Organising Life: Mechanisms of Human Exceptionalism in a Corpus of Picturebooks about Death

This article offers insights into the pervasive ontological divisions between different types of life through an analysis of organic decomposition in picturebooks about death. I utilise Braidotti’s distinctions between ‘zoe’, as animal and unintelligent life, and ‘bios’, as historically situated human life, to delineate the mechanisms that organise human exceptionalism in a set of picturebooks. Human exceptionalism is expressed through a set of mechanisms that protect bodies from decomposition through the concept of the ‘good death’, recodification via funerary rituals, and pedagogical devices that teach the distinction between zoe and bios. Anthropomorphism emerges as a potential bridge between the two extremes of the binary, throwing light on pressing challenges for children’s literature creation.