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GROTESQUE IN SCRIPTIONS: LIBERAL OPTICS AND
SPECTACLES OF THE DEAD

By

Faith Kirk

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

2009

ABSTRACT

GROTESQUE INSCRIPTIONS: LIBERAL OPTICS AND
SPECTACLES OF THE DEAD

By

Faith Kirk

Discussions of Body Worlds, the immensely popular exhibition of plasticized
human cadavers, tend to circulate around the ethical questions raised by the staging of a
spectacle that uses human bodies as the material for the creation of anatomical art. This
essay, however, seeks to consider the site of the contemporary anatomical exhibit as kind
of optic technology that reveals more about the desire to see than it reveals the “real”
human body. As a technological production that functions in the same aesthetic mode as
taxidermy, the plastinate object is a response to a desire to confront the dead body, a
desire that is expressed across time in multiple historical moments. Taxidermy and
plastination are both processes that partake of a violent politics of representation that
comes at the expense of bodies deemed expendable to a neo-colonial, neo-liberal regime
of knowledge production that is organizes and obj ectifies what Agamben calls “bare
life,” the organic material of bodies that is mobilized for the purposes of defining the
political subject in a globalized marketplace. In this essay, I trace a history of such
moments of representation, sites where cadavers were made available to the spectating
public in a variety of forms in an effort to make the claim that the State, in all these cases,
uses the dead body to manufacture a brand of spectatorship that becomes necessary to

maintain a coherent, rational subjectivity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1

BODY OF ESSAY ............................................................................. 7
Liberal Institutions and Bodily Objects ............................................. 7
Mystical Encounters with Presencing Things ..................................... 23

WORKS CITED ......... ; ..................................................................... 35

iii

INTRODUCTION

Discussions, scholarly and otherwise, of Body Worlds, the immensely popular
exhibition of plasticized human cadavers, tend to circulate around the ethical questions
raised by the staging of a spectacle that uses human bodies as the material for the creation
of anatomical art. The positions ranging between moral reprobation and fascination are
well rehearsed: questions over whether the bodies used to fashion the anatomical
sculptures were obtained legally have haunted the exhibition since its inception in 1995
and are largely responsible for a phenomenal (and highly profitable) continued interest in
the exhibit.1 The body objects that are displayed in Body Worlds are manufactured
through a process von Hagens terms “plastination” in which the fats and water in human
cadavers are replaced with silicone rubber.2 While von Hagens insists that the bodies he
uses to create what he terms “plastinates” are obtained from willing donors, many of
them culled from the exhibition itself which features an option for visitors to donate their
bodies afier death to von Hagens’ plastination institute, the fact remains that the majority
of the bodies used in Body Worlds and numerous spin-off exhibits come from China.
Among the 400 plastination laboratories in 40 countries that he operates, von Hagens
owns the largest plastination lab in Dalian, a city in the PRC that now claims plastination
as its most profitable industry.3 Religious authorities have called the plastinate bodies

“perverse”; in a frequently cited 2001 interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, pastor

 

‘ According to the Body Worlds web site, more than 28 million people have visited the exhibits, making
them the “most successful traveling exhibitions of all time”( ttp://www.bodyworlds.com
/en/exhibitions/past_exhibitions.html). With ticket prices ranging between twenty to thirty US. dollars, it is
clear that Body Worlds has become a highly lucrative enterprise.

2 For a detailed description of the plastination process, see the Body Worlds web site
(http://www.bodyworlds. com/en/plastination/method_plastination.html).

3 See David Barboza, “China Tums Out Mummified Bodies for Displays”, The New York Times, Aug. 8,
2006. Premier Exhibitions, the company responsible for the 1990’s mega-hit Titanic exhibits and now
creator of a rival anatomical display “Bodies: The Exhibition”, also operates a plastination lab in Dalian.

Ernest Pulzfurt charged von Hagens with “. . . playing with corpses like they are
dolls. . .This has nothing to do with anatomy. It is Play- Doh, and he makes it out of dead
human meat”.4 In a broadcast shortly thereafier, bioethicist Ruth Guyer claimed
anatomical exhibitions are evidence that “we have forgotten our moral obligations to the
dead”.5

Despite the long history of public exhibitions of the anatomized body, including
the public dissections by Vesalius in the anatomy theaters of the sixteenth century, many
contemporary anatomists have sought to distance themselves from von Hagens’ image
and methods, claiming that while his dissections are “technically exquisite,” the “circus
element” of the exhibit, what von Hagens has called “edutainment,” moves the aims of
Body Worlds away from the pedagogical and into the realm of fetishistic displays of the
grotesque or bizarre.6 The plastinate object is as much an artistic production as it is a
scientific model, a fact underscored by the typical sites of display for these anatomical
exhibitions that include museums of science and technology as well as a former
slaughterhouse and a former museum of erotic art.7 In 2002, von Hagens performed the
dissection of a cadaver in London for a live audience that was simultaneously broadcast
on the BBC. Publicity materials for the event included the frontispiece for Vesalius’ 1543
text De Humani Corporis F abrica, a canonical image that depicts the famed anatomist
dissecting a woman’s corpse for a crowd of spectators in an imaginary anatomy theater,

and von Hagens prefaced his dissection standing on a stage featuring a backdrop of the

 

4 National Public Radio, All Things Considered, 2001.
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyld=5553329

5 National Public Radio, “A Bioethicist Takes a Peek at ‘Body Worlds’, 2001.

6 See Charleen M. Moore and C. MacKenzie Brown, “Gunther von Hagens and Body Worlds Part I: The
Anatomist as Prosektor and Proplastiker,” The Anatomical Record (Part B: New Anat.) 2678: 8-18, 2004.
7 National Public Radio, All Things Considered, Aug. 10, 2006.

famed Rembrandt painting Anatomy of Dr. Nicolas T ulp.8 Situating his performance in
the context of two images that are highly significant in the histories of anatomy and art
(modes of analysis and representation that are mutually constitutive), von Hagens self—
consciously constructs his work as a continuation of multiple, intersecting histories of

representation: anatomy, visual culture, and theatricality.

While historically, the practice of anatomy can be said to produce the body as an
art object, many contemporary anatomists object to the sensational nature of von Hagens’
displays and consider him to have more common with RT. Barnum than with Vesalius.
The sideshow elements of Body Worlds are hard to ignore: mysteriously cordoned off
behind a black curtain labeled with a warning sign about the controversial nature of the
material on display, the highly controversial plasticized corpse of a woman who died in
the eighth month of her pregnancy lies posed on her side with her protruding belly sliced
away to reveal the plasticized fetus inside of her. Considering that the plastinate body
entitled “Reclining Pregnant Woman” is surrounded by a series of deformed fetuses
suspended in jars, this section of the exhibit begins to more closely resemble a freak show
than a lesson on human development in the womb, its purported aim. If the practice of
anatomy can be considered a discipline that works at the intersection of art and science,
the exhibition of anatomy, as a spectacle designed to draw a wide audience, becomes a
site that reframes that historical intersection in the fetshization of the grotesque body.

Visitors to the exhibits describe an encounter that is a mixture of wonder,

 

8 For a description of the public dissection in the context of the anatomy and theater in England, see Hillary
M. Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Ashgate, 2005), 198-9.
Von Hagens is also pictured in front of the Rembrandt painting on the Body Worlds web site. Von Hagens
is known for wearing a black hat similar to the one worn by Tulp, the anatomist depicted in the painting-
When asked about the hat, he has repeatedly cited the image as the referent for his self—fashioning.

fascination, and disappointment with the plastinate bodies. After admiring the
technological innovation of the plastination process, an editorial in The New York Times
proclaims that the strangest aspect of viewing the sculptures is the “utter absence of
death,” a characteristic that “blunts the visceral and emotional responses of the
audience... [because] identity—familiarity—has been shed with the flesh”.9 The
anatomical sculptures assume a variety of poses, from reproductions of classical art to
representations of athletic prowess; “wearing” the glass eyes of a taxidermy object and
lips and noses fashioned out of putty, the plastinates seem to be expressive, animated,
frozen in a liminal space between life and death, or subject and object. The Body Worlds
web site describes the anatomical sculpture as a thing that facilitates an encounter with
the “individual interior face” of a human body that is “fragile in a mechanized world,” a
moment that acquaints visitors with the “anatomic beauty inside of them”.'0 The imagery
conjured by these statements is rich; the plastinate object envisioned by the exhibit offers
the potential for immortality, the transcendence of the material, finite body figured by the
ultimate technology of preservation, and promises an encounter with an aesthetic object
that is both the self and the other in a kind of postmodern, ecstatic meditation on the

cosmos represented by the body universal. Yet, the experience that visitors to the exhibit

 

9 See Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Editorial Observer; Some Thoughts on Seeing the Polymerized Remains of
Human Cadavers,” The New York Times, Apr. 6, 2005.

'0 Notably, other exhibits of plastinate cadavers such as Bodies. . .The Exhibition and Our Body The
Universe Within deploy similar rhetoric in their mission statements. The publicity materials for Our Body
The Universe Within claim that visitors will “connect on a very personal level with these human artifacts as
they use them to better understand their own bodies” and Bodies. . .The Exhibition advertises that “you will
leave with a greater understanding of your own physical makeup and with a deeper respect for the machine
that gives you the power of life... the Exhibition will change the way you view yourself forever”. All of
these statements claim that the best way to appreciate the interior of one’s own body is through the
observation of the plastinate specimen, a body that is remarkable for its supposed authenticity and its ability
to simultaneously be an object that is unique and representative of humanity. What is most interesting to
me, for the purposes of this essay, is the claim that all of these exhibits make to facilitate transformative
encounters. See the mission statements of the exhibits on their web sites at http:// www.bodyworlds.com,
http://www.ourbodytheuniversewithincom, and http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com.

describe is very different; according to spectators, Body Worlds offers an encounter with
technology and the politics of representation rather than a philosophical or spiritual
encounter with death.

One can trace a multitude of histories that inform Body Worlds and similar
exhibits: the spectacle of public dissections in the early modern anatomy theater, the
complex history of anatomy, a conjoined discourse of art and science, the history of the
museum, an institution that is as much indebted to the freak show and the circus as it is to
liberal notions of public education, and the display of various forms of bodily effigy, such
as the wax figure, the mannequin, and the taxiderrnic object. This list of histories offers a
number of compelling potential paths of exploration in tracing the genealogy of Body
Worlds. One might be tempted to simply pick any of these historical threads and follow it
in the hopes that it will lead to something resembling an explanation. I hesitate to embark
on such an investigation though, because while such a project certainly has the potential
to reveal a set of shared interests between historical modes of bodily display and
visuality, it should come as no surprise to anyone to suggest that Body Worlds is yet
another spectacle of the fragmented, the photographic, or the grotesque body, and as
such, is a sensationalized experience that defines and naturalizes the potent fantasy of the
“body universal”.

Read another way, the list is also a history of fascination with the body exposed,
marked as criminal, deformed, rendered grotesque, dismembered, and reified. Tracing the
history of fascination is a somewhat different project than a history of display, although
the two concepts are clearly intimately linked. The history of corporeal display always

implicitly poses questions about “who”: who is objectified in the regime of looking, who

gets sacrificed to the project of exposure that is under girded by the desire to ‘see the real
thing"? While these ethical questions should be asked and need to be asked, this essay
seeks to pose another set of questions: why are spectators continually drawn to spectacles
of the body turned object? What is the promise of such exhibits and why do visitors of
Body Worlds express dissatisfaction in the anatomical sculpture? In other words, if the
exhibit fails to facilitate a satisfying encounter with death, why does it fail? I do not wish
to approach these questions through a psychoanalytic framework in order, for instance, to
trace a history of a subconscious drive toward death. Rather, I want to consider Body
Worlds as kind of optic technology that reveals more about the desire to see than it
reveals the “real” human body. Plastination is a process of reification (literally and
figuratively) that manufactures a particular way of seeing or a specific kind of
spectatorial gaze of the bodily interior. As a technological production, the plastinate
object is a response to a desire to confront the dead body, a desire that is expressed across
time in multiple historical moments. If we could imagine that the glass eyes of the
plastinate object returned our gaze, a fantasy that is already implicated in the taxiderrnic

imaginary, what would a glass eye see?

Liberal Institutions and Bodily Objects
Donna Haraway defines the space of the museum as a “visual technology”
drawing a compelling parallel between modes of representation and the machinic
production of narratives. H Haraway describes the museum diorama, a display of

taxidermy animal bodies, as “meaning-machines” that are “maps of power, arrested

 

” See Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, I908-
I936.” Social Text I I (1984-1985): 20-64.

moments of social relations that in turn threaten to govern the living” (52). In her
formulation, taxidermy becomes a pivotal part of a fantastical production of knowledge
in which power, conceived of in this case as not only white and masculine, but also
specifically American, is exercised over the natural world and temporality itself. I invoke
Haraway because I am employing her conceptual framework of the museum as a site that
deploys modes of representation like taxidermy and the tableau to naturalize particular
configurations of power, namely that of the rational subject over an unruly world
populated by savages, animals, and exotic objects. Her focus on the taxidermic body as
well suggestively positions a hybrid figure at the intersection of artistic representation
and the epistemes that inform the ways all bodies are produced. Historically, the museum
became a prominent institution of middle class education in the context of nineteenth-
century liberalism, transforming the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cabinet of
curiosities, collections of random objects valued for their status as strange or fancifiil,
into a methodologically organized space where the display of artifacts is designed to
narrate an evolutionary history from primitive civilizations to an enlightened subjectivity.
If the museum is a key pedagogical site that promotes a liberal humanist epistemology,
what happens when exhibits of anatomy are displayed there? For the plastinate object to
be understood as a mechanism that presumably facilitates a transformative encounter
with the bodily interior, it must circulate within the framework of a larger visual
technology that is the museum itself.

Taxidermy, considered here both as a material and conceptual process of
reanimating the dead, relies on a paradoxical relationship to the live body. Formalized as

a scientific mode of preservation and classification of specimens by Linnaeus in the

eighteenth century, the logic of taxidermy requires that knowledge of the live body be
obtained through the collection of a multitude of dead bodies.'2 For a figure to be
taxidermic it must be fashioned out of real bodily material; the hybrid form that is created
in the process of taxidermy however, is one that highlights the process of its own
production, transforming “the real” body into an artificial production of one. As Pauline
Wakeham compellingly argues in her book Taxidermic Signs, the collection and display
of taxidermy bodies facilitates a colonial relationship to the natural world in which
knowledge is always produced at the expense of the other. Born out of an Enlightenment
episteme that assumed mastery through an empirical relationship to the world, the paired
scientific practices of taxidermy and taxonomy required the natural philosopher to collect
as many specimens as possible in an effort to exercise control over a vast empire, most of
which “exotic” and strange. The taxidermic figure, then, is born out of a violent
representational politics that is exercised on the bodies of the exotic other and is
intimately linked to the rise of science as a discursive regime that exerted the power to
define which forms of life were considered expendable to the needs of the empire.

While embalming is traditionally the process by which human cadavers are
preserved, I would argue that plastination bears a closer relationship to taxidermy. The
novelty of the plastinate figure lies in the fantasy that it appears to be frozen in space and
time, photographically suspended in a singular moment that illustrates the human body’s
capacity for strength, flexibility, or resiliency. Like the body of the taxidermy animal, this
pose renders the plastinate body perpetually available to the gaze of the spectator. The

plastinate object becomes both the reanimation of a historically contextualized image, the

 

'2 For an excellent summary of the colonial history of taxidermy, see Pauline Wakeham’s Taxidermic
Signs: Reconstructing A boriginality (U of Minnesota P, 2008).

anatomical illustration, and signifies a new method of bodily preservation that extends
the utility of the body after death. Even more significantly, taxidermy and plastination are
both processes that partake of a violent politics of representation that comes at the
expense of bodies deemed expendable to a neo-colonial, neo-liberal regime of knowledge
production that is organizes and objectifies what Agamben calls “bare life,” the organic
material of bodies that is mobilized for the purposes of defining the political subject in a
globalized marketplace.

If one considers plastination to borrow the paradoxical logic of taxidermy, then it
becomes impossible to consider the anatomical sculpture to be a “true” or “real” vision of
the body. Certainly, as Jose van Dijck observes in her analysis of the exhibit, “the objects
are manipulated with chemicals to Such an extent that they can hardly be regarded as
‘real’ bodies” (109). To claim the plastinate an “authentic” body is in some sense to
obfuscate the complex process through which a cadaver is fashioned into an art object.
As a mode of corporeal production and re-presentation, the process of plastinating flesh
seems to open up the ontological space in which it becomes difficult to distinguish
between people and things and suggests the ways that the categories of human, animal,
and object are always imbricated. A similar mode of corporeal production can be found
in the practice of making human effigies. Wax figures, mannequins, and even puppets are
unique objects. Designed to fascinate, impersonate and, in the case of wax figures, to
stage an imaginary encounter between a spectator and a celebrity or historical icon,
effigies rely on the fantasy that objects can impersonate “the real thing”. Although
spectators in the wax museum are captivated by the mannequins on display, what wax

figures really showcase is the craftsmanship responsible for manufacturing a flawless

representation of real, living bodies. The anatomical exhibit, on the other hand, inverts
the relationship between reality and artifice that is foundational to a spectacle of this kind
because the sensationalism of the exhibit lies precisely in the fantasy that the plastinate is
real, and not a simulation of real bodies. Where in the space of the wax museum, the
spectator is asked to compare the real body of a celebrity or a historical figure to the wax
figure, in the anatomical exhibit the spectator is asked to compare their own body to that
of the plastinate on display.

It is important to note that the histories of wax museums and anatomical exhibits
are deeply intertwined and firrther, that von Hagens’ concept of “edutainment” is
certainly not a twentieth-century invention, but is inherited from the shared conventions
of display that inform both traditions. Nineteenth-century wax museums like Madame
Tussaud’s famed museum in London, recognized the potential of the grotesque to attract
large crowds and typically offered displays of human dismemberment and deformity in a
separate “Chamber of Horrors” to visitors, located downstairs and cordoned off from the
more reputable display of iconic historical figures upstairs. As visitors descended into the
recesses of the museum, they passed signs warning them of the violence they were about
to witness, before entering a space designed to illicit repulsion and awe: wax exhibits
depicting medical anomalies and fetuses suspended in jars were displayed alongside
scenes of torture, decapitation, and body snatching, the infamous crime of stealing
“fresh” corpses from graveyards to be sold to anatomical labs in need of a constant
supply of cadavers that reached its heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. '3

Body snatching became just one of the stock images populating the downstairs space of

the wax museum that explicitly referenced the seedier elements of the history of
anatomical study: vivisections of live criminals, bodies at various stages of dissection,
and a collection of deformed or grotesque body parts were all common scenes in the
Chamber of Horrors. Traveling wax cabinets, such as the popular Hartkopf’s Wax
Cabinet and Anatomical Museum that toured Europe in the early twentieth century,
combined the conventions of anatomical exhibits and freak shows, offering a wax
collection of diseased body parts, cross-sections of deformed or disfigured bodies, and
fetuses, alongside wax renderings of conjoined twins, dwarves, albinos, and heads
depicting racial typologies.l4

In a study tracking the relationship between human effigies and the fashioning of
bourgeois society in the nineteenth century, Mark B. Sandberg considers the
upstairs/downstairs mode of display to be an integral part of the logic of the wax
museum, an institution that is historically linked to spectacular, public displays of
violence. As Sandberg notes, a young Marie Tussaud and her mentor Phillipe Curtius,
were famously commissioned during the French Revolution by both revolutionaries and
later the J acobins to model death masks from heads either severed by the mob or the
guillotine.15 The original death masks, including the heads of Marie Antoinette and
Louise XVI, are still on display in Madame Tussaud’s museum in London and almost
every wax museum contains what Sandberg calls an “obligatory reference to the French

Revolution,” either in the recurring figure of Marie Antoinette or in a scene of

 

'3 The Anatomy Act of 1832, passed in Britain in response to the public outcry over the illegal trade in
stolen bodies, expanded the number of cadavers that could be legally obtained from hospitals and poor.
Prior to that time, no patient could donate their body to science.

'4 Sandberg, Mark B. Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton
UP, 2003), 23.

'5 For a detailed history of Marie Tussaud and the formation of the Chamber of Horrors, see Pauline
Chapman, Madame Tussaud ’3 Chamber of Horrors: Two hundred years of crime (Constable, 1984).

ll

decapitation by guillotine, because the concept of the wax museum itself “remained a
veritable monument to death and decapitation” (22). In a particularly haunting moment,
Curtius was commissioned to make a death mask at the graveside of a recent victim to the
guillotine and literally rolled the severed head into a pool of hot wax he had poured onto
the ground. Sandberg reads this historical anecdote as one that reveals the spectacular
brand of corporeal violence that is imbricated in the representational practice of wax
modeling. Clearly, only a head that has been removed from the body could be subjected
to such treatment. As he observes, “. . .the sacrifice of life for the sake of display, finds in
this early account a most macabre realization” (48).

What interests me here is not only the link between spectacles of the grotesque in
the downstairs space of wax museum and in the anatomical exhibit, but the indexical
relationship between the cadaver and the wax figure that is embedded in both the practice
of modeling wax figurines and in the definition of the wax museum itself. The death
mask is one step removed from the traumatized body from which it is created in this
scenario, highlighting the conjoined history of the cadaver and the wax figurine. As a
process of representation, wax modeling does not seem terribly removed from the
colonial logic that gives birth to other preparations of the body such as taxidermy and
plastination. While Tussaud’s exhibitions always cite the violence of revolutionary
France, her Chamber of Horrors display gained its popularity in England in the early part
of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that could be attributed to the way that the

upstairs/downstairs conventions of display bolstered a colonial epistemology.l6 Both wax

 

‘6 Pauline Chapman writes that Madame Tussaud’s display of wax figures competed with several other
exhibits in London, including Mrs. Salmon’s Wax Works on Fleet Street and Mrs. Bullock’s ‘Beautiful
Cabinet of Wax Figures’. Tussaud’s wax display gained popularity due solely to her main attraction, the
“death heads” and the horrific narrative that accompanied them. According to Chapman, it was Tussaud’s

12

modeling and taxidermy rely on a method of collecting and preserving a multitude of
individual specimens valued for their uniqueness and at the same time, for their
contribution to a vision of the “total” human body. As modes of representation, both
processes are invested in the transfiguration of a “real” body, contextualized in a
historical moment, into an object body that is considered timeless and rendered
perpetually available to the gaze of the spectator. Each mode has undergone a
transformation from a disreputable practice that glorified a grotesque aesthetic for the
entertainment of the masses, to a distinctly middle class form of education as they have
been incorporated into the moralistic “edutainment” of the modern museum.

The spectacle of the dead body that is celebrated in the downstairs mode of
display exceeds efforts to contain it; Sandberg writes, “the affinity of the mannequin
itself to the dead body haunts the wax museum as an institution and has forever linked it,
even if only subconsciously, to the macabre” (23). The fragmented body on display
haunts, to use Sandberg’s provocative term, the pristine bodies of historical icons and
celebrities that are exhibited in the upstairs space, and like all displays of deformed or
monstrous bodies, works to normalize the supposedly “unmarked” or whole body
upstairs. The upstairs/downstairs convention of wax museums can also be considered as
indicative of the violent politics of representation that becomes necessary to uphold a
liberal humanist teleological narrative of history. The galleries upstairs at the
contemporary Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London are populated by members of
the British royal family, world leaders, pop stars, Hollywood and Bollywood celebrities,

professional athletes, and celebrated historical figures like Albert Einstein or Neil

 

recognition of the public interest in the dead body and their artifacts, such as the bloodstained shirt of
Henry IV that made her display remarkable (22-3).

13

Armstrong, a collection of cultural icons of beauty, athletic prowess, celebrity, and
wealth. The exhibits are meant to be interactive, staging fantasy scenarios such as
“Premier Night” or “A-List Party,” where visitors can “mingle” with movie stars on the
red carpet or at a Hollywood insider cocktail party, posing for pictures with their favorite
icon. The historical narrative that is realized through the display of the iconic body relies
on the downstairs presence of the criminal, obscene, or grotesque one (the bodily
“remains” and the inheritance of the violence of the mob and the State that is realized at
the historical inception of the wax museum). The fragmented body that is housed
downstairs becomes necessary in this logical schema to normalize the iconic body
upstairs and to naturalize a narrative of historical progress and development. In Said’s
famous formulation, liberal humanism is an epistemology where knowledge is produced
at the expense of the othered body; the upstairs/downstairs conventions of display
physically manifests the power dynamic inscribed on the “savage” or deviant body and
highlights the violence inherent in representations of the body “universal”.

Many commentators have remarked that the plastinate body sculptures that von
Hagens creates in Body Worlds seem strange precisely because they resemble wax
figures, a statement that becomes even more curious when we consider the historical
relationship between cadavers and wax models, or Sandberg’s claim that the macabre
figure of the corpse always “haunts” wax mannequins. There is a difference, however,
between the exhibition of so called “real” bodies and wax ones: namely, the audience’s
desire to confront the dead. While the body in pain and the cadaver are both spectacles
available in the Chamber of Horrors, visitors can safely view such violence precisely

because it is recognized as a simulation of “the real thing,” a tableau that is meant to

14

approximate an encounter with the gruesome corpse that most likely will never be
experienced in real time and space. The sensational element that draws such an
extraordinary number of visitors to Body Worlds and similar anatomical exhibitions is
presumably the desire to confront the real dead body, albeit one that is sanitized and
available for viewing in the public, socially sanctioned space of the museum.

While many visitors to Body Worlds regard the exhibit as a novelty, publicly
displaying cadavers is certainly not a contemporary phenomenon. The sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century practice of publicly dissecting the bodies of criminals in what were
called “anatomy theaters” was a spectacle that drew a wide audience, composed of not
only physicians and students of anatomy, but also from the wealthy elite of Europe.
Anatomy theaters staged explorations of the body in a historical moment before the
advent of a “disinterested” science, as Jonathan Sawday notes in his book on the
Renaissance culture of dissection, The Body Emblazoned. Functioning in a direct
relationship to the State, the focus of Early Modern public dissection was on the criminal
body, a figure considered both disposable and deserving of public condemnation through
bodily denigration. Sawday writes that the dissections performed in public anatomy
theaters can best be understood as “ritualistic expressions of often contradictory layers of
meaning, rather than scientific investigations in any modern sense”; the triumverate that
composed the staged anatomical spectacle included “the felon, the executioner, [and] the
anatomist... the technologists of the medico-criminal jurisdiction over the body,” all of
whom collaborated to uncover a paradoxical vision of a body that was both universal and

at the same time capable of revealing the roots of criminality (Sawday 63).

15

The anatomist himself was a figure of central importance in the staging of public
dissections. Acting as a guide into the unknown, the term incognito that is the body, he
assumed a role as intermediary between the spectating public and the bodily-subject, and
assumed the privileged gaze of empiricism necessary to colonize corporeal space,
mapping the body like the sixteenth century explorers who charted the unknown regions
of the globe (23-5). According to Sawday, anatomy in the early modern period emerged
as one discourse of discovery in the context of many such discourses; the body,
conceived of in mythic proportions as unknown, uncivilized space, provided one more
“object of colonial enterprise,” a site where “the alien and savage ‘other’ could be located
within the minute and hidden pores contained beyond the body-surface” (95). In this
context, public dissections can be considered a process that tamed the savage body,
resignifying the deviant corpse as a microcosm of a divine universe, a portrait of the self
and of humanity at large.

Although the anatomy theater was an ephemeral, performative event, it was also a
site of tremendous image production. The Vesalian ‘muscle-men’, a series of woodcuts
featuring flayed corpses wandering in pastoral landscapes, appeared in the canonical
1543 text De Humani Corporis F abrica and set the conventions for anatomical images
that proceeded them. Often pictured pulling their own skin aside to reveal the interior
structures of their bodies, the muscle men are impossible subjects: willing participants in
their own anatomization, they exist in a liminal space between alive and dead. The classic
anatomical image can be read as a fantastic and violent mode of representation that
suggests that the practice of anatomy is one of animating the dead corpse. Clearly,

anatomical exhibits actively encourage visitors to read the plastinate body as the classical

l6

illustration realized through technological innovation. The plastinate objects are often
placed in front of silkscreen images of the Vesalian woodcuts and numerous anatomical
images pervade the exhibition site and materials, a move that seeks to normalize the
display of cadavers by historically contextualizing the practice within the history of
anatomical science. We have seen how the plastinate body sculpture cites the taxidermic
object and the wax figure, both in its politics of representation and the conventions of its
display. By rhetorically Situating itself in the context of the images that comprise the
history of anatomy in the popular imagination, Body Worlds also channels the
paradoxical logic of the anatomy theater, claiming that the plastinate cadavers are both
unique and representative of the “body of man,” and by promising an encounter with the
other and with the self.

One can certainly read the anatomy exhibit as the most recent manifestation of a
particular gaze established in the Early Modern culture of “natural philosophy” in
multiple ways. In a postmodern rewriting of an Early Modern moment, von Hagens
assumes the place of Vesalius and the localized economy of criminal bodies that supplied
the anatomy theaters is transformed into a proliferation of cadavers exchanged in a
transnational marketplace to manufacture plastinates that stock multiple exhibits
displayed in multiple sites throughout the “developed” world. While Body Worlds and
other anatomical exhibits make claims about the body that draw on an Early Modern
paradigm, what interests me most is the way that they apprOpriate and repeat the image
production of an early moment in studies of anatomy. It is not simply that the plastinate
body sculptures take the place of the Vesalian muscle men or that von Hagens assumes

the role of Vesalius, for while these images and personas are certainly repetitions, they

l7

are repetitions with a difference, imitations or citations that play with the very concept of
an “original”. The imitations of iconographic anatomical images become not just a kind
of mimicry of the images that they refer to, but instead comprise an effort to realize a
desire that could not be realized in a moment before the technological innovation of
plastination. If the desire to see the interior and to confront the dead has always been with
us as Body Worlds claims, than the narrative that the exhibit spins is that this incarnation
of the anatomical object, the plastinate specimen, will provide the means through which a
transcendent encounter with the dead body can finally take place.

As a central figure of the exhibit, von Hagens himself appropriates and plays with
his image, often encouraging public perceptions of him as a reincarnation of Vesalius by
staging photographic portraits with his plastinate sculptures that are highly reminiscent of
the iconic portrait of the classic anatomist holding the dissected arm of a cadaver. '7 Von
Hagens also appropriates the image of the anatomist featured in Rembrandt’s famous
painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, attributing what is perceived as his eccentric
propensity to wear a black, wide brimmed hat to this iconic image of the seventeenth
century Dutch anatomist. Interestingly, von Hagens always cites the Rembrandt image
when asked about his hat, rarely referencing Nicholas Tulp’s career or his contributions
to the study of anatomy, a tendency that suggests that he is consciously engaged in a
process of re-representation, as opposed to engaged in something like an homage. Von
Hagens’ self-fashioning becomes one more instance of image production just as the
anatomical exhibit becomes one more site of representation, rather than a novelty or a

paradigm shift in the study of the body. Using the early modern anatomy theater as a

 

'7 Portraits of von Hagens posing in front of numerous plastinates are included throughout the Body Worlds
website. See http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/gunther_von_hagens/life_in_science.html.

'l8

frame, Body Worlds can be read as yet another iteration of a violent representational
politics exercised upon expendable bodies.

The nineteenth century that saw the rise of the museum as an institution of liberal
education for a burgeoning middle class, also proclaimed the dead body a site worth
seeing, with all the casually voyeuristic overtones suggested by such a phrase. The city
morgue of Paris, an attraction that drew a massive spectating public to see the unclaimed
cadavers of the poor or indigent theatrically propped up behind large glass windows
strikingly similar to those installed in the department store (another invention of the
nineteenth century), provides a particularly fascinating example”. Visual culture
historian Vanessa Schwartz makes the compelling claim in her book Spectacular
Realities, that the displays at the Parisian morgue successfully transformed an urban
public prone to violence into a public of spectators with an insatiable appetite for a
“spectacle of the real” in which the figure of the corpse plays a pivotal role (48). For
liberal humanists like Matthew Arnold, the violence of the mob posed a constant threat to
rational governance; Schwartz notes that Paris, haunted by the memory of revolutionary
mob violence, used the displays at the morgue to satiate the appetites of the ‘common
man’ for an encounter with death.

The cadavers on display at the morgue were unclaimed bodies, often fished out of
the Seine or found abandoned in some disreputable comer of Paris, and never collected

from the city by a family member to be buried. The morgue began to reveal

 

'8 For a detailed account of the vision of the “spectacular reality” offered by the city morgue in nineteenth
century Paris, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in F in-de-Siécle Paris
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1998). Schwartz claims that the city morgue drew over a million visitors per
year, according to an article in the French newspaper L ’Eclair that ran on August 29, 1892.

I9

unclaimed bodies presumably to identify them; French citizens were entreated to visit the
display windows at the morgue as part of their “civic duty”. Schwartz describes the
sensational elements that moved the display of cadavers at the city morgue firmly into
theatrical territory. A wooden barrier covered the windows of the morgue that faced the
street so that the public had to enter the building to view the bodies. Once inside,
spectators faced large glass windows covered by green velvet curtains that were drawn to
the side to display cadavers that were dressed and propped up on wooden tables, a
convention that Schwartz characterizes as closely resembling the peep show (57-9).

The morgue capitalized on newspaper “true crime” narratives, particularly those
that featured gruesome or macabre deaths. One of the most popular displays was that of a
dismembered corpse that was sent to the morgue by authorities in two packages. As the
public followed the story in the newspaper, the cadaver of the young woman was pieced
together and exhibited in the windows of the morgue for weeks; at its height, the
spectacle drew between ten and twenty thousand people a day.19 After the head of the
corpse began to decay, a replacement head was modeled in wax, an event that only
served to increase the popularity of the exhibit. For Schwartz, this incident becomes a
pivotal moment because spectators were coming to “see two spectacles in one,” the
cadaver of a murder victim and the uncanny vision of a wax head that when combined,
signaled that “reality as a spectacle was transformed into realist spectacle” (73). Once
again, the wax figure and the corpse become conjoined (in a bizarre collage, in this case),

highlighting the intersecting histories of the uncanny body in displays of the dead.

 

'9 Schwartz cites this statistic from a November 26, 1876 edition of the popular crime journal L ’A udience.

20

 

Schwartz notes that the display of unclaimed corpses in the city morgue coincided
with the increasing medicalization of death and the desacrilization of the cadaver that was
a part of that process, a narrative that continues into the contemporary site of the
anatomical exhibition where the plastinate is celebrated as a positivist vision of
technological innovation. The observation that in both cases, the moment when medical
discourse proclaims itself as integral to “modern” history or “progress” is paired with an
increased interest in viewing the real dead body is suggestive. A teleological history that
privileges a modern, rational subject advances on the “found,” unclaimed corpse in both
instances, and gains currency through the appearance of novelty and sensationalism
designed to attract a massive, spectating public. In this historical moment, encountering
the dead body was not promoted by appealing to the public’s curiosity, but instead by
appealing to their sense of civic duty. It is the collective encounter with the dead body
that defines the citizen in this case, provocatively linking a State-sanctioned definition of
the “proper” subject to the act of observing a corpse.

If Schwartz is right that the morgue staged what she terms a “spectacle of the
real” in order to provide the city with a means of channeling what was perceived as the
propensity of the masses to violence toward spectatorship, I would amend her claim
slightly to note that the spectacle of the real required, in this case, the presence of a dead
body. The Parisian morgue reveals a moment when the State recognizes the remainder in
the equation that produces a rational subject, for the desire to see the corpse (one that was
in fact subject to decay and not plasticized) betrays an irrational wish for another kind of
subjectivity, one that can be glimpsed in the experience of awe before a fascinating

object. What is the expectation of the encounter with the dead body that makes spectacles

21

of the dead resurface throughout history so persistently and command such attention from
the a spectating public? Why would the city of Paris not only sanction but promote a

collective viewing of the dead body?

Mystical Encounters with Presencing Things

It seems clear that “edutainment” for a public of spectators is not an invention of
the twentieth century, nor is the act of publicly displaying corpses in a variety of
representational modes a novelty. The culture of natural history or science museums
combines recreation with the moralizing educational practices that rose to prominence in
the nineteenth century, constructing an atavistic narrative of history that relies on the
exhibition of the dead through their artifacts or effigies. Sandberg’s suggestion that the
corpse haunts the creation and display of wax bodies can be effectively expanded here to
a claim that the spectral figure of the cadaver haunts the concept of the natural history
museum itself. As an archive of the dead that is constructed solely through objects, the
museum functions as an interactive, theatrical space that endows objects with the
capacity to retain the aura of human contact, to in fact presence, in Heidegger’s use of
that term, functioning as replacements for the dead human subjects among whom they
circulated. I will return to Heidegger’s notion of the presencing of things in a moment,
but first I want to pose the question that is implicit in the process of tracing the histories
of the anatomy theater, the wax museum, and the city morgue. Why do people desire to
confront the dead body? What does the encounter with the corpse promise for the

spectator?

22

It is not enough simply to conclude that humans continue to be drawn to
spectacles of the strange or the bizarre. To argue that witnessing the dead is a desire that
we can see repeated in history in order to advance a larger claim that “desire” constitutes
an intrinsic or essential part of human nature, is to reproduce a problematic logic that
undergirds notions of a universal “mankind” and invoke “desire” as a site that exists
outside of history or discourse to which we have access. Instead, I want to consider the
ways that the desire for a particular kind of vision is a social construct, one that is always
framed within a set of historical and political contexts. In this case, the desire to see the
dead, grotesque body should be understood in relationship to the economies imperatives
of empire that gave rise to the liberal notion of “rational man” and defined proper
subjects in contradistinction to the savage, foreign world and the bodies that inhabited it.

The historical moments that I have traced thus far are all instances in which the
production of knowledge is linked to the display of cadavers considered expendable by
the State by virtue of their status as criminal or unwanted. I want to consider the
historical moments that I have identified in this essay to be iterations of a liberal optics,
iterations that collectively have the potential to expose the interior of the body of liberal
discourse and the logic that works to perpetuate the mechanical operations of that body of
knowledge. Liberalism, as an episteme that privileges reason and a narrative of historical
progress from savage violence to enlightened subjecthood, relies on the body of the other,
a body that is put to the service of an authoritarian discourse. Liberal optics, therefore, as
a mode of representation, needs the dead body to manufacture a brand of spectatorship
that becomes necessary to maintain a coherent, rational subjectivity. The traffic in human

bodies that is so often invoked as the primary ethical problem of anatomical exhibitions

23

such as Body Worlds must be understood then, not as a derivation from a system of
“proper” medical or scientific uses of cadavers, but as a necessary to the construction of
scientific discourses of the body specifically and of liberal discourse in general.

Further, liberal notions of the rational subject are constructed in contrast to the
figure of the irrational, illiterate, or nonsensical. If the site of the museum is designed to
produce and foster a rational subject, a concern that becomes particularly prominent in
the nineteenth century, that site also incorporates and allows for the inherently irrational
elements of liberal discourse: spectacle, the object of wonder, and magic. The fact that
spectacles of the body have a tendency to attract massive crowds attests to the appeal of
such exhibits and forces us to recognize the power of not only the novel or bizarre, but of
the lifelike object (in the case of human effigies) or the corpse to promise an encounter of
wonder or awe. While the experience that the encounter with the dead body actually
delivers falls short of magical, the allure of the exhibit continues to resonate with the
spectating public.

In his philosophical meditations on death, George Bataille articulates a connection
between the spectacle of death and a state of ecstasy that can help illuminate the potential
of the encounter that is staged in the anatomical exhibit and other displays of the dead. In
Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille mourns what he characterizes as the
“discontinuous” state of humanity in which humans beings “suffer from a shared

993

nostalgia for a ‘primal continuity, advancing the notion that the collective
“contemplation of death” in a ritual sacrifice of “spectacular killing” provides a means of

returning to what he conceives of as an ancient continuity (15, 82). While observing the

dead body does not quite satisfy the requirements for what he calls a “spectacular

24

killing,” what is significant here is the way that Bataille imagines the “collective
contemplation of dea ”to facilitate a return to moment that is decidedly pre-historic or
outside of the progressive temporality of history. To determine what this moment looks
like for Bataille, we must turn to an earlier work, Inner Experience, in which he invokes
the language and practices of Christian mysticism as part of a strategic grappling with
what he considers to be an Oppressive relationship to a teleological historical model.

In an often cited passage from Inner Experience, Bataille famously describes his
practice of meditating on a photographic image of the dead body of Chinese torture
victim, executed by the process of Iingchi, or the death of a thousand cuts. He writes:

...I would gaze at the photographic image—or sometimes the memory which I have of
it—of a Chinese man who must have been tortured in my lifetime. Of this torture, I had
had in the past a series of successive representations In the end the patient writhed, his
chest flayed, arms and legs cut off at the elbows and at the knees. His hair standing on
end, hideous, haggard, striped with blood, beautiful as a wasp.

I write “beautiful”!... something escapes me, flees from me, fear robs me of
myself and, as if I had wanted to stare at the sun, my eyes rebel (119—20).

Bataille’s description of his repeated encounter with the flayed corpse, both in the
photograph and his memory, decontexualizes the specificity of the image, rendering the
Chinese subject of the photograph a representation of a body that is both the other and the
self. He professes that his return to this image of spectacular violence and death “robs me
of myself” and affects a kind of temporary blindness akin to staring at the sun. His
compulsion to continue to stare at the corpse is both illicit and transformative because the
excessive and grotesque nature of the image that he describes has the capacity to dissolve
the self.

Bataille’s critics, most notably Sartre, castigated him for denying history and

25

deploying obfuscatory, mystical rhetoric to explain intrinsic desires or to locate a “true”
site outside of history from which to speak.20 To deny the validity of Bataille’s project
entirely, however, ignores what is remarkable about his thought experiments. Bataille
does not simply see the photographic image and return to it unintentionally in memory.
Instead, his meditation on the image is intentional, systematic, and reflective, signaling
his desire for an epistemic transformation that he believed could be attained by training
his gaze upon an object of wonder, namely the mutilated, Chinese corpse. In his study of
the relationship between the Chinese body in pain and Western conceptions of modernity,
Eric Hayot characterizes Bataille’s relationship to the photograph to be one of strategic
misreading in which he removes the image from its “relation to the political or historical
facts of state-sponsored violence... [and] elevates the victim into a theological figure for
a world beyond subjectivity a world without self-protection or even selves at all” (226).
In his attempt to deny the photographic status of the image, Bataille betrays a “violent
disregard for the difference between a picture of something and the thing itself,” and in so
doing, rhetorically constructs a radical continuity, to use Bataille’s term, between the
subject and an object, which significantly in this case, is a corpse (228). Hayot suggests
that the image that Bataille cites becomes legendary precisely through its association with
the prominent French philosopher; while the image was originally reproduced as part of a
postcard series that was circulated in both China and France in the early twentieth
century, the photograph is mentioned throughout Bataille’s work and was finally printed
in his 1961 text Tears of Eros, a fact that makes Bataille himself integrally connected to

the reproduction and continued circulation of the image (219-221). By appropriating and

 

20 For a detailed reading of Sartre’s critique of Bataille, see Amy Hollywood’s book Sensible Ecstasy:
Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002), 25-88.

26

incorporating the image into his own work, Bataille lifts it from the political specificity of
its production and circulation and invests it with another purpose that denies not only its
cultural and political context but also its very status as a photographic object.

Bataille denies the ontological status of the photograph as an object in an effort to
confront the “real” dead body that the image signifies implying that for him, the corpse is
an object of wonder and not the photographic body. It is worth noting, however, that the
particular corpse that Bataille imbues with the potential to transform his gaze could only
arrive in the form of the photographic image that arrests and records a singular moment
in history. The photographic body is inherently an objectified one; further, as Hayot
observes, the image was proliferated and circulated as a specific kind of commodity, the
postcard, intended for the gaze of the tourist or outsider. If the original body that is the
subject of the photograph was clearly marked criminal and executed in a particularly
spectacular form of state-sanctioned violence, the reproduced and circulated photographic
image of that body is also firmly rooted in a national discourse about Chinese cruelty. In
this instance, Bataille’s transcendent figure of death is a thoroughly reified body that
continues to circulate as a commodity within academic discourse.

Bataille’s interest in repeatedly engaging with the image of the corpse suggests
that for him, ways of seeing are intimately linked with ways of knowing. In her book
Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Diflerence, and the Demands of History, Amy
Hollywood reads Bataille’s meditation on the flayed corpse of an executed man as a
traumatic response to the pervasive violence of World War 11. She writes that his
proclivity to return to the site of the photographic image coincides with another incidence

of traumatic repetition that is similarly rooted in his fascination with mysticism. In the

27

opening passage of his text Guilty, the first of three volumes that comprise the
Aetheological Summa, Bataille describes the difficulty he has reading and writing in the
context of wartime violence. In the midst of his confusion, he is drawn to the work of the
thirteenth century mystic, Angela of Foligno, specifically her Book of Visions, in which
she describes reaching a state of ecstatic anguish after meditating on an imagined image
of pieces of Christ’s flesh that were driven into the wood of the cross during his
crucifixion. Hollywood writes that Bataille’s response to Foligno’s text is to copy it out,
word for word, in an attempt to replicate her dissolution into “nothingness,” a site of
irrational, ecstatic transcendence before a “divine object” (70). She understands his
practice of meditation on the image of the flayed body as a reinterpretation of the
relationship between the mystic and an object of wonder, linking the commodified image
of the dead body to a definition of what constitutes a magical object.

Hollywood reads Bataille’s fascination with the mystical as a response to the
violence of history, rather than an escape from it. While the photographic image of the
corpse that bears the marks of an almost unthinkable pain in is transformed in some sense
to a universal body for Bataille, it is always described as a specifically Chinese body, a
fact that Hayot also underscores in his interpretation of Bataille’s deliberate
“misreading”. For Hollywood, Bataille’s meditations are a “traumatic response to the
ethical call of the other, those suffering violently throughout Europe and the world” (5 7).
His interest in the practices of Christian mystics reflects his desire, in her reading, to
demarcate a site of “alternative community building” that invests epistemologies that lie
outside of the liberal framework, like magic or spirituality, with the power to create

radical unity with the other through the dissolution of the self (62). If the purpose of

28

liberal humanism is to fashion subjects, perhaps we could consider Bataille’s investment
in the dead body, not purely as an image but as a magical object, to be an attempt to
reject occupying a legible position as a subject of the State, particularly in a historical
moment when to be a subject meant to accept a role as complicit in the mass violence of
wartime France.

Bataille’s description of his experiments with the practices of Christian mysticism
in order to reach a state of transcendence articulates something akin to the desire for
spiritual communion with the human body that is promised in the rhetoric of Body
Worlds and similar exhibits. According to the Body Worlds website, the mission of the
exhibitions is to reacquaint visitors with the “naturalness of their bodies” and the
“anatomical beauty inside of them”; von Hagens claims that plastinate bodies are superior
to models because “the authenticity of the specimens. . .is fascinating and enables the
observer to experience the marvel of the real human body” and what is termed throughout
the exhibit as the individual “interior face” of the plastinates (Body Worlds). Von Hagens
presumes that the plastinate body, an art object that is fashioned primarily out of Chinese
bodies, facilitates an encounter with the self rather than with the other. While the
plastinate body derives its “authenticity” from its specificity, the Chineseness of that
figure is effaced in a rhetorical move to render the object an individual example of the
“real human” or the so-called body of man. The racial specificity of the bodies on display
haunts the exhibit in the form of a continued campaign of bad publicity, constituting the
Chinese cadaver as a spectral figure that is always present at the site of the exhibit and in
the ethical debate that continues to surface with each subsequent manifestation of the

plastinate cadaver.

29

One could consider the exhibit to be a perversely literal realization of Bataille’s
desire to see beyond the photograph and to commune with the flayed corpse of a Chinese
man. While this reading seems reductive, it does not seem untenable to claim that
Bataille’s meditations are but one of the many historical moments the exhibit cites. A
particularly interesting connective thread might be to consider the ways that both Bataille
and von Hagens employ mimicry as a means of altering their relationship to history and
temporality. Bataille’s impulse to copy the words of the mystic Angela of F oligno reveals
the necessity of repetition to his methodology of reinterpreting a mystical relationship to
time and space. Von Hagens’ plastinates, on the other hand, are reproductions of early
modern anatomical illustrations meant to provide an opportunity for the spectator to
“marvel” at the “real human body”. Jose van Dijck considers the plastinates to be
“imitations of representations, executed in modified organic material... the ‘real’ body
plastinate imitates a piece of art—Vesalius’s drawing—object and representation seem to
fuse in the sculpted body” (114-115). For her, the anatomical sculptures are part of a
process of image making that is evacuated of meaning, part of a flurry of postmodern
representations that celebrate the means of their own production. I would add that the
plastinate figure not only highlights von Hagens’ technological innovation, but that its
repackaging of the “original” image from which it derives is what normalizes its mode of
production and endows it with value as a commodity in a global market.

While the plastinate object, then, falls short of the promise of Bataille’s mystical
communion with the figure of the corpse, rhetorically it functions similarly as an object
of wonder. Visitors are meant to “marvel” at the spectacle of reality that the exhibit

offers, both of the real human body and the technological innovation responsible for

30

reclaiming the cadaver from the forces of decomposition and rendering the body an
object available for contemplation. Museums invest objects with the capacity to represent
or stand in for history, reassigning their use value and defining them as artifacts. What
happens to the artifact, or representative object, though, when it is fashioned out of
human material? If there is a slippage between the ontological positions of human and
object, Heidegger’s conception of “the thing” may serve to illuminate this space.
Heidegger imagines that things can bridge the distance between humans and the
phenomenological world, a distance he attributes to the rise of science and the Kantian
figure of Enlightened Man. For him, the objects that compose the “everydayness” of
Being (part of the fundamental ontology of Da-sein that he elaborates in Being and Time)
are productions of the totalizing logic of the technologies of the modern world: his
references to these productions range from the radio to film to the atomic bomb. While
the technology of film, for instance, seems to erase the distance between spectator and
image, Heidegger suggests that this effect should more accurately be described as
creating a “uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near” becoming part of an
“unearthly” distancelessness (166). His interest in demarcating an ontological category of
things comes out of a desire to breach the distanceless quality of modern living and return
to a moment of responding and recalling, rather than explaining, to perceive neamess in
the material world (181).

Heidegger’s language becomes increasingly obfuscatory as he proceeds through
his argument because his conceptualization of “the thing” rests on his notion that it lies
beyond the explanatory function of language and can only responded to or encountered.

Like Bataille’s turn toward the language and practices of the mystic, Heidegger wants to

31

locate a site of wonder that can not be subordinated to a reasonable language, but instead
requires a lexicon that could be considered inventive or nonsensical. For him, things
seem to have an essential nature, a quality that allows them to “stand forth” or to
“presence” (168, 174). To elucidate this claim, he interprets the qualities of a relatively
ordinary object, the jug, as performative. The jug performs a kind of work, standing on its
own and presenting itself as a container to be filled and poured out. While the object is
man-made, Heidegger argues that “the vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material
of which it consists, but in the void that it holds” and further, that “the jug’s jug-character
consists in the poured gift of the pouring out” (169, 172). To be considered a thing, the
object must have a usefulness that is performed in a singular moment; the jug always
presents the possibility of pouring and waits to fulfill its purpose in the world. Things are
best understood in Heidegger as a site of congruence, a space where the “the fourfold”
elements, earth, sky, mortals, and divinities, merge (174). Here, the thing occupies a
sacred, mysterious location, existing as always-already part of the fourfold. “Thingness”
is an ontological category that is inexplicable, yet recognizable as part of an event—the
offering of the gift.

The type of encounter that Heidegger’s performative thing facilitates is what most
interests me, particularly in the context of the museum, where objects are removed from
their ordinary purpose and defined as either exemplary specimens of a category of objects
or as stand-ins for people or civilizations that are worthy of examination. The plastinate
object is a reiteration, a repetition, of an image that as a taxidermic figure is meant to
arrest time; placed in the space of the museum, objects and bodies are endowed with a

magical or spiritual quality that can engage with the spectator. The disappointment

32

visitors express upon confronting the plastinate body, however, should not be dismissed
as a sign that the display fails to facilitate an encounter that is potentially available. The
anatomical exhibit, like all spectacles of the dead, fails because the magical experience
that is associated with the dead body is a fantasy created by the very liberal discourse that
constructs and privileges a certain kind of live body. Visitors to Body Worlds do not find
a version of the presencing thing that the exhibit promises, but instead are confronted
with the eerie distancelessness of the body turned object that Heidegger describes as
symptomatic of the modern subject’s relationship to the world. As such, the transcendent
encounter with the dead is an empty fantasy at the center of liberalism that can never be
realized.

If the epistemology that produces proper liberal subjects is precisely what creates
the irrational, savage body that lies outside the bounds of the State, the empirical
relationship to objects privileged by liberal discourse requires the production of a
contrasting kind of knowledge, a site of nonsense, magic, and mysticism. Recourse to the
opaque language of religious mysticism may provide a site of potential resistance to an
oppressive relationship to history or inscription for Bataille and Heidegger. For
contemporary iterations of anatomical spectacles, however, such language merely
provides a rhetorical cover for a mode of representation that recycles cadavers to produce
a commodity that is marketed as novel, educational, and at the same time, magical. The
desire to confront the dead remains in this instance, one more iteration of an optics that
does not reveal the “truth” of the interior, but instead, works to illuminate the empty

center of liberal fantasies of the body, a plastinate mannequin with glass eyes that

33

promises to meet our gaze with the vision of the seer, yet in reality, always confronts us

in its blindness.

34

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1986.

---. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.

 

Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies.
Mission of the Exhibitions. 18 November 2009.
<http://www.bodeords.com/en.html>

Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New
York City, 1908-1936.” Social Text 11 (1984-1985): 20-64.

Hayot, Eric. The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modemitv, and Chinese Pain.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetm, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demgnds of
Histog. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

Sandberg, Mark. LivingPictures, Missingjersons: Mannequins, Museums, and
Modernity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection aid the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Earlv Mass Culture in F in-de-Siecle Paris.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Van Dijck, Jose. “Bodyworlds: The Art of Plastinated Cadavers.” Configurations 9
(2001): 99-126.

 

35

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