thanatopraxis

From thanato- +‎ praxis, chiefly as a calque of French thanatopraxie. Doublet of thanatopraxy.

thanatopraxis (usually uncountable)

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   • 1984, Debra A. Castillo, “Burning the Books: Williams, Canetti”, in The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature, Tallahassee, Fla.: Florida State University Press, University Presses of Florida, →ISBN, pages 153 and 156:

     Marinetti’s “thanatopraxis” is more overtly political and less subtle than Derrida’s, but more immediately perceptible in its effects. Lafcadio Wluiki, the post-Nietzschean protagonist of Gide’s novel Lafcadio’s Adventures, is a practitioner of this revolutionary thanatopraxis. He is a literary man who rejects literature in favor of, one would presume, bombing libraries. […] Nevertheless, the burning is far more effective than mere denunciations that simply cast an Apollonian light on the surfaces of things. Thanatopraxis annuls this feeble light; flames and death speak from behind the mirror of imperfect resemblances.

   • 1984 fall, Andy Payne, quoting Steve McCaffery, “‘Nothing is Forgotten but the talk of how to talk’: An interview by Andy Payne with Steve McCaffery”, in Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Its Modernist Sources, number 4, Burnaby, B.C.: Simon Fraser University, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 81:

     Part bound, part articulated by a verbal order (the self of the proper name, the name of the Father in the Son) and yet incessantly striated and (as you aptly put it) ruptured by instinctual drives that surge through the linguistic order and are felt in (but never identified as) rhythm, intonation, this Subject as plurality will haunt, repeat and delete simultaneously the numerous eschatographies that inhabit and (at this historic moment) describe the act of writing as thanatopraxis.

   • 1986, Djelal Kadir, “Borges’s Ghost Writer”, in Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance (Theory and History of Literature; 32), Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN, page 41:

     Borges’s internalization of Valéry’s equivalents immortalité/inexistence is itself a mark of the Argentine’s ironic insight into this aphanisis paradox. That is why, I suspect, Borges displays such fondness for John Donne’s Biathanatos, where it is said that "Homer, who had written a thousand things that no one else could understand . . . was said to have hanged himself. Donne’s “fabulous or authentic” exemplum of Homer’s violent thanatopraxis, however, has not impeded Borges from pursuing and sublimating Homer as immortal phantom in the proliferating ghosts of incunabula.

   • 1990, Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, →ISBN, pages 6 (Prologue: Silence Speaking Words) and 122 (The Ear Heretical: A Theoretical Forum on Phonemic Reading):

     Hallam’s voice is certainly not to be heard in his letters, neither in the whole documents nor in the graphic letters that compose them. All that speaks in or through them is the spirit of the man: “and strangely spoke / The faith, the vigor.” Here is no phonocentric recuperation of speaking presence; the “thanatopraxis” (or death-work) of textuality is hardly accompanied by a voice or embrace from beyond the grave. […] In this they stage the relation of death to life; they inscribe, that is, by being no more than script, the relation of simulacrum to vital reality, of verbal ghost to the living body of utterance. True to Foucault’s double title, the labyrinth, become a hall of mirrors, becomes a tomb: what Derrida would see as the underlying “thanatopraxis” of all textuality exhumed and laid open to view in a quintessential modernist instance.

   • 1994, Philip Kuberski, “Mailer’s Ancient Egypt”, in Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory (SUNY Series, The Margins of Literature), Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, chapter IV (Chaosmoi), pages 163–164:

     For writing, as Derrida has remarked, is a praxis of death (a thanatopraxis) that embalms presence before its rot can spread to another presence, and thus to the idea of presence itself.

   • 1999, Garrett Stewart, “Motion’s Negative Imprint”, in Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 83:

     Hence the recurrent Derridean figure of textual deathwork, a phantasmal “thanatopraxis” of marked difference, rather than seen marks, out of which the referred word is generated.

   • 2003, Hugh Rayment-Pickard, “Death, Impossibility, Theology: the Theme of Derrida’s Philosophy”, in Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology), Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 15:

     The importance of the idea of ‘death’ in Derrida’s philosophy has long been underscored, most recently in Catherine Pickstock’s critique of Derrida in After Writing. Long before that, Geoffrey Hartman (in his highly influential work on Derrida, literature and philosophy, Saving the Text) identified what he called Derrida’s thanatopsis or thanatopraxis.

   • 2004, Djelal Kadir, “Coeditor’s Introduction: History after History”, in Mario J. Valdés, Djelal Kadir, editors, Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History (Literary History Project), volume I (Configurations of Literary Culture), New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page xxxvi, column 1:

     Between praxis and thanatopraxis, historical life and history tend toward the contingencies of the former, rather than the totalization of the latter. History still tacks its paradoxical course between the necessity of the first and the inevitability of the second. In this regard, and in this instance, the historian too is subject to history. The illusion of immunity from its ambiguities may well continue to be the metaphysician’s domain.

   • 2005, Hugh Rayment-Pickard, “Derrida and Nihilism”, in Wayne J[ohn] Hankey, Douglas Hedley, editors, Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth, Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 168:

     The concern with death that Pickstock labels ‘necrophilia’ is better expressed by Geoffrey Hartman, who speaks of Derrida’s ‘thanatopsis’ and ‘thanatopraxis’ (Hartman, 1981, pp. xxv–xxvi). The way that Pickstock manages to make death and life look like opposites in Derrida’s philosophy is to stop Derrida’s deconstruction in mid-flow – at the very point that his thanatopraxis raises ‘death’ as the return of the repressed.

2. (uncommon) Funeral rites; death rituals or practices.
   • 1983, Herminio Martins, “Introduction: Tristes Durées”, in Rui Feijó, Herminio Martins, João de Pina-Cabral, editors, Death in Portugal: Studies in Portuguese Anthropology and Modern History (JASO Occasional Papers; 2), Oxford, Oxfordshire: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, →OCLC, pages xi and xix:

     [I]t is the English version of Western death that seems to be spreading more widely […], both in the thanatopraxis of cremation which is spreading even in Portugal with the blessing of the Catholic Church and in the cultural ideals of dying […] In the 'symbolic' perspective one studies death through the prism of cosmology and community, collective and individual representations, mortuary rites, the cultural regulation of the emotions, thanatopraxis, mourning customs, the iconology of death.

   • 1986 [1974], Jacques Derrida, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Glas, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, published 1990 (1st paperback printing), →ISBN, page 86, column 2:

     Is the work [travail] of mourning work, a kind of work? And will thanatopraxis, the technique of the funeral rite taught today in institutes, giving rise to diplomas of qualification, be limited to one corporation among others, within a social economy?

     [original: Le travail de deuil, est-ce un travail, une espèce de travail? Et la thanatopraxie, technique de la pompe funèbre aujourd’hui enseignée dans des instituts, donnant lieu à des diplômes de qualification, la limiterat-on à une corporation parmi d’autres, à l’intérieur d’une économie sociale?]

   • 1988, Stuart E. Thompson, “Death, Food, and Fertility”, in James L. Watson, Evelyn S[akakida] Rawski, editors, Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Studies on China; 8), Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, published 1990 (1st paperback printing), →ISBN, part II, pages 73, 75, and 80:

     In some respects the thanatopraxis of the Cantonese as described by James Watson is more discrepant, though I will indicate later in this chapter key underlying uniformities. […] Another standard feature of Chinese thanatopraxis is that, whereas spirit-money, paper houses, paper representations of clothes, a set of real new clothes, and other items are all transmitted to the deceased in the otherworld by burning, food is never burned for the dead. […] An individual’s biological death is merely a chapter-ending in that individual’s more extensive biography. This notion, of course, is widespread and by no means specific to the Chinese syndrome of beliefs and thanatopraxis.

   • 1992 [1981], Roger Bartra, translated by Claire Joysmith, The Imaginary Networks of Political Power, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, pages 1 (Introduction), 208, and 209 (The Resurrection of the Corpses; footnote 3):

     The following essays attempt to establish subtle connections between many unusual themes, commonplaces and well-known political phenomena: namely, […] cartomancy, thanatopraxis, ethnopsychiatry, […] Thanatopraxis consists of a technique whereby a corpse undergoes somatic treatment and is then stored, a practice that substitutes the ancient religious one of simply burying mortal remains in a cemetery as soon as possible. […] Sophisticated thanatopraxis can work marvels with corpses deformed by accidents, skin diseases, cancer and other mutilations. There are specialized treatments for overweight or pregnant corpses. […] D. Rochette, quoted by Louis-Vincent Thomas, Mort et pouvoir, Paris: Payot, 1978, p. 129. My description of thanatopraxis comes from this book.

   • 1993 [1976], Jean Baudrillard, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, “Funeral Homes and Catacombs”, in Symbolic Exchange and Death, London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, →ISBN, chapter 5 (Political Economy and Death), “My Death Is Everywhere, My Death Dreams” section, page 181:

     Therefore, every thanatopraxis, even in contemporary societies, is analysed as the will to ward off this sudden loss of signs that befalls the dead, to prevent there remaining, in the asocial flesh of the dead, something which signifies nothing.

   • 1994, Burkard Sievers, Work, Death, and Life Itself: Essays on Management and Organization (de Gruyter Studies in Organization: Organizational Theory and Research; 51), Berlin; New York, N.Y.: Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, pages 10 (Beyond Motivation), 57 (Participation as a Quarrel), 146, and 149 (Equality through Death):

     What Ziegler (1982), the Swiss sociologist and politician, states about death in his remarkable book ‘Die Lebenden und der Tod’ (‘The Living and Death’) in which he compares the thanatopraxis – i.e. the way cultures deal with the fact of death – in our capitalist ‘Producer-Society’ with an African culture in Brazil, can be seen as the dominant image of man: “People produce goods and so themselves become products” (Ziegler (1982), 15). […] According to this more person-oriented perspective, the focus on our contemporary thanatopraxis relates more to the personal experience of life and death in the context of its social construction. […] Seriously acknowledging mortality as a human quality of all men and women would eliminate the main basis for inequality which, enforced by the total ignorance of death, is permanently maintained in the thanatopraxis of western societies. […] Contemporary thanatopraxis seems, as far as its lack of participation and self-management is concerned, to mirror the everyday reality in industrial enterprises.

   • 1997 [1994], Élisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Barbara Bray, “Tomb for a Pharaoh”, in Jacques Lacan (European Perspectives), New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, part VIII (In Search of the Absolute), page 407:

     The funeral parlor sent a specialist trained at the French Institute of Thanatopraxis to prepare the body for burial, with the usual arranging of the face and body to best advantage.

   • 2005, Véronique Campion-Vincent, quoting Jean Ziegler (Les vivants et la mort), “Facts and the Legend”, in Organ Theft Legends, Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, →ISBN, pages 65–66:

     I had to explore, area by area, the death practices (thanatopraxis) of the commercial capitalist societies of the West, […] The thanatopraxis of commercial societies brings legal assassination, as surely as clouds bring storms. . . . There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the conceptual apparatus of contemporary thanatocrats to exclude the arrival of a thanatopraxis similar to that practiced by Nazi barbarity.

   • 2007, William Pawlett, “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, in Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality (Key Sociologists), Abingdon, Oxfordshire; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 61:

     For Baudrillard all societies, ‘primitive’ and modern, share a necessary ‘thanatopraxis’. This means that any society must do something to ward off or make meaningful the ‘sudden loss of signs that befalls the dead, to prevent there remaining in the asocial flesh of the dead something which signifies nothing’ (1993a: 180).

   • 2017 [2016], Josep M. Comelles, Enrique Perdiguero Gil, translated by Kevin Booth, “The Walking Dead and Epidemics in the Collective Imagination”, in Toni de la Torre, editor, Medicine in Television Series (Notebooks of the Esteve Foundation; 42), Barcelona: Esteve Foundation, →ISBN, page 65, column 1:

     The series dramaturgy is therefore far removed from the idea of a chronic illness, whether degenerative or not, but rather placed in a setting much closer to the original model of the resuscitated corpse, matching a culture that systematically practices thanatopraxis and embalming before burial.