Death and Representation.

When a performance piece which included taped appearances of terminally-ill people was recently staged in New York City, dance critic Arlene Croce saw fit to criticize the piece without even seeing it. For Croce, the performance was less a representation of death than a direct presentation of the thing itself, and as such was "undiscussable" as art ("Discussing the Undiscussable," New Yorker [26 December 1994, 2 January 1995]). For the contributors to this volume, it is the representability of death itself that is the (eminently discussable) issue. The essays begin with the recognition that no representation is adequate to death, that most unrepresentable of referents. On the one hand, our symbolic universe is replete with images of death and the dead - not only artistic pictures and stories about the actual process of dying, but such commonplace artifacts as monuments, wills, death certificates, and autopsy reports. On the other hand, death eludes every act of symbolic representation, and it is especially unclear to what extent the dead "themselves" can be politically, legally, or …