Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Jonathan Strauss
The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses started to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances.
The dead had fallen victim to a sustained reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century—the Paris of modernity—arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between the animate and the inanimate.
As the dead became a source of pervasive and intense anxiousness, they also became an object of fascination that at once exceeded and guided the medical imagination attempting to control them. Human Remains examines that exuberant anxiety to discover the irrational, indeed erotic, forces motivating the medicalization of death.
Working across a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the book seeks to understand the meaning of the dead and their role in creating one of the most important cities of the contemporary world.
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About Jonathan Strauss
Reviews for Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
-–Mitchell Greenberg, Cornell University “I recommend reading this book by dim light
from candles or gas if possible. But don’t let this enjoyable horror tale’s lithe prose fool you. Serious theoretical work connects the cholera, corpses, miasmas, necrophiliacs, prostitutes, rag pickers, sewage, and other forms of “abjection” explicated in this volume.... This is an intricately interdisciplinary work, which would nevertheless speak fluently with older approaches from intellectual history and the history of ideas. Informed broadly by the wide arc of continental theory
including phenomenology and hermeneutics, dialectics, existentialism, post/structuralism, and above all psychoanalysis
Strauss also incorporates notable elements of visual studies, comparative literature, and recent interest in “literature and science.” He smoothly blends literary history, criticism, and theory with political history, criticism, and theory.”― Peter S. Soppelsa
—H-Urban
Strauss examines the role played by a medical field that had recently gained considerable prestige, and the variety of discourses that accompanied the nineteenth-century's obsessive interest in the dead, testifying to an 'inadmissible desire for the abject'. This is an important and dazzling work.
-—Marie Helene Huet, Princeton University The pages pullulate with life and death, and the mesmerizing world of nineteenth-century Paris will at once disgust and entice you. This is a book that trades powerfully on its academic credentials, but which deserves equal success in a more popular sphere for its ability to communicate the morbid fascination of its subject matter.
The British Society for Literature and Science