Dead in life. Lives pierced by death

Abstract

This introduction presents the special issue entitled “Dead in Life. Lives Pierced by Death” that emerged from an empirical need. We were confronted, in a growing number of situations, to the need to rethink the borders between life and death and the intersections between those two states, which result in bad deaths and bad lives. The articles gathered here examine, on the one hand, how atypical deaths are produced, managed, and lived; and, on the other hand, look at those who are left behind after catastrophe and loss, the life that is broken following an exposure to death, the forms of life that come into contact with (civil or social) death.

This special issue entitled “Dead in Life. Lives Pierced by Death” is the product of one of the research lines pursued as part of a decade-long collective research program: “World(s) of Victims” and was discussed at an international seminar held in Bilbao in the month of April 2019. As we focused in the context of this research program first on victims and then on different forms and cases of disappearance,¹ in particular what we have called “social disappearance” (Gatti, 2020), we gradually realized that in order to understand a myriad of social situations we needed to rethink the borders between life and death and the intersections and overlapping between the two states, which manifest in bad deaths and bad lives, in lives that are not really lives. This realization was not born merely of a theoretical concern. The cases we researched (migrants who disappear in the borders separating the global South from the global North, women who are victims of sex trafficking, thousands of people who do not exist in the eyes of the state because there is no record of them, and individuals forcibly disappeared by drug traffickers or caught in the crossfire of the war on drugs, among others) sparked the need to rethink those borders. And they prompted us to turn to other colleagues who move in different disciplinary coordinates and work in other geographies, and listen to their findings on the subject of lives that resemble death.²

It was not easy. The particularly dense line that separates life from death is a territory that the social and human sciences, our disciplines, have not ventured comfortably into. And in the rare occasions in which they have, it has generally been to pathologize it, at best developing care policies, which are necessary, but do not always further our understanding. The works gathered in this issue, however, overcome those limitations and propose analyses that succeed both in shedding light on some powerful examples of that ambiguity and in suggesting new working tools for understanding them.

The time of writing this introduction, the exceptional moment the planet is going through with the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, forces us to look out from our places of confinement and wonder about the timeliness of what we are proposing. It also forces us to consider whether it will be useful for understanding the world that is emerging. We are seeing living deaths silenced, we know of lives that are hard to recognize as such and which have gained a visibility that they normally lack: elderly people who die alone in hospitals or retirement homes, in places of abandonment; relatives who are prevented from performing conventional mourning rites due to the risk of contagion; migrants who return to their homelands from the prosperous Europe despite knowing that life there is worse… That initial feeling—that there was something missing on that subject—has given way to another: that it might not be necessary, given that the pieces featured in this issue propose categories and develop very powerful theoretical and methodological tools for understanding a world in which the borders between life and death are blurred.

While the lines between life and death have been a big theme in literature, this hazy, ambiguous border region has rarely been addressed by the social sciences. Lately, that territory of existence has received much attention from “high culture” and popular entertainment, resulting in the delivery of both works of art and mass products. A good example of one such product is the television series The Leftovers analyzed by Gabriel Gatti and Jaume Peris in this issue. These works and products range from excellent to forgettable, but they are all indicative of a renewed interest in that liminal area. What does that interest in zombies, the living-dead, the dead-in-life, spirits, ghosts, forsaken lives, and extremely precarious and vulnerable existences say to human and social scientists?

There are many studies that look into the reasons that explain the ubiquity of the living-dead, the nonexistent, in each era. The works in this sense by Ulrich Beck (1992) (uncertainties, risk), Zygmunt Bauman (2000) (liquid modernity), Donna Haraway (2016) (boundaries separating human from non-human), Judith Butler (2006) (precarious life), or Anna Tsing (2015) (life in capitalist ruins) are very diverse, but they do have in common this interest in exploring a world where there are few certainties, including certainties concerning the limits and contents of the living, the human, and existence. In contexts with similar intellectual concerns but different disciplinary frameworks and methodological approaches, there are also many scholars who have descended into the territories of ordinary life to examine some of these metaphors in depth, to discover what shapes these non-living entities, zombies, ghosts, and spirits of the absent take in our everyday existence. Some of the works that stand out in this sense are, for example, João Biehl’s (2013) anthropological studies on drug addicts who are on the brink of death and have been abandoned to their fate; the research by certain anthropologists on pain communities in India, where living is far removed from a consolidated sense of life (Veena Das, 2008); or studies on places of social death, such as historical slavery (Orlando Patterson, 1982) or present-day slavery, places of non-human or nearly human lives (Silvia Wynter, 2003; Alexander Weheliye, 2014). In other academic fields, some scholars whose work focuses on the psychological (Judith Butler, 2006; Vinciane Despret, 2017; Dominique Memmi, 2011) have been concerned with the problematization of the standard way of managing grief and the theoretical possibility of conceiving forms of collective mourning that are permanent and non-pathological, in which the lines between life and death are again blurred and the “social life of the dead” takes on sociological meaning.

There is a need to address this in sociology, the discipline we, the editors of this issue, work in. Sociology needs to think about the bad deaths and the bad lives, because the reality it observes demands that reflection. It needs to know what to say about the life of those who inhabit “death spaces,” about the death of those who perish for lack of medical assistance or of those who die in their journey to the global North. It needs to understand how to manage unusual deaths, and to know how to name the lives of women who are trafficked for sexual exploitation or abused by their partners, or those who are constantly exposed to illness. But it still lacks the conceptual and methodological tools to do so. The contribution of this special issue and the process that led to it are meant to open the social sciences up to those questions.

Toward that aim, we present a series of articles from various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literature, and cultural studies, with each discussing these issues from their own empirical approach. We formed a small working group and met only once in person, but we worked together remotely on several draft versions. We arrived at the April 2019 seminar with a written text, but rather than presenting it, we chose to discuss it in depth. And we sought to pose questions as opposed to reaching conclusions. The methodology of the process had to respect the need to change the tools used, to find ones more apt for those questions. In that sense, the interdisciplinary dialogue was fruitful: How do we address objects with so many edges? How do we prepare to listen to them? It is not merely a matter of having a set of methodological and technical instruments, but of a willingness to think about empirical situations that are only seemingly abnormal. That methodological approach to a difficult object created communicating vessels between disciplines (for example, the work by Gabriel Gatti and Jaume Peris, which combines sociology and cultural studies), bringing us, by the hand of Kirsten Mahlke, to a proposal for a research methodology that would function in parallel with the working method it seeks to establish for those who have to deal with strange deaths. It needs to be a methodology that affects.

Two lines of work structured the seminar and run through the texts gathered in this issue. The first line involves examining how atypical deaths are produced, managed, and lived. In this sense, the article by Jonathan Xavier Inda examines the production of death as a result of the lack of care in migrant detention centers in the United States, employing a biopolitical approach, but at the same time transcending it. The piece by Carolina Kobelinsky simultaneously poses questions about the threat faced by migrants who cross the Mediterranean, which is not only the possibility of dying but also of disappearing, and about those who make it to their destination but whose lives are inevitably and profoundly pierced by the death of their disappeared fellow travelers. Kirsten Mahlke, for her part, focuses on how death is managed, as she analyzes the protocols applied in Germany by the police and psychology practitioners to deal with relatives who have suffered the loss of a loved one in strange accidental circumstances, and how those protocols limit the “possible mourning” and psychiatrize the loss. And, as a counterpoint, the article by Gabriel Gatti and Jaume Peris considers a more everyday way of dealing with deaths and the lives that remain after those deaths. Through an analysis of the series The Leftovers, they reflect on life after a catastrophe, proposing the concepts of “social death” and “social disappearance” to understand those lives marked forever by an unconfirmed death.

The second line looks at those who are left behind after catastrophe and loss, the life that is broken following an exposure to death, the forms of life that come into contact with (civil or social) death, the bizarre vital status of those affected (Gatti and Martínez, Forthcoming). This line of analytical inquiry addresses a paradox: life when it seems to deny itself, when it has left the territory of life of a human being that is complete and has moved toward “social death” (Patterson, 1982). These are the “dead in life” or “living dead” (Fregoso, 2017). The situations that we call “social disappearance” create these forms of death in life, of suspended life, of incomplete life in which subjects, nonetheless, live life: ordinary life, political life, individual and collective life, life that does not recover its previous status and is not fully reconstructed. Three of the articles clearly work in this line. María Martínez, for her part, reflects on life not during some forms of gender-based violence, but precisely after that violence, when it is considered that the violence has been overcome and life has been recovered, a life that is lived, however, as a “death in life.” This question regarding impossible lives is addressed by Luisina Castelli when she analyzes the life of bodies that are not entirely human and are continuously exposed to death and illness. Through an ethnographic work with two people with disabilities, she raises questions about the life of those who can never attain the standard of normality of (a) life. Both Castelli and Rosa Linda Fregoso allow, however, for the possibility of thinking that in such contexts of “social deaths,” in those “death spaces,” in those places where life itself seems to be denied, forms of life, and even agency, nonetheless, emerge. In Fregoso’s case, that possibility is opened by a critical discussion of the concept of refugee as conceived by the international human rights discourse, and ends by proposing the concept of “fugitivity,” a possibility for thinking about the reconstruction of impossible lives.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the General Board of Scientific and Technical Research of Spain’s Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, under its call for “projects of excellence” (MINECO-CSO 2015-66318-P) for the years 2016–2020: https://identidadcolectiva.es/victimas-desapariciones/.

Notes

1 The project is entitled “Desapariciones. A transnational study of a category for managing, inhabiting, and analyzing social catastrophe and loss” and is part of the wider research project “Mundo(s) de víctimas” (“World(s) of Victims”). “Desapariciones” seeks to understand how the category of the disappeared circulates transnationally and contributes to manage, inhabit, and analyze different situations marked by catastrophe and loss.

2 In addition to the researchers featured in this issue, Bruna Bumachar, from the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and Daniela Rea, from the Mexican NGO Periodistas de a Pie, also participated in the seminar in Bilbao, but their contributions were not available for this publication.