Vigor Mortis, or the failure of death disavowal

Christian Nirvana Damato

18 July 2025

Starting from the reading of the dream of the fire mentioned by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams and reread by Lacan in one of his Seminars, in Disavowal the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Alenka Zupančič affirms how the "true nightmare" is not so much the one embodied in a temporary dream phase, albeit in its eventual recurrence, but rather the one from which we cannot wake up by escaping into reality. When the factual components that make a nightmare such persist in the everyday, what happens to some extent is a countermeasure of disavowal, which, broadly speaking, defines a condition in which, when we are confronted with a problem that is too big, complex and undeniable, our reaction is to resignify these overt signs of the nightmare by translating them into a form that allows us to deal with them in some way, thus deluding ourselves that we can wake up and continue living as if nothing is wrong.

The mechanics of disavowal can be applied in a variety of ways and contexts, one of which could be death and grieving: in fact, something similar happens in David Cronenberg's The Shrouds (2024).

First disavowal (technology)

In the film, protagonist Karsh (Vincent Cassel)—starring as Cronenberg's alter-ego himself-loses his wife to cancer, and to cope with the loss he invents a wearable shroud (Shiny Cloth Technology) consisting of a series of internal cameras capable of constantly filming the corpse inside the coffin, and then constantly broadcasting the recording live on a device screen. Over the next four years, the shroud became the spearhead of a multinational entrepreneurial project, GraveTech, a system for digitizing cemeteries and "connecting" loved ones with the graves of the deceased.

In Karsh's atheistic, organic view, the body ''is reality,'' after that there is nothing. This consideration leads the protagonist to chase his wife's body all the way into the coffin. It is as if there is a second phase of life together; the first between two living bodies, the second of digital wakefulness on a kind of second post-mortem old age, where in the deteriorating phase there remains a form of movement and transformation of the body, until it leaves a bony simulacrum that no longer even houses third life forms. The act of live recording, made of 360-degree rotation and zooming, indicates the need and desire to reproduce movements of the gaze of approaching that lost intimacy.

The invention of the shroud is not only to be read as a technical response designed to support Karsh's endurance of finitude and death, but also as an early form of disavowal of this very truth.

At one point in the film, when his wife's body disappears, Karsh tries to put on the shroud, while his ex-wife's sister (both played by Diane Kruger), bursting into the apartment and asking him what he was doing, receives as her response, ''I wanted to know how he felt about being in here.'' The sister's obvious observation is that Becca (Karsh's ex-wife) could not feel anything, having died. This seemingly simple scene in its poignancy is actually precisely the first evidence of how the very construction of the shroud was an initial act of resignification linked to a broader and more diverse process of disavowal that unfolds throughout the film through a number of aspects (if this one is technical, the other two-as we shall see-are dreamlike and conspiratorial).

Although Karsh keeps repeating that the body is the limit and after that there is nothing, although he knows-as an atheist-that this is the underlying truth, the construction and fruition of the shroud is meant to recreate a bridge in which this truth falters and the desperate belief in an afterlife surfaces as a necessity. In his perpetual nightmare from which he cannot wake up, the technical invention of the shroud is a measure adopted in reality so that he can continue to dream, after all, that on the other side what we see is somehow alive and close. Even in its organicity, Karsh's invention has its own tragically spiritual matrix insofar as the belief emerges that that body can feel something despite being a corpse in a shroud. In the final analysis, Shiny Cloth Technology is not a tool that responds to a rational, techno-scientific ideological matrix that denies any form of afterlife, but a form of disavowal that goes to resignify that epistemological limit by opening up spaces of conflict, those of obsessive visuality, that allow unconscious elements of belief to emerge that are neither definable nor visible, but necessary to sustain and endure the everyday.

So far so good, to quote another of Cassel's characters, time passes by witnessing a second phase of life together that all in all makes everyday life bearable, joining entrepreneurial commitments. All this architecture of diversion (which according to Peter Wessel Zapffe would be the third most prevalent defense mechanism of human beings, that is, a process designed to keep us occupied with an incessant stream of "impressions") collapses the moment the grave is desecrated and his wife's funeral disappears. We must read this act metaphorically, as well as the whole film and the ensuing succession of plot from this "theft": the disappearance of the remains of Becca's body represents the failure of the material and rational attempt at disavowal, a moment of no return in which the construction of a coherent frame begins to crumble.

But why does it begin to crumble? What lack does the empty coffin indicate?

Perhaps, technology as the only tool of action for a false awakening (to keep dreaming) is not enough, especially when it follows an idea of progress as a resolution to all evils, ending up in disembodiment and disinterest in the body. The disappearance of that corpse perhaps indicates that, despite the extent of the shroud, at the moment when the body really dies, any technical and rational tool is not enough to assist a truly functional form of disembodiment. Reason coupled with the technology of the shroud is not enough, perhaps the latter does not have enough strength in constructing on its own a narrative superstructure to make more powerful the experience of contemplating the corpse, which after all is not far removed from many religious experiences.

Second and third disavowals (dreams and conspiracy)

The desire of the protagonist is not metaphysical and spiritual, but is first and foremost related to an affective and sexual love in a carnal measure of the term, since for Karsh the body is everything; it is this, the lack that the high-tech shroud attempts to fill, and which fails at the moment when the body-after four years-completely ceases its post-mortem aging process: the skeletal simulacrum returns a second death, and it is at this moment in the film that the body is metaphorically stolen and we find ourselves witnessing an awakening of Karsh in terms of a desiring subject. After four years, sexual desire reappears in the protagonist: symbolically and literally, Karsh begins to see and touch other bodies as well (more or less, because for him it will always be a matter of making love to his wife through intercourse with other bodies, think of the explicit reference to Diane Kruger, who plays both Becca, his ex-wife, and his sister, whose body is therefore identical).

This awakening of desire manifests itself as an entropic unconscious that goes on to complicate and develop the whole plot, dangling two overlapping directions that intermingle and blur: one is that between reality and dreaming-which become increasingly carnal and sexual-and the other between truth and conspiracy.

When desire awakens, the nightmare of reality from which there is no waking up and in which the first rational form of disavowal has collapsed causes the beginning of a phase of decline for the protagonist, who is left with nothing but to use - without being aware of it - as defense mechanisms of the less rational means to defend himself from the brutality of pain. And so it is that reality is overlaid with recurring dreams that in turn become nightmares. Karsh seems to have no escape: even dreams mixed with reality become contaminated with the traumatic element; death seems to escape any process of positive resignification. All that remains is another strategy, that of conspiracy: who stole the body? Is there a larger design behind it? The last bastion is to construct a conspiracy theory made up of doctors, secret agents, experimentation and political issues in order to find a meaning that can work, following the failure of all other attempts. In the last chapter of Disavowal, Zupančič turns precisely to conspiracy theories, pointing out how they are a perverse form of disavowal, especially when what they attempt to re-signify is something too big or too far beyond coherent understanding. According to the Slovenian philosopher, conspiracy theories are one of the most elaborate forms disavowal. However, even in this case, the paths followed by Karsh end up getting tangled up and tripped up by his nightmares and paranoia, returning a completely unsuccessful declination, again, of a possible form of disavowal that would help to rework the protagonist's mourning: every elaborate theory remains inconclusive until the end.

Cronenberg himself, responding to a question about why much of the plot develops in this verse, points out how paranoia and conspiracy ‹‹goes with the grief" [...]. The death of a loved one is completely impossible and be meaningless, these are two things it's very difficult to accept, so in order to endure that you often find that people find to assign some meaning to what is happened [...], every conspiracy theory partly comes from a desire to empower yourself, you know what's really going on that other people do not know. [...]when there is no meaning we're going to invent somehow››.

The failure of any attempt to signify death and its radical meaninglessness is the ultimate message this film returns to us, without offering us a moral cue as to whether or not it is necessary to accept it in its meaninglessness and the inevitability of the failure of any technical or fantasmatic process of meaning-making. The ending is consistent in its incoherence: Karsh wakes up on a plane with his new lover; we do not know whether he is actually still dreaming, whether the destination is real or not. What is important is that the narrative metaphor closes in its inconclusive being, leaving all rational hope of signification on the ground and wallowing in the hallucinatory incoherence of nonsense.

The inevitable failure to disavowal death is what makes us human

Perhaps, what makes us human is not only the creation of myths, narratives and beliefs to make sense of death, but rather, above all, the conflict that is established with it and the ultimate awareness of its meaninglessness. At this point, precisely this underlying inconsistency, this unanswered hole that death leaves us with, is nonetheless that aspect so human that it allows us to reflect on the profound value of life itself. Accepting the meaninglessness of death, in a world where perverse, functional and cynical forms of disavowal resignify bodies and populations to justify the most heinous actions, is perhaps an act as human as it is urgent.

Biography

Christian Nirvana Damato (1994) is a writer, curator, and independent researcher working in the fields of philosophy, technology, psychoanalysis, and visual culture. He teaches media theory at the IED in Turin. He writes and collaborates with various magazines and publishing houses. He is the founder and editorial director of Inactual. He has published Multiplication of Organs Manifesto. Body, Identity, Technology, and Desire, with a preface by Vincenzo Estremo and an afterword by Franco “Bifo” Berardi (Becoming Press, 2025), Medial Disorders. Interpretive and Non-statistical Compendium of Technological Disorders. Vol I, with contributions by Geert Lovink, Alfie Bown, Isabel Millar, Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) et al. (Inactual, 2024) and Medial Disorders Vol II are forthcoming.