Bodies’ Strange Stories : Les Revenants and The Leftovers

Abstract

Focusing on two TV series, the French Les Revenants and the American The Leftovers, the essay aims to analyse the cultural and techno-scientific paradigm of animation of the inanimate and its opposite, which may range from reification and ghostly disembodiment to a redefinition of what the human is. Driven by an apocalyptic imaginary, both television projects revolve around the failure of the natural order to distinguish and separate life from death; therefore, they revolve as well around the crisis of the psychological, social and ritual processes through which life, by working through the thought of death, allows the subject to make sense of time and reality—that is, to perceive and understand the finitude of things and the mortality of bodies.