ABSTRACT
If we submit to a growing intellectual demand that we take account of the embodied nature of human life in our attempts to make sense of the social world, it is the dead body which most powerfully confronts us with the question of what social scientists understand by the term ‘human life’. When posed, this question often materialises as ‘what is it that constitutes the self?’. We need to recognise this question as one which has emerged from a quite specific Western intellectual heritage. Asad argues that it was during the seventeenth century that self-reference began to beckon as Descartes equated the human mind with consciousness (1998). The religious imperative to care for, or save, oneself lies at the roots of the notion of the ‘subject’ and by the late eighteenth century the mind had come to be understood as the subject within which ideas inhere. The possibility of the self or ego had come into being. It is therefore a sociohistorically specific concept-‘self’—which underpins a recent focus on the embodied nature of selfhood within social theories of the body. And indeed this concept-‘self’—has close allies in a set of kindred terms; identity, personhood, and the individual, all of which are quite specific to our own socio-cultural moment. Within this model of the self, flesh becomes central to a process described by Bryan Turner as ‘enselvement’ (1998). When the flesh ceases to be, when it is cremated or when it rots, we are left with the question of how ‘self’ and ‘flesh’, as conceived of by social scientists, actually relate to one another. If self and body are identical or mutually constitutive, does this mean that the self is discontinuous, something which is repeatedly reinvented as change takes place within and on the body’s fleshly surfaces? If this is the case, is the self entirely dissipated once the body has been pronounced dead?
