Dead Loved Flesh

Everyday we are confronted with multiple occurrences of death on our screens. Nevertheless we do not have to experience the materiality of corpses ourselves. Today the fear they incite adjusts to this detachment. The authors contributing to this interdisciplinary issue update the uses and the rationalizations the dead body is submitted to. Here we explore the ambiguity of the mortal remains, and the ever-present topic of the right distance relative to them. In law, in medicine, in the arts, in linguistics, in burial practices and in our rites of bereavement, the place of the corpse is constantly renegotiated, and its political and polemical impact is never excluded.