A Thinking Corpse

A Thinking Corpse..

**"A Thinking Corpse: A Relational Aesthetic and Foucauldian Reading of Nizar Chakroun s Novel *The Days of the Murdered Fatimid*"**

**Author: Hikmet Elhadj**

**Abstract:**
This paper aims to examine Nizar Chakroun s novel *The Days of the Murdered Fatimid* through a hybrid lens that merges Relational Aesthetics with Michel Foucault s concepts of power, surveillance, and biopolitics. The study posits that the novel transcends classical narrative form, evolving into an interactive aesthetic space where the relationship between politics and poetics, death and narration, and authority and representation is restructured. The corpse in this narrative is not an end, but rather a reflective origin—a locus of resistance, aesthetic tension, and epistemological inquiry.

**Introduction**

In an era where the boundaries between literary genres are increasingly fluid and critical theory is undergoing a radical shift, the need arises to revisit the literary text not simply as a linguistic´-or-narrative structure, but as a relational space. Such a space reshapes the dynamic between the writer and reader, text and context, aesthetic and political, through various platforms of reception and interpretation.

This essay proposes a relational and Foucauldian reading of *The Days of the Murdered Fatimid*, a novel by Tunisian writer Nizar Chakroun, as a hybrid narrative form that invites the reader not to consume the story but to participate in its (re)construction. The novel resists linear storytelling and classical narrative resolution, instead introducing a narrator who is both dead and self-aware—a “corpse with a voice”—and thus reimagining narrative authority and temporality.

Drawing from Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of Relational Aesthetics, where art is seen as a social interstice rather than a solitary object, and combining it with Foucault’s genealogical approach to power and knowledge, this paper examines how the novel -function-s as a critical apparatus for unveiling the inner workings of biopolitical control, institutional surveillance, and the aesthetics of state violence. The text does not simply portray death-;- it politicizes and aestheticizes it, transforming the corpse into a site of epistemological and affective resistance.

**Body of the Essay**

Unlike conventional narratives that adhere to chronological coherence´-or-plot-driven logic, *The Days of the Murdered Fatimid* emerges as a narrative installation—an open system that invites aesthetic, ethical, and political engagement. The protagonist, Mokhtar al-Fatimi, is not alive in the narrative present. Instead, he occupies a metaphysical threshold between death and afterlife, awareness and disembodiment. Through his posthumous consciousness, the novel becomes a site of philosophical and existential inquiry.

The corpse, encased in an iron box, is not merely a symbolic device-;- it is a disciplinary apparatus in Foucauldian terms. It -function-s as prison, grave, autopsy table, and bureaucratic file simultaneously. The dead body becomes an object of scrutiny, of concealment, of denial. Rituals of mourning are forbidden. Family members are excluded. The corpse is handled not with reverence but with clinical, almost militaristic detachment. This aligns with Foucault’s analysis of how institutions exercise power over life and death, shaping subjects not only while alive but also after their biological demise.

Yet, this body speaks. It observes, remembers, protests. The narrative voice, oscillating between omniscience and vulnerability, exposes the mechanisms of postmortem violence—a term that takes on literal meaning in this novel. The autopsy scene becomes a moment not of truth revelation, but of further mystification, as institutional figures—doctors, officers, and state agents—struggle to classify what cannot be classified: a corpse that resists symbolic burial.

This resistance is aesthetic. The novel deploys its language not to explain, but to disorient. It whispers instead of shouting. It questions instead of answering. The reader is not a spectator but a collaborator in meaning-making. The corpse here is not a passive signifier, but a relational node that connects trauma, memory, injustice, and language into a single destabilized form.

The story does not end at death—it begins there. The autopsy room becomes a theater of sovereignty, echoing Agamben’s notion of the state of exception, where bodies are stripped of rights under the guise of legality. Mokhtar’s body is a remainder—a piece of evidence of political history erased, then staged. He is both victim and witness, matter and memory, absence and assertion.

Through the lens of Relational Aesthetics, the novel reads like an open installation—a relational art form that transforms the reader’s role from passive consumer to engaged participant. Every gesture, scene, and utterance invites aesthetic co-creation. And through the Foucauldian frame, it becomes clear that what is at stake is not the resolution of death, but its institutional orchestration.

**Conclusion**

Reading *The Days of the Murdered Fatimid* through this hybrid lens reveals a narrative that neither seeks closure nor offers redemption. Instead, it provokes. It unsettles. It demands that the reader become complicit in the unburying of silenced bodies and censored histories. Nizar Chakroun has crafted not simply a novel but a speculative archive—one that stages the corpse as a site of political and aesthetic revelation.

In an age of epistemic uncertainty, this novel reminds us that literature s most subversive -function- lies not in reflecting reality but in reconfiguring our perception of it. The corpse in this novel does not end the story-;- it *is* the story. And by listening to its voice, we are drawn into a space where power and mourning, fiction and resistance, become indistinguishable.

This essay, therefore, is not a final reading but an invitation: to dwell with the corpse, to think with the dead, and to reread the political through the broken syntax of the aesthetic.
(Translated from the Arabic by: M.A.Ahmad)


**Keywords:** Nizar Chakroun – Relational Aesthetics – Michel Foucault – Biopolitics – Metafiction – The Thinking Corpse – Hikmet Elhadj – Kinaya Magazine – M.Ali.Ahmad

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**This novel by Nizar Chakroun was published in Arabic language by "Meskilyani" publishing house in Tunisia 2025.

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