Queering the Social Imaginaries of the Dead

I offer a philosophical examination and feminist queering of the social imaginaries of the dead – with specific reference to recent public disclosures about death in Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes – by looking at the issue of spectrality through the work of Jacques Derrida and others. What does it mean to respond to the dead, who, though temporarily forgotten, return to haunt us not as remembered human beings but as remnants or remainders? The normative distinctions between past and present; past, present and future; between living and non-living; absence and presence; and self and other are all made indistinct when displaced by a non-linear temporality. What differential is in play with respect to those who are grievable (in Judith Butler’s terms) and the others who constitute what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life? The strategy of memorialising the re/discovered dead seems inadequate, and I outline an alternative hauntological ethics, as suggested by Derrida, and ask if there are queer social imaginaries that allow us to live well with the dead not because we give respect, but because death itself has been rethought. I close with some speculations arising from Deleuzian vitalism and Rosi Braidotti’s optimistic claim that ‘death frees us into life’.