Dead

Two claims, and the second is the sharper one. Dead names a position low on a spectrum of animation rather than a state on the far side of a line, which follows from Marsh's treatment of life as a force flowing in and out of objects rather than as a property a thing either has or does not. The second claim is that dead is an endoreality term, meaning the boundary is assigned by an authority rather than discovered, and the evidence she gives is that the boundary keeps moving for reasons that have nothing to do with biology. In medicine the definition is subjective in practice. A person may be declared dead earlier in the process if they run out of money to pay for treatment, and earlier still if their living organs are needed for somebody else. Brain dead is a recent invention created to make organ harvesting acceptable to the authorizing next of kin, since harvesting has to happen before a person is dead by the ordinary definition. English carries one kind of life and one kind of death, which she treats as a poverty peculiar to one recent materialist tradition rather than as precision, given that most cultures have distinguished several. The consequence runs in the other direction too. If the dead are low on a spectrum rather than absent, then the living continuing the selves of the dead is a description rather than a figure of speech, which is what an admonition like do not speak ill of the dead already recognizes.

Determining death is an active problem in medicine and law rather than a settled one. Cardiopulmonary and neurological criteria coexist, the Uniform Determination of Death Act in the United States accommodates both and bioethicists including Robert Veatch and Alan Shewmon have argued for decades that brain death is a legal convention adopted for transplantation rather than a biological fact. Anthropology records societies in which death is a process taking months and requiring second burial, following Robert Hertz. Marsh's position is close to the critical bioethics reading but reaches it from a different premise, since she treats animation as a continuum for reasons drawn from her account of life as energy rather than from the transplantation debate, and takes the movable boundary as confirmation rather than as the problem to be solved.