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Derrida Beast and Sovereign 2 habeas corpus

habeas corpse / habeas corpus 

There is a habeas corpse--there are literary remains

He does not go to Rousseau, as he could have.

Derrida says here is no habeas corpus in B & S Vol 2.

Rousseau cathected to that process; Benjamin doing that same thing all

over Europe.

skeletal fragments of Middleton into a textual corpse

Derrida collapses the book in the bios through the phantasm. Beast and SOvreign 2, 129-133; 148-49

Dying alive, swallowed alive, buried alive apply both to RC and to the book (133) and to the narrative (132).

Dying a living death being buried or swallowed up alive, is indeed, for Robinson, to be delivered over, in his body, defenseless, to the other (138)

In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe. . Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. (130)

The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and het threat of finitude, this alliance of the living and the dead. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neiher life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130)

Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)

Then Derrida wants to wake from this reading as reanimation psycho-anthropology of cultures . . present modernity of Greco-Abrahamic Europe, like ours,. . wonder what is happening to us that is very specific . . . in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family and / or the State, of the so-called dead boy, what we call a corpse.,. . . not just in the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying dead (132)

Coming finally now to the autoimmune double binds that constitute the only two choices left to us today to respond to the fantasy of dying alive: inhumation and cremation. This is first, and again, a problem of sovereignty, Habeas corpus [Derrida doesn’t note that the journal pages missing in RC]. if one extends a little the idiom and the juridical law that binds this concept and this law to England, habeas corpus [see Agamben Homo Sacer on Habeas corpus as an extension of biopolitics; Derrida also uses the “zone” metaphor in B and S vol 2] accords a sort of proprietorial sovereignty over one’s own living body. I have the property of my own body proper, that’s the habeas corpus poss as to birth, conception, birth control, medicine, experimentation, organ transplants, etc [in other words, what Foucault calls biopolitics], to limit myself to the treatment of death. I shall not even speak of the specific problems of autosopy, DNA research , etc. I shall limit myself to the decision, the choice, the alternative between bury and cremate, and its relation to the fantasy of the living dead. [Derrida doesn’tntote that the canniblas both bury and cremate the uneaten remains of their dead prisoners. The cannibals are both raw and cooked, to recall Levi-Strauss.]

Then he gets into the way the State is involved, there’s always a testament or will [or a living will]. And he says that there is no such thing as habeas corpus or a corpse.

A dead person is one who cannot him or himself put into operation any decision concerning the future of his or her corpse. The dead person no longer has the corpse at his or her disposal, there is no longer any habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, at least, is not a habeas corpse, supposing there ever were such a thing. Habeas corpus concerns the living body and not the corpse. Supposing, I repeat, that there ever were such a habeas corpus for the living body. Because you can guess that I believe that this habeas corpus never existed and is a legal emergence, however important it may be, designates merely a way of taking into account or managing the effects of heteronomy and an irreducible non habeas corpus, And the non habeas corpus at the moment of death, shows up the truth of this non habeas corpus during the lifetime of said corpus. 144

So Derrida is wrong on the concept—it limits the State; it checks the sovereign. Protects the citizen from the state. Or the subject. Plus corpse is required for a murder charge. Missing person. Then can be presumed dead.

Instead of starting with a fantasmatics “the fantasy of dying a living death” [a psycho-anthropological point of view] 144 leading to apoertics of inhumation ad cremation, we can start with a living corpse. Habeas corpse is the literary remains. Robinson C’s anxiety / fantasy is shared by Rousseau only in relation to the fate of his works. Rousseau stopping writing for publication. So Derrida too quickly invokes inheritance as a metaphor for textual transmission, or he boxes up what he could have unfoled but simly did not.

Different account of sovreihnty follows than he has or than Agamben has. Habeas corpus—pun on corpus.

In the jewish community of Algeria, where people are buried, of

course, with no coffin, straight int the ground in the shroud , ,  to

make sure ice is not burying someone living, one plugs all the

orifices and lays out the corpse on cold titles long enough fir

stiffening, rigor mortis, to confirm beyond all doubt the legal or

medical certification of death that in the end one does not absolutely

trust. 145

Rousseau's anxeity has exactly to do with trust, especially related to

the way his name can be be attached to his body doubles.We have long known that the polis, the city, the law of the city,

politics are never constituted, in the history of this thing, the

polis and politics, without a central dmnistation of funerals. .

Bascially, when Robinson is afraid of being buried or swallowed alive,

he less afriad of dying than of dying without being buried without the

social rite whereby we bury the departed while keeping them. he is

afardi of the pre-social and pre-institutional savagery that would

have him die without a funeral, of whatever sort. he is farid of dying

like  a beast, basically, if the beast is indeed. .  as Heidegger

supposes, a living being that dies without a funeral and without

ourning. 145

connect not trusting the certificate back to Specters of Marx--but

then add Afterlife--hte document proves she's dead!

|Rilke Notebooks of Laura Briggs story about paper in dead father's wallet read and burned by narrator |

| |Rainer Maria Rilke Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs

A fictional autobiography.

story about paper in dead father's wallet read and burned by narrator.

It is possible that I now know something that he [his father] did fear. Let me say how I arrived at this assumption. Well inside his wallet was a sheet of paper, folded long since, brittle and broken along the creases. I read it before I burned it. It was written in his finest hand, firmly and evenly; but I perceived right away that it was only a copy.

‘Three hours before his death,’ it began. It was about Christian IV. Naturally, I cannot reproduce the content word for word. Three hours before his death, he desired to get up. . . . But this was really of no consequence at al. The moment the King found that they understood what he was saying, he opened wide his right eye, which he still had, and put the whole expression of his features into that one word his tongue had been forming for hours, the one thing that still existed: ‘Doeden [Death],’ he said, ‘doeden [death].’ [sort of like “rosebud” in Citizen Kane]

That was all that was written on the sheet of paper. I read it several times before I burned it. And I recalled that my father had suffered greatly at the last. That was what they had told me.

104-05

I now understand very well, by the way, that a man will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dying hour. It need not be one especially chosen; they all have something well nigh distinctive about them. Can we not imagine someone copying out, let us say, the manner of Felix Arver’s death? . . . He became perfectly lucid, and explained to her that the word was ‘corridor’ [not ‘collidor’]. Then he died. 107-08

Bibliotheque Nationale [16]

I am sitting here reading a poet. There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Why are they not always like this? You can go up to one and touch him lightly: he feels nothing. And if you happen to jostle against the next man as you get up, and apologize, he nods in the direction of your voice, with his face turned towards you but not seeing you, and his hair is like the hair of someone sleeping. How pleasant that is. What good fortune. 25

Bothered in Paris by what he calls ”untouchables. . . not merely beggars; no . . . one must make distinctions. They are human refuse, the husks of me spat out by fate. Moist with the spittle of fate, they cling to a wall, a lamp-post, a Morris column, or they dribble slowly down the street, leaving a dark, dirty trail behind them,” the narrator says. They keep coming up to him and bothering even though he pretends not to notice them and doesn’t understand them.

“What on earth did that old woman want of me, who had crept out of some hole carrying a bedside-table drawer with a few buttons and needles rolling about in it? . . . And what possesses that little grey woman to stand beside me for a full quarter of an hour in front of a shop window, showing me some long old pencil thrust out infinitely slowly from her sorry, clenched hands? I affected to be studying the window display and to have noticed nothing. But she knew that I had seen her, she knew that I that was standing there wondering what she was doing. For I was perfectly aware that it wasn’t about the pencil: I sensed that it was a signal, a sign for the initiated, a sign the untouchables recognize; I felt intuitively that she was prompting me to go somewhere or do something. And the strangest thing of all was that I could not shake off the feeling that there was some kind of agreement between us, that the signal was part of an assignation, and that essentially I ought to have been expecting the scene to occur. That was two weeks ago. Now, however, hardly a day goes by without some similar encounter, not only at dusk: in broad daylight a little man or an old woman will suddenly appear, nod, show me something and disappear again, as though all that was needed had now been attended to. It is possible one day they will even venture as far as my room; they no doubt know where I live, and they’ll have ways of getting past the concierge.”

26-27

But here, my dears, I am safe from you. One needs a special card to gain access to the reading room. I do have a card, and with it an advantage over you. I walk the streets somewhat warily, as maybe imagined, but at length there I stand, at a glass door, open it as if I were at home, show my card at the next door (just as you show me your things, but with the difference that here they understand and know what I mean)—and then among these books, beyond your reach as though I were dead, and sit here reading a poet. 27

The narrator is homeless

And to think that I too might have become such a poet if I had been able to live somewhere, anywhere on earth, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one looks after. I would have required only one room (they sunny room under the gable). There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-colored leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written. I would have written a great deal, for I have had a great many thoughts and memories of a great many people. But things turned out differently, and God no doubt knows why. My old furniture is rotting in a bard where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dead God, I don’t have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes. 28

For some time yet, I shall be able to write all these things down or say them. But a day will come when my hand will be far away from me, and, when I command it to write, the words it writes will be ones I do not intend. . . .But this time it is I who shall be written. I am the impression that will be transformed. 34-35

Intro p. xx: a vogue for writing the ‘papers’ of fictional characters was observable around the turn of the century in other writers Rilke was probably reading, from Hamsun and Andre Gide to Ricarda Huch and Robert Walser). COmares the narrator to the character in A rebours.

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