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The human body is at the heart of modern warfare. This chapter focuses on the multiple ways that the weaponry of the Second World War killed and injured the human body. The first section of this chapter examines military death in wartime, comparing the different ways that members of the services died across the globe, and the fascination with the corpse as described by many men who encountered the dead on the battlefield. The second section focuses on civilian death; specifically the deaths of those killed by aerial warfare and the use of high explosive and fire bombing against towns and cities. It concludes with a consideration of the multiple ways that conflict removes agency from individuals, as the individual body becomes subject to the wartime body politic.

Necropolitics is often used to denote how the living is subjected to the power of death and destruction. Omitted from this conceptualisation is the violence that takes as its object the realm of the dead – the corpse, the act of burial, funerary rituals, the graves and cemeteries as sites of burial and commemoration, and forms of mourning and reverence. In this chapter, I examine different forms of postmortem violence directed at insurgent bodies. I focus on the image of the naked and bloody corpse of a woman, later revealed to be a Kurdish militant and guerrilla fighter known as Ekin Wan, leaked to the press in the period of Turkey’s hung parliament in the summer of 2015. I argue that the circulation of her denuded image after being killed in combat with the state’s security forces was a symptom of the end of the peace process and the beginning of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. I theorise violence that targets the realm of the dead as a distinctive and neglected form of necropolitics and necropolitical violence as the entire ensemble of practices that target the dead as a surrogate for, and means of, controlling the living.

This chapter examines the motif of round-the-world flight, and the impact on surrounding society of the quirks of a single life, in Odoevsky's tale The Live Corpse. It is seen to be developed into what purports to be interplanetary flight. The chapter also examines the rise and fall of a civilisation, in Dostoevsky's late story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Particulars of such supposed cosmic travel may have been, in part at least, ‘borrowed’ by his successors from Dostoevsky. However this may be, such things are seen to be taken very much further, in twentieth-century English horror and science fiction writing, in key works by William Hope Hodgson and Olaf Stapledon.

Chapter 4 chronicles the development of modern Ashtanga yoga by the Indian Hindu Shri Krishna Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009) for the purpose of becoming “one with God.” Ashtanga pursues its spiritual goal through physical postures, āsanas, opening with Sūrya Namaskāra(Sun Salutations), defined by Jois as “prayer to the sun god,” and closing with Padmāsana(Lotus) and Savāsana (Rest/Corpse), to facilitate meditation and enlightenment. Postures incorporate symbolic gestures, añjali mudra (prayer) and jñāna mudra (wisdom), not only to express but also to instill devotion. Ashtanga exemplifies an experiential model of religion in which practitioners envision physical practices as transforming beliefs and achieving spiritual goals. Ashtanga arrived in the U.S. in 1975 in Encinitas, California, and attracted wealthy devotees, among them Sonia Jones, who created Jois Yoga and the Jois Foundation (K. P. Jois USA Foundation) in 2011. The Foundation’s “mission” is to bring the “philosophy, teachings and values of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois to “youths in underserved communities” and “support changes in public policy” to make yoga and meditation “essential,” even “compulsory,” in teacher credentialing and school curricula. The chapter argues that teaching Ashtanga yoga in public schools raises constitutional questions because Ashtanga exhibits the Malnak-Meyers indicia of religion.

This chapter deals with the debut of Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum in Nazi cinema and her impact on Harlan’s life. After choosing her to play the female lead in Jugend (Youth, 1938), the adaptation of the play that had provided him with his breakthrough in the theater, he not only falls in love with and marries her but also chooses her to be the dominant presence in his future films. In the play, the character Söderbaum plays is shot, but in the film she drowns herself, earning her the nickname “Reich’s Water Corpse.” In Jugend and in its follow-up Verwehte Spuren (Lost traces, 1938), Harlan directs her in a sadistic and often voyeuristic manner. Thematically, both films are more personal than Harlan’s previous ones. They deal with the early loss of parents, inherited sin, incest, religious dogma, and distrust in a relationship. Both are costume films set in the previous century and, despite their apolitical nature, are admired by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

The valuable living individual did not exist in clear conceptual terms within the historical context in which Antigone was written, but he nonetheless made his possibility felt as an absence. This absence revealed itself as an object of desire and as the sign of a loss. Chapter Three focuses on this sign of loss and sees in the corpse an important figure for conceptualizing a missing individual. Polyneices's dead body, which plays a central role in Antigone, is thus read as an instrument for understanding and appreciating the specificities and contingencies of individual life. This is an inherently frustrating undertaking, however, since the corpse is defined by the lack of life. The chapter concentrates on Hegel's readings of burial rites in Antigone, since he offers the richest and most far-reaching conceptualizations of death in the play.

As the previous chapter showed, the dead body represented both the value of the individual and an indeterminate state between life and death. Chapter Four argues that, as such, the corpse was excluded from the city and echoed other categories that did not fit comfortably into the conceptual structures of the state: namely the criminal, the ostracized, and the abject. The paradox of these elements is that although they must be excluded from the polis they are also necessary to its identity and cannot therefore be eradicated from it. In this respect, the corpse represents an aporia at the hear of the city and a reminder of its mysterious origins. Through her allegiance to the body of her dead brother, Antigone thus grapples with the original paradox of the state while indicating the possibility for a different but still gendered notion of the political – one based on feminine love. The readings in this chapter draw on several texts by Plato, including Alcibiades I, Parmenides, Crito, and the Laws.

Since the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in 1897, the character of Count Dracula has proven to be eminently adaptable, appearing in various guises in over 300 feature films – from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) through to Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012). As with other iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Batman, Dracula has been freed from his roots in a source text and entered what Will Brooker describes as ‘the realm of the icon’. Yet, while there has been a considerable amount of scholarship on the canonical adaptations of Dracula produced in Hollywood, the UK and Germany, very little has been written on the numerous adaptations of the Count Dracula character that have appeared in other film industries. This chapter considers examples of transnational film remakes, including the 1953 Turkish film Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in Istanbul), the 1957 Mexican film El Vampiro (The Vampire), and the 1967 Pakistani film Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse). Paying close attention to the variety of ways in which the character is utilised across different cultural contexts, this chapter interrogates the complex issues that this raises in relation to the dynamic interplay of global and local within international popular cinema.

Chapter 1 introduces photographic indexicality and uses it as the metric to understanding the relationship between the body of the dead leader (Lincoln, Lenin, Eva Peron) and the “body politic” for which it stands.

The conclusion argues for an understanding of death that allows the body to speak and signify in ways that restore dignity to the mourning process and extricate it from capitalist modes of social reproduction.

In the introduction, Swartz introduces the corpse as representational object referring to deceased, and documents the relationship between photography and embalming as aesthetics as well as mourning practices. Schwartz defines the terms corpse and iconography. She gives descriptions of the historical figures that the chapters are about, such as Emmett Till, Abraham Lincoln, Eva Peron, Lenin, Michael Jackson, and Hamza al-Khateeb. The remainder of the introduction is dedicated to the history of mortuary rituals, particularly embalming and how they are relevant today.