Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia

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Cesare Lombroso—the godfather of criminal anthropology—cites the case of a 40-one-year-old male named Gruyo who lived in Vittoria, Spain. Outwardly, a normal man, married three times, having no previous trouble with the law, Gruyo, over a ten-year period, strangled six women, the majority of them prostitutes. He raped some but mutilated all, severing their intestines and kidneys, pulling the organs out through the vagina.[1] This pre-Ripper perversity, fetishizing the corpse, the body without organs, the organs without body, a sex object devoid of all resemblance to socio-sexual ‘norms,’ to embedded objects of desire, transmutes the flesh, the bones, the viscera into a sex tool, a mute assemblage of apertures and sites of multiple ingress—a chaos of new vaginas, a variation of mouths, an accretion of anuses. ‘In the desiring-machine, one sees the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces him to put aside his organs, to different parts of the machine, different and co-existing, different in their very coexistence. Hence it is absurd to speak of a death desire that would presumably be in qualitative opposition to the life desires. Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, by virtue of the working organs.’[2]

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