Psychoanalysis and the Corpse

SUSAN ZIMMERMAN

THEORYassumes that in "recovering" the past we

recast it so as to collapse the temporal distinctions between past,
present, and futnre. The concept of chronology is itself a constrnction that falters under scrutiny: in the practice of psychoanalysis,
this is hoth a working assumption and a felt experience. For the
analysand, the past is reconstructed as an exercise in the future anterior, that is, the hermeneutic act retrospectively alters the future
of the past, conjoining it reciprocally and unsequentially to the
present. 1 From a poststructuralist perspective, language itself is
slippery, precluding the possibility that "reality," however it may
he fantasized, can he captured in temporally fixed and unitary representations. In hoth its therapeutic practices and critical applications, then, psychoanalytical theory negotiates the multilayered,
protean dimensions of time and language, resistingpartially and
imperfectly to be surethe categorical boundaries of the symbolic
order.
My own recent book, conducted in accordance with these assumptions, focused on representations of the corpse in the religious discourse of medieval and early modern England, and on
"impersonations" of the corpse on the English puhlic stage.^ I
chose to study the corpse because of its visible, material challenge,
in any epoch, to concepts of unitary fixity. If the hody itself can be
said to serve as hermeneutic matrix for the subject's construction
of borders (outer and inner, visible and invisible, determinant and
indeterminate), then the putrefying corpse constitutes a direct and
apprehensible challenge to such constructions. As an entity that
slips hetween categorical signifiers, the putrefying corpse represents the ultimate border problem.
What I would like to do here is explore the status of the corpse
in early modern Christianity in terms of Julia Kristeva's theory of
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ahjectiona linkage that heretofore I have considered only hriefly.

I will end with a speculation ahout how Kristeva's reconfiguration
of the Freudian death-driveand in particular her triangulation of
sex, leprosy, and deathresonates tellingly with the indeterminate
ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva addresses the signification of the
corpse as part of a larger speculation concerning pre-symholic, "semiotic" experience in the development of the suhject.^ Kristeva's revisionist project has a double action: in making her case for the hiopsychical forces at work in the infant prior to Lacan's Imaginary, or
mirror stage, Kristeva simultaneously collapses the hinaries in
Freud's discussion of the death drive (organic/inorganic, animate/
inanimate).* As I see it, Kristeva's venture into the "semiotic" is an
attempt to reconfigure the properties and potentialities of the material hody, or, stated more hroadly, to address the conundrum of materiality itself. I would suggest that a similar conundrum is inscribed
in the anthropomorphism of medieval Christianity, and that the Reformation condemnation of the material idol (and hy direct and indirect inference, of the material corpse), represents an intensely
focused attempt to dissociate materiality and generative power. To
state the issue somewhat differently, it might be said that the ontological status of the material body, its status as determinate (dead) or
indeterminate (generative) roils the ideological foundations of both
psychoanalysis and Christianity.
The linchpin of Christianity is, of course, the mystery of an incarnated deity, a man/god, who undergoes bodily sacrifice in order to
earn for ordinary beings the right to transcend mortality, that is,
death and putrefaction. The body of the dead Christ does not putrefy: Christ himself resurrects and trans^gures his body as a model
for that of the redeemed heliever, whose own putrefied remains
will undergo a lesser kind of metamorphosis into an eternally
changeless state. Further, at least for medieval Christians, it was
(literally) the body and blood of Christ, re-sacrificed throughout
time in the sacrament of the Eucharist, that enahled an inversion,
as it were, of the Incarnation: the ingestion (or "sacramental cannibalism")^ of the god/man, the divine corporeal, in the corruptihle
bodies of the faithful. Thus, as Caroline Walker Bynum demonstrates, medieval Christianity was profoundly anti-dualistic; bodily
process was inseparable from spiritual transformation.^ The conundrum of the corpse was that it generated new forms of material life
through a process of disintegration or unbecoming at the same time

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that it served as the raw material for the transformation of the believer into a changeless, eternally static state. The spiritually realized self v\fas, in Bynum's phrase, a "psychosomatic unity,"' the
corpse serving as disturbing if compelling evidence of the generative power of fragmentation.
The danger that reformists astutely identified in the Catholic hypostatization of the hody was its implicit affirmation of this generative power as a constituent property of materiality. For iconoclasts,
such an affirmation diminished the antecedent, disembodied, immaterial being of God the Father, whose identify as God proceeded
from his unique status as pure spirit. The proto-dualistic revisions
of reformist theology thus insisted on dividing body and spirit, material and immaterial, inanimate and animate, while subordinating
or discounting the problematic relationship of putrefaction to redemption. Significantly, reformist tracts prepared for public consumption, such as the homily on idolatry (1563), attacked the
supposed perversity of Catholic anthropomorphism by singling out
the corpse as the only material entity that could fully demonstrate
what dead means. The corpse, axiomatically dead ("dead as stocks
and stones"), became the transparent signifier for the deadness of
materiality." However, it is noteworthy that in the English cultural
imagination, the corpse refused to be "quiescent" (to borrow one of
Freud's adjectives for inorganic matter). Long-standing beliefs in
the power of the corpse to generate life from its putrefying liquids,
to kill by contagion, to bleed, to walk, even to attack the living, remained manifest in resistance to reformist funerary and burial rituals, in local reports of appearances of the un-dead, and in fictional
representations of corpses and ghosts, including those on the public stage.
In short, what I am outlining here is a tension in early modern
religious ideology between, on one hand, an incipient dualism, an
effort to reconceptualize the body in terms of boundaries that
served to demarcate differences, and on the other, a continuing insistence on body boundaries as fluid, or subject to destabilization.
This contestation centered on the proper interpretation of the material principle in the Christian system and ultimately on the signification of the corpsespecifically, the relationship of fragmentation
to reconstitution (redemption) in a changeless state. For me, the issues at stake in this argument resonate strikingly with Kristeva's
probing of the semiotic.
For Kristeva, abjection, experienced in the human subject as "a

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conglomerate of fear, deprivation and nameless frustration" (15),

originates in pre-discursive experience ("these 'operations' are premeaning and pre-sign," "analogous to vocal or kinetic rhythm").
It is as if there is a later eruption in the speaking subject of a translinguistic "spoor of a pre-object" {PH, 73). This nameless "spoor"
signals the "recognition of the want on which any being, meaning,
language, or desire is founded" (5); it "stake[s] out the transition
from a state of indifferentiation to one of discretion (subject/object)" (32):
There would be a "beginning" preceding the word . . . In that anteriority
to language, the outside is elaborated by means of a projection from
within, of which the only experience we have is one of pleasure and
pain. The non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would thus be unnamable, a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain. (61)

This unnameable border evokes the originary "processes of division in the living matter oi an organism"; further, these "bio-physiological processes" are "themselves already inescapably part of
signifying processes, what Freud labeled "drives" [KR, 28). Thus
the undifferentiated "spoor" of a "pre-object" resonates "back" to
organic division while simultaneously anticipating symbolic differentiation.
But it is the corpse, a material entity inhabiting the symbolic
order yet unamenable to categorization, that effectively collapses
the border between the symbolic and the organic:
decay does not signify death . . . refuse and corpses show me what I
permanently thrust aside in order to live . . . the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon ever5dhing . . .
The corpse . . . is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life . . .
The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. [PH, 3-4)

According to Kristeva, the danger of the corpse, of abjection, is that

it threatens to engulf the totality of the subject's identity as constructed by the symbolic order, drawing one "toward the [semiotic]
place where meaning collapses" (2), where the subject, "fluctuating
between inside and outside, pleasure and pain, would find death,
along with nirvana" (63-64).
Thus Kristeva situates the simultaneous death of the symbolic
order and the subject at a bio-psychical border whose fluctuations,
originary source of the subject's experience of pleasure and pain.

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end in "nirvana." The corpse serves as material witness to the ambiguous relationship hetween fragmentation and "nirvana" in the
structure of human life; abjection enables the subject to comprehend the corpse in the self. Ultimately, of course, Kristeva's argument ends with a paradox rather than a resolution. On one hand,
"nirvana" suggests an ecstasy of oneness, a complete fusion that
gives the lie to symbolic differentiation as well as to the indeterminacy of putrefaction. But "nirvana" simultaneously suggests incorporation, ingestion, a (further) tearing apart of the "fragment" that
is the self, the individual. The paradox lies in the simultaneous ecstasy/terror of obliteration.
It should already be clear that Kristeva's theory connects in provocative ways with that medieval orientation toward the Christian
body that the Reformation was so keen to eradicate. If the medieval
Christian is a "psychosomatic unity," then the body must not only
be redeemed, it must also be a part of the redemptive process. Thus
the reciprocity of body/spirit metaphors; the preoccupation with
suffering as sacrifice, mutilation, and dismemberment; the centrality of the Eucharist as the literal ingestion of the god/man; the fascination with states of transition, preeminently that of corpse; and
the transformative concept of redemption as fragmentation enabling immortality. At bottom what is common to Kristeva's system
and the gestalt of medieval Christianity is a nondualistic approach
to psychic/religious phenomena that eschews categorical clarifications for the suggestive irresolutions of paradox. I find such conjunctions provocative and illuminating, although presumably
unrelated in historical terms. Thus my analysis of these temporally
discrete discourses provides a particular kind of nonlinear linkage
in which insights are a function of unintended reciprocations.
Such linkages help, I would argue, in understanding the horror/
attraction of the ghost in Hamlet. When the ghost first appears, he
comes encased in armor, a "portentous figure," a "fair and warlike
form" (1.1.112, 50).'' He is, emphatically, a material revenant, a
"thing" and a "nothing," a "fantasy . . . in complete steel" (1.1.24,
25, 26; 1.4.52, my emphasis). As armored warrior, the ghost replicates the living King Hamlet, but this eerie if familiar image evokes
an unsettling question: who/what inhabits this dead-Hamletarmor? Or, to put it another way: what does the impregnable-looking casing hide?
What lies behind the armor is of course a corpse: if what makes
Hamlet Sr. seem alive is his battle-ready fierceness, then what

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makes him an "illusion" is the mystery within. The singularity of

this revenant is that its indeterminate status as revenant, its halflife/half-death, is literally figured as a contradiction: steel exterior
vs. "no/thing," an apprehensible outside enclosing and containing
an unviewable interior.
When Hamlet first sees the "questionable shape" (1.4.43), he
wants to believe that it signifies an invincible, avenging power that
defies the dictates of nature, but he soon becomes aware that the
ghost is his dependent, that the ghost's exhortation creates a symbiotic relationship in which the son as avenger must prove the
father's invincibility. These reciprocal claims are threatening, forbidden, unknowable: if the animated warrior king belongs to the
Prince, so also does the corpse within the armor, the "no/thing"
behind the mask.
Significantly, the ghost itself, in language echoing Hamlet's own,
repeatedly references corrupt and corrupting bodiesthe "garbage" (1.5.42) of Claudius's body preyed upon by Gertrude's lust,
the "leprous distilment" (64) of the poison that renders the living
body of the King "lazar-like," barked about "with vile and loathsome crust" (72). This image of leprosy would have a special horror
for Hamlet: it is Hyperion the sun god horribly metamorphosed, his
once idealized body seized by a kind of anticipatory putrefaction.
"O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!" (80): certainly the disfiguring death of the sun king, but also the idea of this "dead corse"
(1.4.52) resurrected "in complete steel."
Hamlet's deeply ambivalent response to the ghost resides, I
would suggest, in his inability to reconcile its implicit contradictions: the seeming vitality of its determinate form (the ghost as
idol), with the materiality of its unbecomingthe mindlessly generative rot within, the undiscriminating deliquescence. Thus the
apparition emblematizes an unfixable margin between life/death,
process/stasis, partition/unity. Although it fully exploits the paradoxes of Christian belief and the tensions in the controversy over
idolatry, the ghost is nonetheless not reducible to any sectarian
status (Catholic/Protestant). It is a mystery in material form, a palpable impalpable, or, as Kristeva would say, "death infecting life
. . . a border that has encroached upon everything" [PH, 3-4).
Interestingly, Kristeva's theory of abjection also comments (although never explicitly) on the function of the ghost in the representation of Hamlet's sexual imagination. Kristeva's vocabulary for
abjection is of course itself sexualthe ecstasy of death ("nirvana")

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as an obliterating fusion/incorporation. But Kristeva speculates further that the abject originates in the violent separation of the infant
from the womb, an explusion which leaves a trace or memory in
the subject of "the archaic mother," originary site of terror and desire. Significantly for Hamlet, Kristeva argues that the biblical
abomination of leprosy "becomes inscribed within the logical conception of impurity . . . [as] intermixture, erasing of differences,
threat to identity": and that ultimately, "the fantasy of the born
body, tightly held in a placenta that is no longer nourishing but
devastating, converges with the reality of leprosy" (101). Thus Kristeva's identification of leprosy with originary defilement makes it
possible to triangulate the ghost/corpse, Gertrude, and Hamlet: that
is, the "leprous distilment" that disintegrates the sun-king is analogous to Certrude's lust, which transforms (in the ghost's furious
words) a "radiant angel," to a creature who "prey[s] on garbage"
(1.5.55, 57). By reinforcing Hamlet's own rage at his mother's unfathomable desire ("To post / With such dexterity to incestuous
sheets" [1.2.156-57]), the ghost thereby links leprosy, garbage, lust,
and deaththe component parts, as it were, of Hamlet's sexual
imagination, inextricably linked throughout the play with his desire for his own obliteration.
But if the contours of Hamlet's dilemma are more sharply defined
by Kristeva's conjunction of leprosy with birth/death, and I think
they are, in the end the paradox of Shakespeare's material/indeterminate ghost eludes captivation. The brilliance of Shakespeare's
creationand, I would argue, of Kristeva's theory in an altogether
different modeis their power to probe the inexpressible, to bring
us closer to the kind of intuition that fractures symbolic constraints. In this instance, improbably, Shakespeare and Kristeva enhance each other's expressive power, and thereby demonstrate the
reciprocally illuminating relationship of art and psychoanalysis. At
the same time, however, this very relationship underscores the
slipperiness of all representation, as well as the impossibility of resolving those psychic phenomena that most persistently compel
usthe mystery of sex and death, the conundrum of the corpse.
Notes
1. Lacan puts it best; "What is realized in my history is not the past definite of
what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what

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I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process
of becoming." See "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis," in Anthony
Wilden, ed.. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 63.
2. See The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinbtnrgh University Press, 2005),
3. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982). This essay represents the fullest elaboration of
Kristeva's theory but it appears in other publications as well (see below),
4. See "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in Peter Gay, ed,. The Freud Reader
(New York and London: Norton, 1989), 594-626. For a helpful commentary on Lacan's notion of the subject's relationship to a "partial object" anterior to the Imaginary (developed, in part, in response to the work of Melanie Klein), see Wilden,
160-65.
5. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on
Gender ond the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1996),
185.
6. The paradox of fragmentation and fusion pervades medieval ritual and iconography, as seen, for example, in the mutilation and miraculous reassembly of
martyrs, the worship of relics as spiritually invested body parts, the representation
of post-death purgation as bodily burning, the metaphors of bodily wasting and
orgasmic transport in the writings of the mystics, and the representation of
Christ's redemptive fluids as bi-gendered (the blood of circumcision and crucifixion, the milk of lactating breasts). See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption,
and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995),
7. Resurrection of the Body, 11.
8. See "Agaynste parell of Idolatry and superfluous decking of chtirches" in
The seconde tome of homelyes, 1563 (STC 136663).
9. See Toril Moi, ed.. The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 29, 94.
10. Quotations from the play are taken from the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982).