Esprit de corps, matière d’âme : les cadavres exquis du petit écran (The Walking Dead, Bones, CSI, Dexter, The Closer, et quelques autres)

Abstract

At a time when death, by proscription, has entered into crisis in western societies, we have reason to wonder about the multiplication of corpses in TV shows. The more that the body is sublimated and abstracted from the ruin of time in idealized representations, the more the corpse intervenes to remind us of the body’s repugnant future. A comparable questioning of human material and of the uncertain transcendence of the body comes to light here, an obsessional investigation of bodily material and the search for the soul, for the spirit, for the dimension of aspiration in something beyond the physical and the material that could constitute the ultimate specificity of the human, while, simultaneously, techniques, technologies, and sciences tend to reduce it to neurobiological proceedings and behavioral automatisms. This is the tension that this article will explore, opening interpretive paths towards the resurgence of the memento mori in televised form.

Keywords

• Walking Dead (The)
• Bones
• CSI
• Dexter
• Closer (The)
• Criminal Minds