9 - Morbid Solidarity: Remains, Afterlives and the Commune of Saints

Summary

‘How shall we live then?’

William Morris

‘I would like to learn to live finally.’

Jacques Derrida

EVERY POLITICAL PLATFORM is also a crypt. Such sepulchral foundations can be disquieting: radical movements in particular tend to resist necrophile (or, as Robert Pogue Harrison has it, ‘necrocratic’) appearances. In his ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx famously framed the new revolutionary project as requiring the abandonment of funereal pieties:

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin till it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content.

Yet the left, broadly conceived, has never truly banished its spectres or renounced its own morbid preoccupations. Lenin's corpse is perhaps the most carefully preserved in the world, and the language of haunting has been drawn back to the tradition's surface in Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Meanwhile, Marx's own tomb (into which he was transferred in the 1950s) continues to be a site of both political assembly and vandalism.

In one of his Fors Clavigera letters to English workers, John Ruskin (writing in 1880) makes concrete the link between a (medievalised) Christian socialism and burial rights:

Trade Unions of England – Trade Armies of Christendom, what's the roll-call of you, and what part or lot have you, hitherto, in this Holy Christian Land of your Fathers? Is not that inheritance to be claimed, and the Birth Right of it, no less than the Death Right? Will you not determine where you may be Christianly bred, before you set your blockhead Parliaments to debate where you may be also all Christianly buried, (your priests also all a-squabble about that matter, as I hear, – as if any ground could be consecrated that had the bones of rascals in it, or profane where a good man slept!) But how the Earth that you tread may be consecrated to you, and the roofs that shade your breathing sleep, and the deeds that you do with the breath of life yet strengthening hand and heart, – this it is your business to learn, if you know not; and this mine to tell you, if you will learn.