Description

In The Monstrous and the Dead, Mark Neocleous explores such questions as they run through three major political traditions: conservatism, Marxism and fascism. One of the things uniting these otherwise opposing traditions is that they share a common interest in the dead. This is therefore a book about the politics of remembrance, showing that how and why the dead register in our political lives constitutes a major dividing line for the political traditions in question: are the dead to be reconciled with the living in a conservative fashion, resurrected for the cause of fascism or are their hopes and struggles to be redeemed for a communist future? Exploring these issues reveals that, as well as leaving traces in memories, dreams and unfulfilled wishes, the dead also generate fears, most notably the fear that they are not really dead: they are undead and thus monstrous.