Reconfiguring the Dead Body: Shapes of the After-life in Gunther Von Hagens and Seamus Heaney

This article focuses on the revisitation of the dead body as exemplified, theoretically, by Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds and, experientially and textually, by the bodies that emerged out of North-Western European bogs celebrated in Seamus Heaney’s bog poems sequence (1969, 1972, 1975). Von Hagens’ work, demiurge-like in nature, defamiliarizes the dead body by turning it into a self-confessed art object that defies the life-death dichotomy and begs for a third option. Bog bodies, on the other hand, are the fruit of peculiar microbiological conditions whereby the dead body is mummified and made available for retrieval, observation, study and, ultimately, exhibition – a visual-verbal art object. The article first lays out its theoretical framework by providing working definitions of both Gilles Deleuze’s devenir and remediation. It then questions the ontological status of the dead body as revisited by von Hagens, self-appointed demiurge, and the Bog, Northern-European laboratory. It further focuses on the layers of remediation that the defamiliarized dead body undergoes: from Body Worlds’ self-proclaimed status as pedagogic art to Heaney’s verses lingering on the giveness and materiality of bog bodies, the dead body is shown as defying the life-death dichotomy, constructing its unprecedented after-life.