Beyond the Species and Beyond Death: Staging Mozart’s Requiem

Over the course of the centuries, and increasingly since early modern times, Western culture has activated strategies aimed at obscuring death as a concrete and recognizable event and placing its representation within imaginaries that move towards a collective repression. Thus, death and forms of mourning have been transformed along the same lines as the change between “body” and “corpse,” casting a shadow over the experience of loss in public life. On the contrary, in contemporary necropolitics, the instrumental use of human existence (and of its end) is exhibited as a political-symbolic legitimization of how particular groups and subjects are exposed to the risk of death, accepted as a socially acceptable eventuality (as in the care of migrants).1 Within the context of this paradoxical imbalance, in Judith Butler’s studies on contemporary forms of mourning, the urgency of reconnecting grief is considered within the community. This not only leads to a need to redefine the concept of what is “human,” based on an awareness of our shared vulnerability and the precariousness of our lives, but also to reclaim collective mourning as an exercise of social justice and an ethical responsibility that must be shared.2