"The Corpse Bride" by Reza Negarestani (2008)

COLLAPSE IV129

Reza Negarestani

The Corpse Bride: Thinking with

Nigredo

The living and the dead at his command,Were coupled, ace to ace, and hand to hand,Till, chok’d with stench, in loath’d embraces tied,The ling’ring wretches pin’d away and died.

1

The punishment imposed by Mezentius on the soldiers o Aneas should be inicted, by coupling him to one o his owncorpses and parading him through the streets until his carcassand its companion were amalgamated by putreaction.

2

1.

Virgil,

The Aeneid

, VIII 483-88.2.

Erinensis, ‘On the Exploitation o Dead Bodies’,

The Lancet

, 1828-9:

777.

COLLAPSE IV, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, May 2008)ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4http://www.urbanomic.com

COLLAPSE IV130

A P

relude

to

P

utrefAction

In the eighth book o Aeneid (483-88), Evanderattributes an outlandishly atrocious orm o punishmentto Mezentius, the Etruscan King. However, it is not Virgilwho frst speaks o this punishment, or beore Virgil,Cicero cites rom Aristotle an analogy which compares thetwoold composite o the body and soul with the tortureinicted by the Etruscan pirates. Revived during the reigno the Roman Emperor Marcus Macrinus, the notoriety o this atrocity survives antiquity and the Middle Ages. In thesixteenth century, the horror o this torture is expressed,once again, by a popular emblem called

Nupta Contagioso

showing a woman being tied to a man plagued by syphilis,at the King’s order. Widely distributed throughout Europe,the emblem continues to reappear in dierent contextsduring the Renaissance and even toward the nineteenthcentury.

Nupta Contagioso

or

Nupta Cadavera

literally suggestsa marriage with the diseased or the dead: a orcibleconjugation with a corpse, and a consummation o marriagewith the dead as a bride.Haunted by the unusually philosophical insinuationso this punishment as well as its subtle imagery, to whichhuman imagination cannot help contributing, Iamblichusand Augustine – like Aristotle – ruminate on the Etruscantorture. They both adopt it as something more than aundamental allegory in their philosophies: they see init a metaphysical model that exposes and explains thecondition(s) o being alive in regard to body, soul andintellect.

3

Jacques Brunschwig, in his 1963 essay

Aristote

3.

For more details on Aristotle and the ragment on the psyche see A.P. Bos,

The Soul and its Instrumental Body: A Reinterpretation o Aristotle’s Philosophy o Living Nature

,(Leiden: Brill, 2003).

Negarestani – Corpse Bride131

et les pirates tyrrhéniens

, describes the baroque details o theEtruscans’ punishment. A living man or woman was tied toa rotting corpse, ace to ace, mouth to mouth, limb to limb,with an obsessive exactitude in which each part o the bodycorresponded with its matching putreying counterpart.Shackled to their rotting double, the man or woman waslet to decay. To avoid the starvation o the victim and toensure the rotting bonds between the living and the deadwere ully established, the Etruscan robbers continued toeed the victim appropriately. Only once the superfcialdierence between the corpse and the living body started torot away through the agency o worms, which bridged thetwo bodies, establishing a dierential continuity betweenthem, did the Etruscans stop eeding the living. Once boththe living and the dead had turned black through putre-action, the Etruscans deemed it appropriate to unshacklethe bodies, by now combined together, albeit on an infni-tesimal, vermicular level. Although the blackening o theskin indicated the superfcial indierentiation o decay (themerging o bodies into a black slime), or the Etruscans– executioners gited with metaphysical literacy andalchemical ingenuity – it signalled an ontological expositiono the decaying process which had already started romwithin. Also known as the blackening o decay or chemicalnecrosis,

nigredo

is an internal but outward process inwhich the vermicular dierentiation o worms and othercorpuscles makes itsel known in the superfcial registero decay as that which undierentiates. For the Etruscanpirates, chemistry started rom within but its existence wasregistered on the surace, so to speak; explicit or ontologi-cally registered decay was merely a superfcial symptom o analready ounded decay, decay as a pre-established universalchemistry. The victim could only be unshackled rom the