The, Bury The Dead, By Judith Butler - 3660 Words

â€Å"First thing strikes anybody,† Leopold Bloom reflects while attending a funeral in James Joyce’s Ulysses, â€Å"Bury the dead† (223). In many ways, Bloom’s mental reflection emphasizes the transhistorical and global pervasiveness of ritual corpse disposal as forming origins for human collectivities: namely, that to be human is to respond to the dead, and further, that to belong to a specific human group is to follow specific conventions of responding to the dead. Or, as Robert Harrison asserts, â€Å"Humanity is not a species[;] it is a way of being mortal and relating to the dead. To be human means above all to bury† (xi). If mortal engagement is our primary humanizing fact, as well as a way of organizing human communities through what is or is not†¦show more content†¦Just as responding to the dead upholds and actualizes our very humanity, so too does responding to the precarious lives of others, and both ethical responses trigger g lobal political implications. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying navigates the ethics and politics of deathways by exploring the functional role of corpse disposal in constructing and deconstructing forms of community during an age of intense modernization. Inhabiting the periphery of a modern economic system as poor white subsistence farmers, but feeling forcefully the pull of the engulfing currents of modernity, the Bundren family undertakes a ten-day journey marred by fire and flood to bury their matriarch in Jefferson. Defining life and death as being co-imbricated, Faulkner parallels the ethics toward the dead and the ethics toward the precarious by showing how members of Yoknapatawpha engage in various modes of assistance or disavowal of the Bundren clan, coloring an ethical and political spectrum of responses to the dead and to the spectralized living. As the rotting corpse of Addie Bundren arrives in the center of the metropolis, forcing modernity to acknowledge the Bundrens as modern subjects-in-be coming, Faulkner, as I argue, grotesquely illustrates complexities of community during global modernization and urban migration and