Life in death : narratives of decomposition in science and literature

Abstract

Narratives of life, and of its cessation, are generally grounded in the notion of the individual as a ‘physiological island’, a self-contained entity that is identified with the ‘organism’. Under this notion, death of the organism is constructed as an abrupt transition between one state and another. The identification of this transition is dependent on biological definitions of ‘life’ as a property of matter, but is also dependent on the definition of the boundaries of the organism. The organism, identified as the group of structures encoded by human DNA, is, in both cellular and genetic terms, a minority player in the human superorganism. Only 10% of the cells and less than 1% of the genes in the human superorganism belong to the organism, the other cells and genes being mostly bacterial. This human system is moreover a habitat for bacteria, fungi, and, depending on the circumstances, various invertebrate parasites.