Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Useful Corpse: The Terrible Utility of David Wojnarowicz

What is it about?

In this essay the phrase “useful corpse” describes a particular set of strategies developed by artists and activists in response to the human toll of HIV and AIDS in America during the first two decades of the epidemic. David Wojnarowicz and the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, of which he was a member) are two entities who employed this tactic adroitly, savvily exploiting the hypervisibility of persons with HIV and AIDS in mass media discourses and turning this scrutiny from the epidemic’s “victims” to those whose negligence perpetuated the biopolitical crisis. Artists and activists staged the useful corpse theatrically, as ACT UP did with “die-in” protests in which living bodies acted as grave markers at sites of political violence. Others presented the useful corpse in a more moribund fashion, producing images of the body dead or dying, or staging political funerals in which the remains of the body ended by AIDS was presented publicly by the bereaved as proof of the human toll of political inaction in the face of the epidemic.

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Why is it important?

This essay contends that the useful corpse is a tragically perverse body that reinscribes the cultural attitudes it protests in being more useful dead than alive. A bitterly ironic figure, the useful corpse stages its own disappearance in order to command the attention necessary to sustain life. The useful corpse represents total abjection in both the Bataillean sense, as the person with HIV is prematurely condemned to death and partitioned from the social, and in the Kirstevean sense, in that the subject expelled from the social does not disappear, but rather remains at society’s margins. This essay examines the political and aesthetic terms and reverberations of Wojnarowicz’s and ACT UP’s terrible imperative to perform publicly total abjection in order to ensure survival.

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