Corpse Magic: Echoes Active in the Slayer–Slain Nexus, Michael Taussig, 2025, University of Chicago Press
Had Freddy Alborta not lingered after other press photographers snapped their fill of Che Guevara lying dead on a slab in rural Bolivia, the Marxist messiah may never have risen again.
The contact sheets of Alborta’s celebrated photo indicate the photographer circled the revolutionary’s Christ-like corpse and worked the scene while military officers prodded it, gestured over it, and speculated about its wounds.
Moreover, the image that became so famous was the 33rd taken by the freelance Bolivian photographer working for Associated Press, and he was not even initially credited with authorship (read Patrick Witty’s fascinating insights here).
Nor was Alborta’s the only image taken of this momentous event—as Witty points out, the most widely-published photo was snapped by the Agence France-Presse correspondent Marc Hutten and is the only version in colour.
Nonetheless, there is a unique quality to Alborta’s work that remains haunting today, as the dead Che stares through the viewer to another possible future, alive forever through self-sacrifice in the name of a millennial ideal.
Hardly surprising, then that the Marxist art critic and cultural theorist John Berger was the first to notice its similarity with the masterpiece by Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480), for its expressive and messianic symbolism.
Thus was born a myth that retains huge potency and relevance but one that also tells us much not only about the inherent power of a corpse, but of how to unpick the undeniable magico-spiritual dimension of our existence in a materialist world.
How else can we explain the desire of some Marxists, for example, to be buried in Highgate Cemetery in London within the spellbinding proximity of the late great Karl himself?
Michael Taussig employs the comparison of Guevara’s body with Mantegna’s work as part of his fascinating interdisciplinary study of the anthropology of the slain and the slayer, Corpse Magic.
And what better place to start than Colombia, which the author—a renowned cultural anthropologist—knows so well: his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980)employed themagical beliefs of workers in Colombia and Bolivia as a lens on capitalist culture in the Global North.
Corpse Magic maintains this perspective, using fascinating but at times harrowing Colombian narcorelatos as a medium with which to explore a phenomenon that is arguably of critical importance to Marxist theory where matter and mysticism meet.
This fits perfectly with the author’s adopted intellectual mission—to employ anthropological observations about the Global South as tools with which to dissect the cultural realities of the Global North, thereby eliminating the distance between metropolis and periphery.
Taussig’s importance lies in his recognition that the superstitions related through Colombian storytelling—in this case to do with drug-trafficking, assassination and death—can in fact tell us about the real social relationships disguised closer to home by the process of mystification that Marx called “commodity fetishism”, a term he himself borrowed from anthropology.
It is arguably one of the bearded sage’s master concepts, a supremely important yet invisible aspect of behaviour describing how in capitalist societies social relationships during the process of production are mystified, manifesting as attributes of commodities themselves.
A good example is the luxury handbag costing £1,000—little more than a receptacle for keys, dirty handkerchiefs, stale biscuits from Costa coffee, and deodorant, yet invested with a symbolic value that far exceeds that of an identical throwaway plastic supermarket bag that does exactly the same job but costs pennies.
Commodity fetishism is critically important to the mechanics of capitalism because objects gain mysterious powers that conceal the human labour and social structures that produced them, and hence hide the exploitation that is essential to the accumulation of surplus value.
This strange magic with an endlessly imaginative capacity to deceive enables consumers to value a commodity more for its symbolic meaning than its actual utility or the labour that went into making it, and is an important concept in Marxist and post-Marxist theory.
Yet at the same time, such a mystical dimension of human behaviour is arguably the missing link of Marxism, denied by historical materialism yet endemic to social relations.
Let’s not forget that Marx began his most famous pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto, with the line: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”
To make the point, Marx drew a parallel between commodity fetishism and spirit seances in which people purported to awaken and receive spirits of the dead, thereby tapping into the popular appeal of spiritism at the time he was writing Das Kapital.
Taussig runs with this notion, employing the symbolism attached to corpses in a society of the Global South riven by violence to explore identical, yet unobserved, phenomena in the Global North—in this case US police killings of innocent Black people.
He identifies a convergence between the metaphysical and the physical that he calls the “Nuer-Effect”—named after a people in Sudan—by which the spirit of a victim enters the body of the killer.
He proceeds to explore Colombian narcorelatos for what they can tell us about this weird yet ubiquitous convergence when applied to cop killings in the US caught by bystanders on smartphone cameras.
The journey is as absorbing as it is instructive, taking us through an historical landscape not only about Colombia’s atrociously violent story, but of cemeteries, the sorcery of death, funeral rites, gangs, vengeance, evisceration, defilement, embalming, hunting, priests, the sheer sexuality of killing, and the “sacred axes” of dumped bodies that litter so many Latin American byways.
Characteristically, Taussig stops along the way to consider a vast bibliography of contemporary social thought, befitting of this cosmopolitan polymath and investing his work with rare authority.
His favourite waystation is the writing of Walter Benjamin, a similarly complex thinker ideally suited to Taussig’s temperament who brought together key ideas from Marxism with mysticism and theology.
Benjamin was also exercised by commodity fetishism, in this case in works of art, and in his essay “Capitalism as Religion” (1921) argued that capitalism serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish and disquiet formerly answered by religion.
Benjamin, Taussig observes, noted how late capitalist societies practise extensive strategies to deny death, taboos to tame it. We have invented our own forms of apotropaic magic—from science to restrictions on images of corpses—to protect us.
The denial of death, Benjamin said, together with the decay of craft production would spell the end of the oral storyteller—something that has clearly come to pass in the Global North.
Yet what if outside the North death is not denied in those stories, Taussig asks, mindful of Colombia, and what if as a result one craft in particular has not disappeared but has become so much more visible, especially as a result of the War on Drugs—the craft of killing?
After all, fetishism and its magical ripples are perhaps perfectly exemplified by the lust for guns—in the US, but spreading like cancer far beyond it, not only as mechanical instruments but as amulets exercising an apotropaic function.
And all the while standing almost eternally behind such “spiritual materiality” suffusing the modern condition, in Western culture at least, remains the very incarnation of corpse magic: the figure of Christ on the Cross.
It is the same figure that invested Alborta’s image of Che Guevara’s corpse with such renewable energy, a crucifixion for the contemporary era.
Taussig writes: “The mystery of the mystery of Christ lies not only in the ritualized state murder but in the fact that the story of a victim of colonial and local priestly rule was chosen to break the mold and give rise to a world-dominating religion.
“Let us not forget that in their separate ways both Che and Christ were regarded as saints because they were portents or prophets of revolution. Like Che, Christ the Jew was of the Global South. It was the Christians who converted his assassination into the exemplary instance of corpse magic that Nietzsche called ressentiment, the cunning of the weak.”
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Categories: Colombia, North America, South America, United States