All things spectral

The question of the human and the nonhuman, how they are produced and inscribed on bodies, has been the subject to a burgeoning amount of research. In this paper I'd like to offer an analysis of what seems to constitute a gap in our theories of the nonhuman, that is the question of dead – radically inert, mute and vulnerable – bodies. By reference to a Greek word sema, which denominated both a ‘tomb’, a ‘sign’ and a ‘trace’, I would like to investigate the three-fold context in which the dead bodies are enmeshed: the material, the discursive and the spectral one. Drawing on the concept of the ‘remnant’ (G. Agamben) and the ‘spectre’ (J. Derrida) I will pose a question regarding the ways in which dead bodies are included in power relations, powers of visibility and normalisation, and how they may challenge them. Finally, I will offer a project of ‘materialistic hauntology’, an ethical stand towards bodies that are in course of dematerialising, but that still matter.