Sculptures of our dead ones, sarcophagi depicting the deceased, robots and dolls that present us with glimpses of our own mortality, are memento mori, objects projecting our future, prompts to remember that we too will die, that we will no longer be animate (animal). Does the sexual possession of a corpse disinhibit our own death drive? An incestuous and psychopathic tyrant, Periander of Corinth, (628–588 BCE)—one of the Seven Sages of Greece—accidentally killed his pregnant wife Melissa by throwing a footstool at her, he then defiled her corpse, burned alive his concubines, and sent his two sons away to become eunuchs. His obsession with his own death has all the makings of a Greek mystery or riddle. After his necrophiliac act, did his megalomania become so intense that his own death would be invisible, as if it had not or could not have happened, that there would be no memento mori to his own passing? To hide his place of burial, Periander ‘instructed two young men to meet a third man at a predetermined place and kill and bury him. Then he arranged for four men to pursue the first two and kill and bury them. Then he arranged for a larger group of men to hunt down the four. Having made all the preparations, he went out to meet the two young men, for he, Periander, was the third man.’[104] Periander attempted to escape death by anonymity, by refusing the architecture of desire, As Diogenes Laertius wrote,
Moving into the present and the future, necrophilia has similarities to cybersex and online sex webcams. ‘The attraction of cybersex is that, since we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment. This aspect of cyberspace—the idea of a space in which, because we are not directly interacting with real people, nobody is harassed and we are free to let go our most extreme fantasies—found its ultimate expression in a proposal which recently resurfaced in some circles in the US, a proposal to “rethink” the rights of necrophiles (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies). Why should they be deprived of it? The idea was formulated that, in the same way people sign permission for their organs to be use for medical purposes in the case of their sudden death, one should also allow them to sign permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs.’[106] The British author/artist Stewart Home pre-empted this concept in his ‘necrocards’. Similar to organ-donor cards, they carried the message: ‘I support sexual liberation’ and ‘I want to help others experiment sexually after my death’. On the reverse of the card are tick boxes indicating the sexual preferences after death—‘I request that after my death A. my body be used for any type of sexual activity or B. gay only. straight only. I do not wish to be dismembered or disfigured during necrophiliac sex. (tick as appropriate).’[107]
Both Žižek and Home, with varying degrees of humour, irony and icononoclasm, view the dead body as an object that becomes a commodity of desire, an erotic vessel, a sex doll; a receptacle not of a transgressive sexual act but a reference to the shifting paradigms and rhizomic networks of human morality and sexuality.[108]
4
Necronaut—Sergeant Bertrand
Sixteen years before Queen Victoria’s beloved consort died, a French soldier, already eroticized by corpses and entrails had an idea. To satisfy his lust, rather than happening upon dead bodies, he would disinter them. It was 1845, France was moving toward the end of King Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy, the philosophies of Romanticism and Anarchism were provoking revolt, coups, and calls for democratic government. Across the English Channel, Sir John Franklin and 134 men set sail on HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in the tragic lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage; while across the Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau began his years of civil disobedience, living in a cabin near Walden Pond. Sergeant Bertrand, intent on his obsession, would begin his years of sexual disobedience by ripping out the guts of cadavers and masturbating over then.
Born in 1822 (or 1824), François Bertrand attended the theological seminary of Langres. As Bertrand described in his confessional interview with doctors after his capture, ‘I began to masturbate at a very tender age without knowing what I was doing; I did not conceal myself from anyone. It was not until the age of eight or nine that I began to think of women, but this passion did not become really strong until the age of thirteen or fourteen.’[109] Facts about his early years are sketchy but Bertrand admits to one of the classic indicators of necrophilia and of serial killing, ‘seeing that it was impossible for me to have human bodies, I sought out the dead bodies of animals, which I mutilated as I later mutilated those of women or men. I cut open their bellies, and after having torn out the entrails, I masturbated while looking at them.’ These animals included horses, dogs and cats. Once he joined the army in 1842, his bestial necrophilia continued and he states that while at the army ‘camp of Villette in 1844, I did not delay going to the Saint-Denis canal to take out animals that had been drowned, dogs, sheep.’ As a young soldier, he was popular with comrades and attractive to women but his necrophiliac tendencies began to increase, ‘In 1846 I was no longer satisfied with dead animals; I had to have living ones. At the camp of Villette as in all barracks, there were many dogs, which, belonging to no one, followed the soldiers indiscriminately. I resolved to take some of these dogs into the country and kill them… I tore out their entrails.’
In Late February 1847, near Tours, in the village of Bléré, Sergeant Bertrand’s company, part of the 74th Regiment, billeted near the East Cemetery. After a walk with a fellow soldier through the valleys and hills, Bertrand and his comrade in arms entered the cemetery. There, Bertrand saw the gravediggers’ tools leaning against a tombstone, the grave next to it not fully filled in. His head started to throb violently, his heart racing. He ditched his friend in the village and quickly returned to the cemetery. Day labourers were working on vines next to the graveyard but this didn’t perturb the sergeant. The day before, rain had made it impossible for the gravediggers to finish their job. He took up a shovel, unearthed the body, and struck it repeatedly with the shovel’s sharp edge. One of the vine workers heard the sound of metal on flesh, the sergeant’s excited grunts, and ran to the gates. The sergeant hid in the grave next to the half-dismembered corpse. When the labourer left to fetch the marshal, Bertrand filled in the grave and escaped by climbing over the cemetery wall. He hid in a copse, obscured by bushes, the undergrowth his mattress, delirious with lust and violence, two hours lost in oblivious revelry. Two nights later, in the pounding rain, he returned to the grave. The gravediggers had taken their tools, so the sergeant got down on his hands and knees and pulled up the sodden earth with his bloodied hands. He managed to disinter the lower part of the body and set about mutilating it with a knife, experiencing an orgasm as he cut into the flesh. Throughout March, April, and early May, he visited cemeteries in the surrounding districts in a state of erotic compulsion but either resisted or is deterred from consummating his lust. When unable to fully disinter a corpse, he would cut off a piece of the dead woman’s clothing and use it to masturbate, or masturbate over it, beside the grave. Sergeant Bertrand goes beyond fantasy, beyond trophy taking, these remnant, onanistic objects, become Lacanian, ‘objet a… something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack.’[110] Metonyms of masturbation, the pieces of clothing acting as replacements for the unattainable dead body, intimately connected with it but separate, that Bertrand re-organ-izes with the splash of his semen.
105
Diogenes Laertius,
107
Stewart Home, ‘The Necrocard: Anyone For Sex After Death?’ http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/necro.htm
108
See Patricia MacCormack, ‘Necrosexuality,’
109
Quotes and details of Bertrand’s crimes taken from L. Thoinot,
110
Jacques Lacan,