ABSTRACT
In the forensic turn, metaphorical death is everywhere, but actual death is another matter entirely. The containment of death is an essential part of the promises extended by forensic logic; and this containment entails abstraction of the material reality of dying. Death lends itself easily to metaphor; the actual dying of a human being enjoys far less ontological clarity. The world, or its relevant aspects, became post-industrial, post-imperial, post-modern, poststructuralist, post-Marxist, post-Gutenberg, or whatever. Like funerals, the prefixes took official recognition of death without implying any consensus or indeed certainty about the nature of life after death. The metaphorical death with which we saturate our discourse is, therefore, paradoxical—a development, an overcoming of finitude, a birth as much a death. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin argues that: if it is in death that the spirit becomes free, in the manner of spirits, it is not until then that the body too comes properly into its own.
