Von Hagens’ Bestiary and Sacrifice’s Crisis
Von Hagens’ Bestiary and Sacrifice’s Crisis

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary culture is fascinated with the body. The body has undergone the process of subjectivization (individualization) and reification. It is important to refer these important phenomena to the problem of death, dead body. It might show new cultural strategies, structures of authorities, the power relations in discourses. Today we can decide what to do with our body after death and funeral becomes even one of the tools to build our identity. However, beside the individualization processes associated with dead flesh there are also inverse’s. The body already for several centuries (from Renaissance and development of necropsy) is gaining new dimension, which could be described as biology and generic. There is an influence of Cartesian understanding dead body as a machine whose mechanism stopped working. This detaches the body from a deceased person, makes him one of the copies, repetitive example of species and results in pragmatism and fragmentation. I am interested in questions, what processes (ways of thinking emphasized by Michael Foucault) has moved the dead body from the realm of the sacred to the profane sphere, to become flesh, an object, which is displayed, the flesh for sale

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