ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the precise modes in which the grammatological-archival work of the clinic serves as a silent point of relay away from the present spectacle of bodily carnage and the urgencies of care toward fragments of a medical past culled by seemingly haphazard memory from books and stories. In milieux where ethno-nationalisms turn necropolitical, the "supreme" question must indeed be the "question of the degree to which life requires the service of history at all". If the urban Colombo hospitals in Anil's Ghost are the site where Thanatos, chaos, and pandemonium rage, the hospitals of the North Central Province in and around Polonnaruwa appear as models of government. Depictions of medical work in the storied environs of ancient Polonnaruwa are quite differently textured from scenes set in the urban hospitals.
