Poe and the Mystery of Things

dignity and solemness, the awe, involved with death--because elevated or deep feelings are absent in life--go up in the smoke of modern thinking: ratiocination. A person murdered, a dead body, is killed again, dies a second death this time for good. body loses all qualities which recall its humanhood (species-being) and now manifests the mutilations of a life impossible to live; it becomes a mere corpse, a hunk of flesh, visited by corruption. Yet in the horror of this process, in the repulsion consequent to its decomposition and putrescence, to use a Poe word, the body--nameless because undistinguished by that which would make it humanbecomes for the first time a referent to that which would be human. It refers to the hitherto faceless generality, in whose bad name it has suffered a fate no longer tragic but by now commonplace: deathly disfiguration. In the figure of its complete annihilation --in body as well as in name--the body is transfigured, as it were, into the afterthought of its own denial, the prefiguration of its blank future. Yet this future would be inscribed with the inescapable logic of the perpetual present. At the root of Poe's detective story lies the body. body which is never there, even in its negation as a corpse. Here we will not speak of the body in terms of the phallic mysticism of esoteric popular academic writing, but rather on its own grounds--those unhallowed by the Christian prayer and buried without further ado. Except the body in the prototypical detective story (actually, The Murders in the Rue Morgue predates our mundane, hence, as

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• Dialectic of Enlightenment

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor W Adorno et al.•Dialectic of Enlightenment…•2020

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