The Politics of the Dead Body

Why have our political arrangements become dependent on the accumulation of dead bodies? How can our responses to the dead body reconstitute performance philosophy and political praxis in the present? Performance Philosophy’s special section on ‘the politics of the dead body’ considers how untimely, preventable, and politically induced deaths around the world inform ongoing struggles for collective liberation and care. The five essays collected in this special issue excavate what it means to seek solidarity with the dead to bring about radical change. Remembering bodies subjected to forms of lethal violence seeking to erase them, even post-mortem, these essays refuse the dominant economies of power through which the value of some comes to depend on the normalized devaluation of others.