I found these readings to be very interesting because I had never thought about the power a dead body could carry, especially in a political sense. Both Yurchack and Verdery discuss how the bodies of certain people, such as leaders, can be heavily symbolic within a society and even go so far as to act as propaganda. In Russia especially, the body of Vladimir Lenin was used to live on his legacy and continue the message of his cult throughout Russian society. Yurchack states that Lenin’s body is “suspended between the two modes of art and biology” (Yurchack 136) . Here the dead body of Lenin is seen as a sculpture, a work of art that will forever be untouched by time. I found this interesting because a human body is the epitome of something that is constantly ravaged by time, and ultimately destroyed because of it. But when looking at dead bodies through this lens you are ultimately preserving it forever, which will continue to spread the same message as it did when it was alive.
To build off of the idea that dead bodies continue a certain message, Katherine Verdery discusses how dead bodies can be perceived by a general group of people. If dead bodies are symbols, just as a monument or a plaque, then the power of the dead body is open to interpretation by whoever chooses to use its’ power. Dead bodies have properties greater than living ones, and Verdery argues that “a body’s symbolic effectiveness does not depend on its standing for one particular thing, however, for among the most important properties of bodies, especially dead ones, is their ambiguity, multivocality, or polysemy.” (Verdery 28) Dead bodies have the ability to transcend the levels of humanness and artifacts, because they are both at the same time.
After reading both of these pieces I thought back to the 9/11 memorial. In the museum there is a huge wall with the words of Virgil placed on it saying:
“No day shall erase you from the memory of time” and behind that wall are the corpses of the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In this instance, these bodies are meant to represent the lives lost on this day, and to encourage us to remember and preserve their memory. Here the power of dead bodies are being showcased, and I found that to be extremely moving. The absence of life within a body does not necessarily mean that its’ existence and legend are simultaneously erased, if anything, it installs its’ memory forever.