of corporeal existence’ (Harrison, 2008: 423)?

One important response to this question can be found in the work of a number of thinkers for whom apprehending mortality and corporeal finitude is itself a spur for ethical behaviour, even its precondition. The writings of Emmanuel Levinas are particularly important here, for whom the phenomenological exposure to the mortal face of the Other precisely opens and conditions the ethical relation. To return again to Precarious Life, Butler considers Levinas’s ethical philosophy to offer a way of recognizing the vulnerable or precarious nature of embodied existence, and thereby of making tangible forms of sociality and belonging that are often written out of public discourse. Here, to consider corporeal vulnerability is to open ‘the question of a non-violent ethics, one that is based upon an understanding of how easily human life is annulled’ (Butler, 2006: xvii).

As already intimated, however, throughout Precarious Life Butler is sceptical that this non-violent ethics can materialize, arguing that it is problematically derailed or disavowed by the conditions of contemporary media. Butler effectively calls for a transfigured, more democratic public sphere (2006: 147) through which we might be better able to be exposed to the kinds of uneven vulnerabilities produced through US war efforts (among other things): ‘[D]ominant forms of representation can and must be disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be apprehended (2006: xviii).

The argument here is that current norms of representation do not sufficiently make visible the vulnerability of bodies, precisely because of the normative distribution or allocation of vulnerability to particular individuals and nations, and disallowing it, or rendering it invisible, in others (cf. Rose, 2014). In Butler’s terms, because of the structures of representation and address at work in the public sphere, ‘we cannot, under contemporary conditions of representation, hear the agonized cry or be compelled or commanded by the face’ (2006: 150).¹⁶ It is precisely this demand to intervene in those public conditions of representation – delimiting what can be seen and what can be said – that is explored in the Forensic Architecture project, discussed above. Forensis, in the context of that project, refers to the promise of public forums in which corporeal vulnerabilities, and the environmental vulnerabilities striating the body of the earth itself, are made visible in ways that both exceed the kinds of ‘evidence’ and expertise admissible within state-sanctioned forums and which also expose different publics to normally inaudible or invisible violences.

V Conclusion

It is with these thoughts in mind that I want to conclude by reflecting on some of the conditions of representation in the contemporary landscape of human geography. In particular, I want to finish by posing the following question: are contemporary geographical imaginations able to adequately address those difficult, if unfashionable, mortal conditions of vulnerability, decline and exposure – to those geographies on the other side of life? This is a question about the extent to which certain norms of current geographical thought allow us to grasp or apprehend the agonized face, the exposed, absent or vulnerable body, as much as it is a question about bringing different kinds of state, corporate and environmental negation within the thresholds of visibility.

A wide range of recent geographical work, often inspired by non-representational geographies, and the ‘vitalist’ writings of Gilles Deleuze, have tended to place an ontological commitment to the ‘push’ of the world (see Thrift, 2000, 2003), and an ethical affirmation of the joys of becoming and corporeal action, as a normative entry point for a plethora of different geographies. A recent paper by Tara Woodyer and Hilary Geoghegan in this journal has also stressed the epistemological value of ‘affirmative modes of critique’ (2013: 206) that can be cultivated through affects and experiences of enchantment. Their argument centres on the notion that a number of critical traditions, such as the pessimistic ‘disenchantment thesis’ of the Frankfurt School, tend to inspire feelings of impotence in the face of apparently immovable institutional structures and to thereby veil the possibilities for thinking about ways of disrupting ‘dominant assumptions about social and spatial organization’ (2013: 208). Woodyer and Geoghegan argue for an attention to different affective energies and those protean, vital forces that enable an ‘alternative power of life knowledge’ (2013: 209), one in which different kinds of enchantment help to foster ethical and political motivation. In this horizon, the researcher is tasked with ‘tuning the self to be attentive to the surprise and the positive energy which our everyday realities can afford’ (2013: 211).

If one of the problems surrounding the writings of ‘disenchantment’ characterizing certain critical traditions is the potentially enervating dispositions they might cultivate and the modes of critique they make possible, there are no doubt potential pitfalls with broader cultivations of joy and enchantment as appropriate affective typologies for addressing the world and undertaking critical human geography. More specifically, and in the context of the present paper’s concern with addressing the politics of mourning, the spatialities of the dead, experiences of corporeal vulnerability, and broader conditions of mortality, the question is whether these kinds of experience are able to appear – to be seen or heard – and thus to be recognized and given appropriate significance. Given the range of representational difficulties surrounding these different conditions of loss, absence, corporeal decline or traumatic violence, certain vitalist habits may well serve to pass over or subsume the very experiences and exposures that so significantly striate our lives at different times – and to thereby participate in their erasure. Another concern, more specifically ontological, turns upon how a normative vitalism might work to erode the status of an individual as a finite singularity by way of their sublimation within a plenum of trans- or pre-individual creative forces (see Hallward, 2006). Again, the relevant question here is not about the correctness or otherwise of this metaphysics of plenitude, but rather about the extent to which it might work to disavow, or structurally exclude, those finite conditions of existence that cannot in all seriousness be subsumed within this metaphysics.

This returns us to the importance of attending to those methodological and representational questions raised at different stages of this paper concerning the possibilities of appropriately responding to, and communicating, experiences that push and pull at the possibilities of phenomenological access, as well as to the ability of geographers to adequately witness or give voice to certain kinds of absence or negativity. In closing, I want to briefly turn to Avril Maddrell’s (2013) recent reflection on the phenomenology of absence and experiences of mourning and bereavement. In that paper she draws upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological account of the ‘not’ to explore the formative place of absence and negation within self–Other relations and in shaping everyday phenomenological experience (2013: 4). In so doing, Maddrell raises an interesting possibility, namely, a more sustained interrogation of negation and the negative, not in the sense of a return to certain kinds of critical traditions for thinking about politics (Woodyer and Geoghegan, 2013: 210) but in the sense of an attunement to the ways in which our lives are sutured and shaped, made and undone, through different kinds of negativity. To borrow a phrase from Parr and Stevenson’s work on the geographies of missing people, this can be conceived on its own terms as an affirmation of the demand of ‘dealing with difficult humanity and its geographies’ (2013: 13).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Katherine Morton and Krithika Srinivasan for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Many thanks also to the editors and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, questions and suggestions.

Notes

References

Ariès

(1981) The Hour of Our Death, trans. Weaver

. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Ashworth

(2008) The memorialization of violence and tragedy: Human trauma as heritage. In: Graham

(ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 231–244.

Barnes

(2008) History and philosophy of geography: Life and death 2005–2007. Progress in Human Geography 32(5): 650–658.

Barnes

(2009) Obituaries, war, ‘corporeal remains’, and life: History and philosophy of geography, 2007–2008. Progress in Human Geography 33(5): 693–701.

Barnes

(2010) Taking the pulse of the dead: History and philosophy of geography, 2008–2009. Progress in Human Geography 34(5): 668–677.

Blanchot

(1989) The Space of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Broch

(1995) The Death of Virgil, trans. Untermeyer

. New York: Vintage.

Brown

(2003) Hospice and the spatial paradoxes of terminal care. Environment and Planning A 35: 833–851.

Buller

(2014) Animal geographies I. Progress in Human Geography 38(2): 308–318.

10.

Butler

(2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

11.

Canetti

(1973) ‘Invisible Crowds’ and ‘The Lamenting Pack’. In: Crowds and Power. New York: Penguin Books, pp. 47–54; 121–125.

12.

Clayden

Green

Hockey

Powell

(2010) From cabbages to cadavers: Natural burial down on the farm. In: Maddrell

Sidaway

(eds) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 119–138.

13.

Cloke

Pawson

(2008) Memorial trees and treescape memories. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 107–122.

14.

Critchley

(1997) Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London: Routledge.

15.

Critchley

(1999) Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity. London: Verso.

16.

Critchley

(2009) The Book of Dead Philosophers. New York: Vintage.

17.

Crystal

(2010) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

18.

Davies

James

(2011) Geographies of Ageing: Social Processes and the Spatial Unevenness of Population Ageing. Aldershot: Ashgate.

19.

Derrida

(1984) Signature, event, context. In: Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 309–330.

20.

Derrida

(1993) Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

21.

Derrida

(1996) The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

22.

Derrida

(2002) The animal that therefore I am (more to follow). Critical Inquiry 28: 369–418.

23.

Derrida

(2003) The Work of Mourning, ed. Brault

Naas

. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

24.

DeSilvey

(2006) Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture 11(3): 317–337.

25.

DeSilvey

(2012) Making sense of transience: An anticipatory history. Cultural Geographies 19: 31–54.

26.

DeSilvey

Edensor

(2013) Reckoning with ruins. Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 465–485.

27.

Dixon

(2008) The blade and the claw: Science, art, and the creation of the lab-borne monster. Social & Cultural Geography 9(6): 671–692.

28.

Domanska

(2005) Toward the archaeontology of the dead body. Rethinking History 9(4): 389–413.

29.

Dorling

(2010) All connected? Geographies of race, death, wealth, votes and birth. Geographical Journal 176(3): 186–198.

30.

Dorling

Gunnell

(2003) Suicide: The spatial and social components of despair in Britain 1980–2000. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28: 442–460.

31.

Dubow

(2007) Case interrupted: Benjamin, Sebald, and the dialectical image. Critical Inquiry 33(4): 820–836.

32.

Dubow

(2011) Still-life, after-life, nature morte: W.G. Sebald and the demands of landscape. In: Daniels

DeLyser

Entrikin

Richardson

(eds) Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities. London: Routledge, pp. 188–197.

33.

Edensor

(2005) The ghosts of industrial ruins: Ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(6): 829–849.

34.

Elias

(1985) The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Jephcott

. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

35.

Forensic Architecture (eds) (2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

36.

Francaviglia

(1971) The cemetery as an evolving cultural landscape. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61: 501–509.

37.

Ginn

(2013) Death, absence and afterlife in the garden. Cultural Geographies 21(2): 229–245.

38.

Gittings

Walter

(2010) Rest in peace? Burial on private land. In: Maddrell

Sidaway

(eds) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 95–117.

39.

Hägerstrand

(1976) Geography and the study of the interaction between nature and society. Geoforum 7 (5–6): 329–334.

40.

Hallward

(2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Verso.

41.

Harrison

(2007) ‘How shall I say it …?’ Relating the nonrelational. Environment and Planning A 39: 590–608.

42.

Harrison

(2008) Corporeal remains: Vulnerability, proximity, and living on after the end of the world. Environment and Planning A 40: 423–445.

43.

Harrison

(2009) In the absence of practice. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 987–1009.

44.

Harrison

(forthcoming) Rachel Whiteread’s art of the immemorial. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

45.

Heidegger

(1962) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell.

46.

Herman

(2010) Death has a touch of class: Society and space in Brookwood Cemetery (1853–1903). Journal of Historical Geography 36(3): 305–314.

47.

Herodotus (1968) The Histories. New York: Penguin Books

48.

Hopkins

(1985) Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

49.

Howells

(2011) Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth Century French Thought. Cambridge: Polity Press.

50.

Jassal

(2014) Necromobilities: The multi-sited geographies of death and disposal in a mobile world. Mobilities 10(3): 486–509.

51.

Johnson

(2008) The modern cemetery: A design for life. Social and Cultural Geography 9(7): 777–790.

52.

Jones

Moon

(1993) Medical geography: Taking space seriously. Progress in Human Geography 17(4): 515–524.

53.

Jones

Gould

Duncan

(2000) Death and deprivation: An exploratory analysis of deaths in the Health and Lifestyle Survey. Social Science and Medicine 50: 1059–1079.

54.

Joyce

Stover

(1992) Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell. New York: Ballantine Books.

55.

Klass

Silverman

RPR

Nickman

(eds) (1996) Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. London: Taylor & Francis.

56.

Kong

(1999) Cemeteries and columbaria, memorials and mausoleums: Narrative and interpretation in the study of deathscapes in geography. Australian Geographical Studies 37(1): 1–10.

57.

Kong

(2012) No place, new places: Death and its rituals in urban Asia. Urban Studies 49(2): 415–433.

58.

Loraux

(2001) The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. New York: Zone Books.

59.

Loraux

(2006) The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. New York: Zone Books.

60.

McNiven

(2012) The spatialities and temporalities of pregnancy loss. Paper delivered at the RGS-IBG, Edinburgh, 2012.

61.

Maddern

Adey

(2008) Editorial: Spectro-geographies. Cultural Geographies 15: 291–295.

62.

Maddrell

(2009) A place for grief and belief: The Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland. Social & Cultural Geography 10(6): 675–693.

63.

Maddrell

(2011) Bereavement, belief and sense-making in the contemporary British landscape: Three case studies. In: Brace

Bailey

Carter

Harvey

Thomas

(eds) Emerging Geographies of Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 216–238.

64.

Maddrell

(2013) Living with the deceased: Absence, presence and absence-presence. Cultural Geographies 20(4): 501–522.

65.

Maddrell

Sidaway

(eds) (2010) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. Aldershot: Ashgate.

66.

Malabou

(2012) The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press.

67.

Matless

(2008) A geography of ghosts: The spectral landscapes of Mary Butts. Cultural Geographies 15: 335–357.

68.

Mbembe

(2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.

69.

Metzinger

(2010) Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books.

70.

Morris

(1997) Gardens ‘forever England’: Landscape, identity and the First World War British cemeteries on the Western Front. Ecumene 4(4): 410–434.

71.

Morton

(forthcoming) Emerging geographies of disciplining the ageing body: Practicing cosmetic technologies in the aesthetic clinic. Gender, Place and Culture.

72.

Murray

(2010) Laying Lazarus to rest: The place and the space of the dead in explanations of near death experiences. In: Maddrell

Sidaway

(eds) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 37–53.

73.

Nagel

(2008) Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

74.

Negarestani

(2010) Undercover softness: An introduction to the architecture and politics of decay. In: Mackay

(ed.) Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy. Falmouth: Urbanomic, pp. 379–430.

75.

Olds

Sidaway

Sparke

(2005) White death. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 475–479.

76.

Orford

Dorling

Mitchell

Shaw

Smith

(2002) Life and death of the people of London: A historical GIS of Charles Booth’s inquiry. Heath & Place 8: 25–35.

77.

Parr

Fyfe

(2012) Missing geographies. Progress in Human Geography 37(5): 615–638.

78.

Parr

Stevenson

(2013) Sophie’s story: Writing missing journeys. Cultural Geographies 21(4): 565–582.

79.

Parry

Dabrowska

(2011) Mind Over Matter: Memory, Forgetting, Brain Donation and the Search for Cures for Dementia. London: PRACTICE + THEORY.

80.

Patchett

(2012) On necro-ornithology, monstrosity and botched birds. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 20: 9–26.

81.

Patchett

Foster

(2008) Repair work: Surfacing the geographies of dead animals. Museum and Society 6(2): 98–122.

82.

Pearson

(2005) The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

83.

Philo

(2012) Troubled proximities: Asylums and cemeteries in nineteenth-century England. History of Psychiatry 23(1): 91–103.

84.

Philodemus (2009) On Death (Writings from the Greco-Roman World Number 29), trans. Henry

. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature.

85.

Porteous

(1987) Deathscape: Malcolm Lowry’s topophobic view of the city. The Canadian Geographer 31: 34–43.

86.

Preston

(2013) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. London: Harper Press.

87.

Rancière

(2005) The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum.

88.

Romanillos

(2008) ‘Outside it is snowing’: Experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Environment and Planning D 26: 795–822.

89.

Romanillos

(2011) Geography, death and finitude. Environment and Planning A 43: 2533–2553.

90.

Romanillos

(2013) Nihilism and modernity: Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s ‘Journey to the End of the Night’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Online First. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12046.

91.

Rose

(2007) Spectacle and spectres: London, 7 July 2005. New Formations 62(1): 45–59.

92.

Rose

(2009) Who cares for which dead and how? British newspaper reporting of the bombings in London, July 2005. Geoforum 40: 46–54.

93.

Rose

(2014) Negative governance: vulnerability, biopolitics and the origins of government. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39(2): 209–223.

94.

Sidaway

(2009) Shadows on the path: Negotiating geopolitics on an urban section of Britain’s South West Coast Path. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 1091–1116.

95.

Sophocles (2004) Antigone. London: Nick Hern Books.

96.

Stavrakopoulou

(2010) Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims. London: Continuum.

97.

Taylor

(2003) The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death. London: Fourth Estate.

98.

Teather

(2001) The case of the disorderly graves: Contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou. Social and Cultural Geography 2(2): 185–202.

99.

Teather

Hae

Eun

(2001) Seoul’s deathscapes: Incorporating tradition into modern time-space. Environment and Planning A 33(8): 1489–1506.

100.

Thrift

(2000) Afterwords. Environment and Planning D 18(2): 213–256.

101.

Thrift

(2003) Still life in nearly present time: The object of nature. In: Cloke

(ed.) Country Visions. London: Prentice Hall, pp. 308–331.

102.

Thucydides (1984) Pericles’ funeral speech. In: Greek Political Oratory. London: Penguin Classics, pp. 33–38.

103.

Tremlett

(2006) Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a Country’s Hidden Past. London: Faber and Faber.

104.

Verdery

(1999) The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

105.

Walter

(1996) A new model of grief: Bereavement and biography. Mortality 1: 7–25.

106.

Walter

(2008) The sociology of death. Sociology Compass 2(1): 317–336.

107.

Weizman

(2014) Introduction: Forensis. In: Forensic

Architecture

(ed.) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 9–32.

108.

Wittgenstein

(2002) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.

109.

Woodyer

Geoghegan

(2013) (Re)enchanting geography? The nature of being critical and the character of critique in human geography. Progress in Human Geography 37(2): 195–214.

110.

Wylie

(2007) The spectral geographies of W.G. Sebald. Cultural Geographies 14(2): 171–188.

111.

Wylie

(2009) Landscape, absence and the geographies of love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34(3): 275–289.

112.

Yeoh

BSA

(1999) The body after death: Place, tradition and the nation-state in Singapore. In: Teather

(ed.) Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites of Passage. London: Routledge, pp. 240–255.

113.

Young

Light

(2012) Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: Following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(1): 135–148.

114.

Yusoff

(2012) Aesthetics of loss: Biodiversity, banal violence and biotic subjects. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37(4): 578–592.