The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

All language is but a poor translation.

1.  

   Frankenstein…. is in important measure a story about the monstrous practices of grave-robbing, body-theft, and dissection – in short, about corporeal dismemberment. And the resonance of this story owed much to actual phenomena, which became points of contestation at the gallows in eighteenth-century London, as the urban crowd fought to save the bodies of the hanged from anatomists seeking to procure corpses for dissection. For the British working class, anatomists, surgeons and resurrectionists were all part of a general conspiracy to degrade and oppress the poor in both life and death through kidnapping, murder, grave-robbing and dissection. But these popular anxieties about body-snatching involved more, I submit, than the fear of one’s corpse being plundered. With the original accumulation of capital in Britain – principally achieved through dispossessing millions of the poor of their land – huge numbers of people could henceforth survive only by selling their bodily capacities on the labour-market. This unprec- edented and deeply traumatising experience was profoundly resented and contested. And rescuing the corpses of the poor from those who would claim them as private property in order to chop them up offered a rare victory in the battle to save working-class bodies from commodification.

   – David McNally, Monsters of the Market Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Lieden: Brill 2011) p.13 (via itsworsethanthat)

   (via cassavetesclique-deactivated877)

   Source: itsworsethanthat

   • 49
   • Link
   • queue
2. 1. bedangeroustogether reblogged this from itsworsethanthat
   2. mendandmakedo likes this
   3. lointaine-3 likes this
   4. little-coyote reblogged this from walterbasedjamin
   5. little-coyote likes this
   6. rhizombie likes this
   7. walterbasedjamin reblogged this from itsworsethanthat
   8. aaygeecee likes this
   9. teschioetibie reblogged this from walterbasedjamin
   10. itsworsethanthat reblogged this from walterbasedjamin
   11. anaramaparaiso likes this
   12. seniseviouyourum likes this
   13. windupbirdchronicle likes this
   14. wahaladey likes this
   15. swearimnotarboreal reblogged this from e-schatology
   16. howtotalktogirlsdialectically likes this
   17. heksenhaus likes this
   18. slashandburn likes this
   19. elektrokardiogrammatology likes this
   20. dontbesuchashmeeshmaa likes this
   21. astrochelonian reblogged this from jayaprada
   22. all-outta-angst reblogged this from itsworsethanthat
   23. karlkaos reblogged this from itsworsethanthat
   24. karlkaos likes this
   25. commondense likes this
   26. idoliveso likes this
   27. maxmaxmaaaax reblogged this from jayaprada
   28. echo0 likes this
   29. nathanhmoore likes this
   30. brokenscripts reblogged this from jayaprada
   31. dreams-from-my-father likes this
   32. jayaprada reblogged this from itsworsethanthat
   33. jayaprada likes this
   34. inkdefense reblogged this from itsworsethanthat
   35. inkdefense likes this
   36. itsworsethanthat posted this
3. blog comments powered by Disqus