foley - voicing terri

Voicing Terri Schiavo: ProsopopeicCitizenship in the Democratic Aporiabetween Sovereignty and BiopowerMegan Foley

This essay examines the case of Terri Schiavo to develop a theory of prosopopeic

democratic citizenship. Prosopopeia*the tropological attribution of voice*rhetoricallysutures an aporia between sovereign and biopolitical modes of democratic governance.

Citizens are split by the democratic rationality of self-governance: they act as sovereign

subjects to govern themselves as biopolitical objects. However, that self-governing logic

begins to falter when applied to live bodies that are not speaking subjects. By projecting a

live bodys self-determining capacity to speak in its own voice, prosopopeia rhetorically

reconstitutes that citizens capacity for self-representation, mediating the gap in the

democratic order.

Keywords: Democracy; Voice; Citizenship; Biopower; Prosopopeia

While the voice has long been a commonplace in democratic rhetorics of rights, in

recent years the role of voice in American citizenship has been inverted. US rhetorics

of rights-claiming have traditionally aimed to extend equal voice to subjects who

were excluded from full citizenship, such as women and people of color. However,

increasingly, rhetorics of rights have turned that democratizing formula inside out.

Even as many speaking subjects continue to be disenfranchised as citizens, rights-

claiming rhetorics have begun to grant citizenship to bodies that are not speaking

subjects.

In the wake of the US civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, calls to

secure rights for a broad spectrum of non-speaking, living bodies have proliferated:

for example, animal rights, environmental rights, fetal rights, and the rights of

Megan Foley is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Mississippi State University. The author

wishes to thank Barbara Biesecker, David Hingstman, Paul Johnson, Michael Lawrence, Jason Regnier, Nathan

Stormer, and the CCCS editorial team for their insightful comments on various drafts of this essay. The author is

also grateful for helpful feedback from the audience at the 2008 National Communication Association

Convention. Correspondence to: 130 McComas Hall, Mail Stop 9574, PO Box PF, Mississippi State, MS 39762,

USA. E-mail: [email protected]

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2010 National Communication AssociationDOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.523433

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 381400

incapacitated patients.1 While the political status of these different bodies varies

considerably, the rhetorical strategies that constitute them as rights-holding citizens

are remarkably similar. As Jason Edward Black has shown, homologous rhetorics

invest these non-speaking beings with rights by asserting the personhood of their

living bodies and attributing voice to those bodies.2 These maneuvers assert the rights

of speechless forms of life by appropriating the trope of giving voice from feminist

and anti-racist rhetorics of rights.3

Traditionally, giving, claiming, or having voice has served as a metaphor for

political agency.4 Voice functions as a rhetorical condensation point for a cluster of

democratic values, such as inclusion, participation, and equality.5 As a political trope,

voice links these ideals of democratic representation with citizens capacity for

symbolic self-representation. However, that link between political and symbolic

modes of representation is broken when the trope of voice is applied to bodies that

are materially incapable of representing themselves through speech. These speechless

citizens demonstrate that voice is more than a political metaphor: voice also

denotes an embodied performance, a bodily and organic action, as Eric King Watts

explains.6 As more and more mute bodies acquire rights, it becomes increasingly

important to consider the place of the living body in the logics of self-representation

that constitute democratic citizenship.

An exemplary limit-case for examining the changing role of the embodied voice in

American citizenship*and the problems it creates for democratic governance*is theTerri Schiavo controversy. On October 15, 2003, the New York Times introduced the

nation to this voiceless citizen: Ever since Terri Schiavos heart temporarily stopped

beating one winter night in 1990, leaving her severely brain damaged, she has been a

woman without a voice.7 Schiavos missing voice quickly became the platform for a

high-volume public outcry. In response to the court-ordered removal of Schiavos

feeding and hydration tubes, ABCs Word News Tonight reported, There is a growing

crescendo of concern across the country, and people have responded in massive

numbers.8 As this crescendo reached its height, American citizens attached to

Schiavos voiceless body as a site of collective investment. USA Today proclaimed:

Schiavo has literally become the body politic.9

This symbolic condensation of Schiavos body and the American political body

symptomatized a growing popular anxiety about the place of voice in democratic

citizenship. Like the other voiceless bodies that have come to populate the US

citizenry, Schiavo posed a crisis of legitimacy for democratic logics of self-

representation. Schiavos voiceless body interrupted biopolitical strategies of American

governance that hinged on citizens right to self-determination. In a democracy

rhetorically grounded on the unalienable rights to both life and liberty, only Schiavo

herself was endowed with the right to decide on her own life. However, Schiavos

incapacity to speak made it impossible for her to exercise that right.

This impasse called for a prosopopeic maneuver that consolidated democratic

governance by projecting the voice of its citizens. Prosopopeia, the trope of giving

voice to a voiceless body, rhetorically resecured the link between citizens rights to life

and liberty*that is, voice rearticulated the biopolitical and sovereign status of

382 M. Foley

democratic citizens. The first section of this essay traces the opening of an aporia

between sovereign and biopolitical rationalities in the rhetoric of self-determination

that characterized the Schiavo case. The second section of the essay tracks the

provisional closure of that aporia through the reascription of voice and choice to

post-Schiavo citizens.10 The essay concludes by arguing that the contemporary

rhetoric of democratic citizenship increasingly relies on such prosopopeic maneuvers

to invest bare life with sovereign rights.

Democracys Aporia: Sovereign Citizenship as a Biopolitical Technology

According to Michel Foucault, biopower, or powers hold over life, inverts the

classically defined right of the sovereign state.11 While sovereign power is the right to

kill, or, more specifically, the right to take life or let live, biopower is instead the

right to make live and to let die.12 That is, the biopolitical state exercises power by

improving, prolonging, and regularizing life. As Foucault explains, this transforma-

tion by which care for individual life is becoming . . . a duty for the state requires anew form of governance that he terms the political technology of individuals.13 In

contrast with the negative, juridical function of the state, the biopolitical state

exercises power through productive interventions in citizens lives.

Giorgio Agamben explains that this politicization of life stages modern

democracys specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men

into play in the very place*bare life*that marked their subjection.14 This aporia isa point of inflection and intersection, where sovereign and biopolitical logics bend

and blend together. Agamben explains that biopower and sovereignty are not

completely separate political rationalities. Instead, democracy harbors a zone of

undecidability, where the sovereign right to kill and the biopolitical mandate to let

die become indistinguishable. This point of indistinction is bare life, the body

reduced to its most basic material condition of living. The seemingly oppositional

technologies of biopolitics and sovereignty converge on the bare life of democratic

citizens.

This is because democratic logics doubly position citizens as both sovereign

subjects and biopolitical objects. To explain this convergence of sovereignty and

biopower, Agamben turns to Aristotles conceptualization of citizenship, declaring:

Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation of the aporia that lies

at the foundation of Western politics.15 Distinct from the other animals, Aristotles

zoon politikon, or political animal, is a living being who acts on and governs his own

life. Aristotle distinguishes the political animal as born with regard to life, but

existing essentially with regard to the good life.16 This citizen is a subject who takes

his (or her) natural life as an object.

This political logic splits citizens and folds them back on themselves. Agamben

writes: There is politics because man is the living being, who in language, separates

and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in

relation to that bare life as an inclusive exclusion.17 Citizens exceed bare life by

becoming political subjects. Citizens become political subjects by taking their own

Voicing Terri Schiavo 383

bare life as the object of their political conduct. In this way, democratic citizenship

requires living beings to circle back on themselves. The self-governing citizen serves

simultaneously as the sovereign subject who exerts power over life and the

biopolitical object whose life is targeted by that power.

Consequently, Agamben argues that the sovereign technique of power over life is

not simply inverted by the biopolitical state. Rather, it is introjected within the

biopolitical order in the form of an exception. Agamben explains that paradoxically,

the sovereign decision is at the same time, outside and inside the biopolitical

order.18 That is, the sovereign decision establishes the rule of law without being

subject to it. Sovereign power functions as an exception to its own rule: the law is

outside itself.19 Sovereign power is eccentric in the strict etymological sense of the

word: its center lies outside.

Agamben argues that the sovereign mode of power reemerges in biopolitical

governance at this ex-centric location. Sovereign and biopolitical logics converge on

bare life, the threshold between life and death. He reasons: If there is a line in every

modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on

death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today

as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones.20 Bare life becomes a limit

exterior to but constitutive of the bioregulatory order. For Agamben, this limit marks

the place where thanatopolitics*the sovereign decision to kill*may be exercised.Agamben highlights the faux vivant, or brain dead person, as a paradigm case of

bare lifes subjection to this sovereign exception.21 Brain death exemplifies the zone

of indetermination in which the words life and death had lost their meaning.22

Agamben explains that such brain-dead bare life crosses a threshold where biopolitics

gives way to sovereign thanatopolitics: Some of the most ardent partisans of brain

death and modern biopolitics propose that the state should decide on the moment of

death, removing all obstacles to intervention on the faux vivant.23 For Agamben, the

faux vivant marks the increasingly permeable borders of the biopolitical order, the

mutable limit that enables the state to politicize not only life, but also death. A

number of scholars have interpreted Schiavos case as an exemplar of this

Agambenian exception.24

Yet Terri Schiavo seems to challenge the rule of sovereign exception that Agamben

theorizes. Although Schiavo occupied an indeterminate zone between life and death,

her body was not treated as an exception to the biopolitical order. As Slavoj Zizek

notes in passing, Schiavos body was not subjected to the thanatopolitical techniques

of sovereign power that Agamben describes: Terri Schiavo was a human being

reduced to bare vegetative life, but this bare life was protected by the entire state

apparatus.25 Although the Florida governor and US president, the Florida and US

legislatures, and the Florida and US judiciaries took various positions on the Schiavo

case, they all agreed on one thing: the state did not have the sovereign authority to

dispose of Schiavos life.

At both the Florida state and US federal level, executive and legislative officials

made vain attempts to contain Schiavos bare life within its bioregulatory logic.

Within a week of the court-ordered removal of Schiavos feeding and hydration tubes,

384 M. Foley

the Florida Legislature enacted Florida Public Law, Chapter 2003418. The act,commonly known as Terris Law, enabled then-Governor Jeb Bush to issue a one-

time stay in cases where family members challenged the withholding of nutrition and

hydration from a patient in a persistent vegetative state when the patient had no

advance directive or healthcare proxy.26

Governor Bush immediately issued an executive order on Schiavos behalf. He

justified his intervention in an editorial letter to the New York Times: In cases where

patients do not have an expressed written directive regarding end-of-life decisions

and where the patients guardian has a conflict of interest, it only makes sense to err

on the side of life.27 The governors brother, US President George W. Bush, echoed

his statement after signing the federal version of Terris Law, insisting that the

American government must always err on the side of life.28 The public embraced

the meme err on the side of life, which appeared in readers letters to the New York

Times, Washington Post, The Economist, and Newsweek.29

Both Bushes supported the pro-life policy by reciting a quite Foucauldian

biopolitical formula: Foucault writes that biopolitical discourse links foster[ing]

citizens lives and the states strength.30 Governor Jeb Bush explained that the

government ought to err on the side of life because Government has a duty to

protect the weak, the disabled and the vulnerable, a duty to protect our most

vulnerable citizens.31 President George W. Bush likewise explained: The essence of

civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are

serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.32 On

the night the US Congress passed the Palm Sunday Compromise, the federal version

of Terris Law, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist ended his closing address on the

Senate floor by quoting an email he received from a constituent: Not only do the

weak need the strong, but the strong need the weak . . . If ever the weak needed a

champion, it is now.33 In this repeated rationalization, the strong nation and the

weak citizen appear mutually dependent. The government may consolidate its own

strength by protecting Schiavos life, the life of the weak citizen. Furthermore,

according to this biopolitical rhetoric, the failure to protect her life would constitute a

failure to fulfill the essential duty of government.

While this biopolitical justification for government aimed to legitimate executive

and legislative actions that kept Schiavo alive, it ultimately revealed that those actions

did indeed err on the side of life. The moment executive and legislative offic-

ials decided in favor of life, rather than merely protecting it, they executed a sovereign

decision that violated their own bioregulatory rationale. Embodying bare life, Schiavo

symptomatized a fundamental undecidability between taking life or letting live and

making live or letting die, the aporia between sovereign and biopolitical governing

rationalities. Unable to exercise sovereignty over her own life, Terri Schiavos bare life

marked the inflection point where the states biopolitical mandate to protect life

mutates into an illegitimate sovereign decision. Protesters insisted that the state could

not legitimately make her live any more than it could legitimately take her life. Both

right-to-die and right-to-life advocates criticized the government for overreaching its


biopolitical function of protecting Schiavos life to make an illegitimate sovereign

decision on whether she should live or die.34

On one hand, right-to-life advocates described the court-ordered removal of

Schiavos feeding tubes as judicial murder, passive execution, and state and

federal support for murder.35 Right-to-life protesters carried signs declaring:

Hospice or Auschwitz?; Murder is Legal in America; Next They Come for

You: AmericaNazis.36 Comparing Schiavos death with a fascist, state-sponsoredHolocaust, right-to-life advocates questioned the right of the state to determine

Schiavos life unworthy and exercise a sovereign decision to kill her.37 On the other

hand, right-to-die advocates questioned the sovereign legislative and executive

interventions that extended her life, insisting that Terri was being forced to live and

should be permitted to die.38 Editorialists compared government interventions to

keep Terri alive to prolonged torture and cruel and unusual punishment.39 Like

the right-to-life protesters, right-to-die protesters criticized the government for a

violent and unjustified intervention in Terri Schiavos life. On the terrain of bare life,

the governments biopolitical mandate to promote life became indistinguishable from

sovereign force.

Rather than affirming the sovereignty of the state to determine who may live and

who may die, the bare life of Terri Schiavo did precisely the opposite. Discussions of

executive, legislative, and judicial interventions in the case frequently indicted

legislators in particular and the government as a whole for an illegitimate exercise

of authority. According to US News & World Report, many Americans criticized

Congress for exercising an abuse of power in the Terri Schiavo case.40 One

editorialist wrote that the American people fear government invasion of privacy.41

Another likewise argued that the Schiavo case brought out the worst impulses of

government to meddle in the most private of moments.42 National polls seconded

these editorialists sentiments. A poll conducted by the ABC television network

showed that 70% of Americans thought the involvement of the federal government

was inappropriate.43 A CBS network poll reported that 82% of Americans did not

support government intervention in the Schiavo case.44 As one editorialist put it: In

this most personal and intimate space where life meets death, there should be a sign

on the door: Congress Keep Out.45

Public responses to the Schiavo case did not invite the states sovereign decision in

this zone of indetermination where life meets death, as Agambens reading of the faux

vivant suggests. Instead, the bare life of Terri Schiavo produced a crisis of legitimation

in the logic of American democracy by exposing the sovereign force of law that

underwrites biopolitical techniques of government. To uphold the biopolitical order,

lawmakers had to step beyond the bounds of that order to execute a sovereign

decision. While the state could strengthen and legitimize itself by protecting the bare

life of Terri Schiavo, it could only do so by infringing on her political life: her status as

zoon politikon, a citizen with the self-sovereign right to act upon and govern her own

life. Schiavos bare life appears in public discourse as a surplus-figure of citizenship;

neither sovereign nor biopolitical techniques for governing life could contain her

rights-bearing body.

386 M. Foley

Editorialists described state intervention in the case not only as an abuse of power,

but as the abuse of Terri Schiavos rights.46 A letter to the editor of the Washington

Post argued: The Schiavo case is . . . a matter of protecting the civil rights of a person

with severe disabilities.47 An op-ed piece in the New York Times likewise argued that

the American public shrank from the sight of Schiavo being taken captive by

politics because the right of individual self-determination is one of the primary

American ideals.48 Another New York Times editorial even pointed out that Schiavo

was the Italian word for slave, declaring that Schiavo has become a slave to the

games politicians play.49 Against a vision of state domination and enslavement, the

public idealized Schiavos right to self-determination.

Public reactions to the Schiavo case insisted that the state had no legitimate

authority over her life because it would usurp Schiavos constitutional right to make

that decision. Described as a constitutional showdown, advocates on various sides

of the Schiavo controversy commonly argued that the proper and legitimate role of

the state was not to decide on Schiavos life, but to secure her right to do so.50

Editorialists criticized Congress for trampling on the constitution, and even

recommended that the overreaching legislators should reread the United States

Constitution.51 Editorials often quoted its preamble, insisting that Schiavos rights

should be protected because rights were the founding principle of American

government. For example:

Our American faith teaches us that, all men are created equal, that they areendowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the purpose of all American governmentis to secure these rights, not destroy them.52

Terri Schiavo, the citizen without sovereignty, posed a crisis of legitimacy for the

American biopolitical order, constitutionally bound not only to protect life, but to

secure liberty. After Governor Bush issued the executive order to reinsert Schiavos

feeding and hydration tubes, the American Civil Liberties Union petitioned the

Florida Supreme Court, arguing that Terris Law was unconstitutional on its face

because it unjustifiably authorizes the Governor to summarily deprive Florida

citizens of their constitutional right to privacy.53 Citing Florida case law, the petition

argues that the right to privacy includes a persons right of self-determination to

control his or her own body and specifies that this right should not be lost because

the cognitive and vegetative condition of the patient prevents a conscious exercise of

the choice to refuse further extraordinary treatment. The petition ironically*butsuccessfully*argued that although Terri had lost the ability to make the sovereigndecision on her life, she had not lost the right to do so.

As a result, the Florida Supreme Court struck down Terris Law as unconstitu-

tional, agreeing that the law abolish[ed] Theresas vested right to privacy because it

does not even require the Governor to consider the patients wishes.54 Furthermore,

the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts directive to remove Schiavos

feeding and hydration tubes on the grounds that the case is about Theresa Schiavos

right to make her own decision.55 The Florida Supreme Court thus affirmed


Schiavos sole right to decide on her own life even though she was incapable of

making that decision. In the ruling, Florida appellate court judge Stanley F. Birch, Jr.

criticized the legislature for acting in a manner demonstrably at odds with our

Founding Fathers blueprint for the governance of a free people.56 US governance,

Birch argued, requires free people*and consequently, requires that Terri Schiavofreely determine whether she lived or died.

After the Florida court order to withdraw Schiavos feeding and hydration based on

her right to self-determination, the US Congress responded with its own version of

Terris Law, transferring jurisdiction on the Schiavo case to federal courts. Unlike

the Florida law, this federal version was framed in terms of Terri Schiavos rights: for

the alleged violation of any right of Theresa Marie Schiavo under the Constitution.57

Even as it preempted the Florida Supreme Courts jurisdiction, the one-page bill

recapitulated its ironic assertion of Mrs. Schiavos right to self-determination. The

bill, signed into law by President George W. Bush, concludes:

It is the Sense of Congress that the 109th Congress should consider policiesregarding the status and legal rights of incapacitated individuals who are incapableof making decisions concerning the provision, withholding, or withdrawal of foods,fluid, or medical care.

Although granting federal courts the power to adjudicate Schiavos case, the federal

executive and legislature reaffirmed Schiavos right of self-determination despite her

lack of self-determining capacity. Even after Schiavo lost her ability to decide on her

life, the federal government charged itself with protecting her right to do so. Ruth

Miller writes of Schiavo: Her inert body was endowed with . . . intentions, desires,

wants, and needs; her political will was manifested through the Florida state court

system, through politicians in Congress, through the federal court system, through

bills signed by the executive.58 In the discourse surrounding Terri Schiavos case, the

American government could legitimately exercise biopower, taking her living body as

an object of power, only to the extent that Schiavo was the self-governing, sovereign

subject of that power.

According to the democratic logic of self-governance that pervaded popular and

political discourse on the case, Schiavos indeterminate position between life and

death called for a decision that only she had the right to make. However, being

between life and death made it impossible for Schiavo to make that decision. Thus,

rather than falling into an indeterminate zone in which the state could exercise a

thanatopolitical decision to kill, Schiavos bare life illustrated the states investment in

the self-sovereignty of citizens as a biopolitical instrument. Moreover, Schiavo

embodied the precariousness of citizenship as a political technology for resolving the

democratic aporia between sovereignty and biopower.

Voiceless and choiceless, Schiavo disrupted the operation of late modern

democratic rule, which as Nikolas Rose explains, governs through the regulated

choices of individual citizens, now construed as subjects of choices and aspirations to

self-actualization and self-fulfillment.59 In this democratic order, sovereign and

biopolitical rationalities jointly configure the democratic citizen as a political

388 M. Foley

technology. The sovereignty once consolidated by the juridical state is dispersed,

vested in citizens as self-actualizing governors of their own lives. Citizens, as

sovereign subjects, take their lives as objects for biopolitical transformation.

When the democratic citizen becomes the primary political technology through

which sovereign power is exercised, the sovereign exception*the law is outsideitself *applies not directly to the juridical state but to citizens as its self-governingexecutors. The sovereign exception of democratic rule thus may be stated: citizens are

outside themselves. Citizens internal division into subject and object serves as

the necessary precondition for their sovereignty over their own living bodies. To

restate Agambens formulation of the conditions for politics: There is politics

because man is the living being, who in language, separates and opposes himself to his

own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life as

an inclusive exclusion.60 That is, people become self-governing political subjects,

capable of taking their own lives as objects, by becoming speaking subjects.

Prosopopeic Citizenship: A Rhetorical Suture for the Democratic Aporia

Democratic citizens, as both sovereign subjects and biopolitical objects, are

structurally split. The citizens political split calls for a rhetorical splint: the capacity

to speak projected by prosopopeia. In speaking, citizens perform and transform their

political lives, becoming the autopoetic and autotelic principles of their own

governance. Terri Schiavo, as a citizen who could not speak, interrupted the

presumptive self-presence of citizenship that sutures the aporia between sovereign

and biopolitical governing rationalities. By reattributing speech to Terri Schiavo,

popular and political discourses tried to close the aporia between those governing

rationalities. Her case demonstrates why citizens must have speech to fulfill their

function as the relay-point between sovereign and biopolitical modes of democratic

rule.

Speech is the instrument that allows citizens to pass from bare life to political life.

Aristotle explains that humans achieve political life through speech: Why man is a

political animal [zoon politikon] in greater measure than any bee or any gregarious

animal is clear . . . man alone of the animals possesses speech [zoon logon echon].61

For Aristotle, the transformation of bare bodily life into political life parallels the

transition from phone to logos, from the embodied voice that belongs to all living

beings to the spoken language that characterizes human political community. Phone,

Aristotle suggests, is distinct from but included within logos: the living, embodied

voice is an element both excluded from and retained within political speech.

As citizenship introjects the bodys bare life into political life, speech introjects the

embodied voice into language. Drawing again from Aristotle, Agamben explains:

The living being has logos by taking away and conserving his own voice in it, even as

it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within

it.62 The democratic aporia between sovereignty and biopolitics manifests not only

in the inclusive exclusion of bare life in political life, but furthermore in the inclusive

exclusion of phone in logos. Insofar as the bare life of the citizens body functions as a


zone of exception, a hidden point of intersection between sovereign and biopolitical

models of power, so too does the citizens embodied voice.

The politicization of bare life necessitates the collapse of phone into logos; it is for

this reason that Agamben calls the politicization of bare life the metaphysical task

par excellence.63 The self-governing citizen, the technological hinge of sovereignty

and biopower, rests on an Aristotlean metaphysics of presence. That is, it rests on

the assumption that speakers are present to themselves and can, therefore,

symbolically and politically represent themselves. Jacques Derrida identifies and

critiques the metaphysical self-presence of Aristotles speaker, whose spoken words

[ta en te phone] are the symbols of mental experience.64 Derrida explains that this

privileging of the spoken word instantiates a logocentrism which is also a

phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being.65 If we assume that spoken

words are an outward expression of a beings inner impressions, the spoken word

appears to offer an ontological guarantee. That is, the spoken word seems to disclose

the speakers being.

However, rather than ontologically guaranteeing the speakers capacity for self-

representation, the spoken word*the performative articulation of phone and logos*rhetorically constitutes that capacity. The spoken word performs the reflexive

mechanism of self-representation: the capacity for subjects to take themselves as

objects. This performative constitution of self-representation is a prerequisite for the

political logic of self-governance; it allows democratic citizens to simultaneously act

as sovereign subjects and act upon themselves as biopolitical objects. The articulation

of phone and logos in the act of speaking is the rhetorical suture that establishes

democratic citizenship as the linchpin of the political aporia between sovereignty and

biopower.

Yet despite their performative articulation in speech, an irreducible gap remains

between phone and logos. While the articulation of voice and speech is a requisite

condition for democratic citizenship, that articulation is not a simple, additive

linkage: the citizens embodied voice is overwritten by speech when he or she passes

into the political community. Like bare life within political life, voice operates as an

inclusive exclusion within speech*not only included in it, but also excluded from itas an exception. Consequently, Agamben explains, The space between voice and

logos is an empty space, a limit.66 The embodied voice functions as the inclusive

exclusion of language, a limit at the center of political life. As an exception or internal

non-presence within logos, the voice simultaneously underwrites and undermines the

citizens capacity for self-representation*and consequently, vexes the democraticarticulation of sovereignty and biopower.

Schiavo epitomized the failure of the citizens phono- and logocentric self-

representation; the undecidability of the question on Schiavos life or death was

rhetorically formulated as Schiavos inability to speak her choice. Against those who

insisted on Schiavos right to self-determination, a letter to the editor of the New York

Times reminded the nation: Terri Schiavo cant speak.67 Speech was the missing link

between sovereignty and biopower in Schiavos citizenship: to exercise her sovereign

right over her own life, Schiavo needed to speak. Without the suture of speech,

390 M. Foley

Schiavos bare life rhetorically ruptured the fragile articulation of sovereignty and

biopolitics that characterizes American democratic rule.

Schiavos speechless body rhetorically produced a breach in democratic citizenship.

Consequently, the democratic mandate to protect Schiavos rights required a proxy to

compensate for her lack of speech: editorialists insisted, Someone has to speak for

those who cant.68 Moreover, commentators speculated that Schiavo created a public

outcry precisely because she was unable to speak for herself. A Washington Post op-ed

declared: Schiavo couldnt speak for herself . . . This silence, this absence, made her

an attractive figure for people with the presumption to speak for her.69 A New York

Times editorial similarly explained, Since she cannot speak for herself, those close to

her*along with thousands of strangers who never heard of Mrs. Schiavo before hermisfortune*have spoken and often shouted on her behalf.70

While commentators largely agreed that the speechless Schiavo needed a surrogate

to speak on her behalf, they highlighted the problem of identifying a legitimate proxy

for Schiavo: If we are unable to speak for ourselves, who speaks for us?71 A New

York Times columnist explained: The case has become a flashpoint in the national

debate over who should decide when an incapacitated persons life should end, and

who should speak for the wishes of those who have not signed directives.72

Accordingly, the controversy shifted, turning not on whether Schiavo had the right to

live or die, but on who could serve as the proper stand-in speaker to defend Schiavos

right to make her own decision. A letter to the editor of the New York Times

encapsulates this quandary:

In the tragic Terri Schiavo case and similar cases where patients cannot decide forthemselves, the question becomes this: Should the wishes of the parents or thespouses be honored? Who holds the best interests of the patient? And who bestspeaks for the patient and what the patient would want?73

This phrasing wavers back and forth between the wishes of the proxy and the

interests of the patient, between the patient who cannot decide and the proxy who

nonetheless represents the patients impossible decision. Because she is unable to

speak, another letter argued: We have no way of knowing what she would choose for

herself . . . whose rights are we talking about here?74 The editorial continues,

insisting that rather than protecting Schiavos right to choose life or death, proxy

decision-makers dangerously assume the sovereign authority to kill. These editorials

highlight the dilemma posed by proxy speech: even as a surrogate represents Schiavos

own sovereign decision, it also substitutes for her decision. The proxy functions as a

Derridian supplement, in which the play of substitution fills and marks a

determined lack.75 Even as proxies tried to resecure Schiavos right to decide on

her own life, filling the gap between phone and logos, they only further marked that

gap, undermining Schiavos right to self-determination as a viable technology of

governance.

Resuscitating Terri Schiavos political life required a reinstatement of the presence

between phone and logos, a rhetorical rearticulation of her voice and her word

amid the public cacophony that surrounded her case. Resecuring Schiavos right to


self-determination required a remarkable public display of prosopopeia.76 As Paul de

Man explains, prosopopeia is the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or

voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latters reply and confers upon it

the power of speech.77 Rather than speaking as proxies on her behalf, people began

putting words in Schiavos mouth. Advocates both for and against the removal of her

feeding tubes couched their arguments in the projected voice of Terri Schiavo herself.

Editorialists began to imagine what Schiavo would say if she could speak, peppering

public discourse with speculations about the wishes of the dying woman herself,

and patients autonomous decision-making.78 The Washington Post dubbed this

phenomenon Terri speak: advocates tendency to phrase their own positions on the

case in terms of what Terri wants.79 Public responses aimed to reinvest Schiavo with

citizenship by rhetorically endowing her with the sovereign decision to live or die.

Public prosopopeia reanimated Schiavo as a self-determining citizen by rhetorically

reconsolidating the self-presence of her voice and word.

The state also resorted to this prosopopeic strategy to determine whether Schiavo

would live or die. Despite all the legislative and executive interventions in the Schiavo

case, Florida state and federal courts of appeals ultimately upheld the 2000 ruling to

discontinue Schiavos nutrition and hydration because the Florida circuit court had

affirmed Schiavos right to speak for herself and decide on her own life. The Florida

court based its ruling on clear and convincing evidence of Terri Schiavos oral

declarations concerning her intention as to what she would have done under the

present circumstances.80

Although the courts judgment acknowledged that neither side is exempt from

finger pointing as to possible conflicts of interest, her feuding familys ventriloquism

of Schiavos own statements nonetheless operated as the best available evidence of

Terris own intentions.81 Good Morning America reported: The court weighed the

evidence, heard the witnesses, and found clearly that these were Terris wishes. The

fact is this is about what Terri wants, not what her parents want, not what her

husband wants, but carrying out her wishes.82 No one could decide on Terri

Schiavos life but Schiavo herself*no guardian, no proxy would do.At the end of a heavily debated legal battle over Schiavos guardianship, the

decision came down to a few secondhand, contradictory statements that Schiavo

herself allegedly made before her collapse. Several witnesses, including Schiavos

mother, husband, and sister-in-law, testified about various jokes and comments that

Terri Schiavo made while watching different made-for-television movies about people

on life support.83 Protecting Schiavos right to self-determination required a tragically

thin reconstruction of what Terri Schiavo herself would have wanted based on the

rhetorical projection of Schiavos own oral declarations.84 As one editorialist asked:

Is it reasonable to draw that conclusion from some offhand remarks she supposedly

made years ago?85 Another questioned: Do these conflicting post-TV accounts

really settle the question of Terris intent?86 Legally, they did. By attributing its

official decision to Schiavo herself, the circuit court recuperated Schiavos right to

self-determination. The prosopopeic reanimation of Schiavos voice rhetorically

reestablished her as a self-governing citizen capable of choosing her own death.

392 M. Foley

While the Schiavo question was settled legally, it remained far from settled in the

popular imagination. The public exigence that Schiavo raised did not end with her

own death: the Schiavo controversy called for prosopopeic citizenship on a much

larger scale. Using prosopopeia to recover Schiavos voice, citizens deliberating on the

Schiavo case were often struck by the fragility of their own voices. As de Man

explains: by making death speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by

the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death.87 The

voices and choices of all citizens appeared vulnerable after the highly-charged public

and political wrangling over Schiavos rights. The Schiavo case illustrated that

citizens right to self-determination was not coextensive with their ability to exercise

it through speech. Schiavo showed that citizens capacity to govern their lives waned

before their lives were extinguished. The living began to call for a way to extend their

speech to the point of death.

A theretofore underutilized governing technique came to the forefront to help

citizens avoid becoming the next Terri Schiavo: the living will.88 Also known as

an advance healthcare directive, living will is an apt name for a governing

technique that articulates life and choice, self-sovereignty and biopower. As a letter

to the editor of the New York Times put it: The Schiavo case will prompt many to

prepare living wills to exercise some control over the end of their lives.89 The

Schiavo case pointed out a crack in the self-governing capacity of citizens, a crack

that the living will could mend by expanding the scope of self-determination to the

very threshold of life itself.

Living wills consolidated citizens rights to self-determination by projecting their

intentions beyond their capacities to speak.90 Sources including Newsweek, the New

York Times, Washington Post, and The New Yorker explained that living wills could

state your wishes if you are unable to speak for yourself.91 Specifically, the

Washington Post explained that the living will dictates what kind of medical care you

want if youre unable to speak for yourself.92 As sovereign dictator and recorded

dictation, living wills became the voicebox of citizens right to decide on their life or

death.

The exhortation was ubiquitous: Get a living will.93 The Economist wrote that

Schiavos case should remind any Americans who do not want to put their families

through a similar ordeal to start writing their living wills right away.94 A legal expert

for the New York Times explained: Post-Schiavo, its become essential to have a living

will.95 In the final days of Schiavos life, First Lady Laura Bush announced that she

and President George W. Bush both had living wills, and encouraged other

Americans to prepare them.96 Florida Senate President James E. King, Jr. passed

out applications for living wills on the Senate floor, urging Senators to fill them out

and circulate them among their constituents.97 A letter to the New York Times

celebrated this exhortation to write living wills as the one positive outcome of the

Schiavo case.98 Another New York Times readers letter even declared that situations

such as Schiavos scream for the necessity of living wills, vividly yoking self-

determination to the amplification of citizens voices.99 Newsweek, USA Today, the


New York Times, and Washington Post all published instructions on how to prepare

living wills. USA Today even included directions for throwing living will parties.100

Americans responded in massive numbers. The Washington Post estimated: by the

tens of thousands, Americans were taking steps to make sure their own intentions for

their deathbeds were crystal clear.101 Visits to the US Living Will Registry website

climbed from about 500 per day to between 30 and 50 thousand per day in the month

leading up to Schiavos death.102 A Time magazine poll the week Schiavo died

reported that 69% of Americans who had not yet signed living wills were now

planning to draft them.103 Headlines proclaimed: Groups See Flood of Inquiries for

Living Wills, and Many Seeking One Final Say on End of Life.104 The public rush

to acquire living wills amounted to a mass act of auto-prosopopeia that promised to

give citizens the last word on their lives. Prosopopeia, the trope de Man describes as

the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave,105 rhetorically revived citizens self-

determination at the limit of life and death.

Yet even that rhetorical suture was incomplete. While increasingly popular, some

critics speculated that living wills would not fulfill their promise to resecure the

autonomous decision-making of end-of-life patients. A USA Today headline summed

up the problem: Living Wills Not Always Followed to the Letter.106 The letter*awritten document*seemed a meager substitute for patients embodied act ofspeaking. Some skeptics suggested that living wills could not possibly anticipate the

infinite range107 of health conditions and contingencies that incapacitated patients

face; others noted that patients preferences change over time and across

circumstance. Still others claimed that caregivers often ignore or override the

decisions that patients lay out in advance directives.

Most of all, opponents emphasized the danger that living wills remained open to

misinterpretation.108 They warned that living wills provide only vague, inade-

quate, or paltry clues about patients wishes.109 They worried that patients living

wills might still be compromised by the guesswork and faulty assumptions of

healthcare providers and family members.110 Given the likelihood of misreading

patients directives, several critics cautioned that living wills can cause more harm

than good.111 Even Schiavo-inspired proponents of living wills admitted that due to

ambiguities in interpretation, the documents were not perfect and not fool-

proof.112

The overwhelming popular insistence on citizens right to autonomous self-

governance rendered even their personally written directives a grudgingly accepted

replacement for their spoken word. Although the prosopopeic maneuver of living

wills provided a momentary point of political stasis, it did not and could not

completely resolve the dilemma that citizens without speech pose for democracy. At

most, prosopopeia offers a fragile prosthetic to extend citizens voices and choices

beyond their capacity for speech. Without the embodied performance of speech, the

democratic logic of self-governance short-circuits. Speechless bodies break the self-

reflexive circuit that democratic citizenship establishes between sovereign subjects

and biopolitical objects.

394 M. Foley

Voicing Life Itself

While the Schiavo case offers an especially vivid symptom of this political breach and

its prosopopeic suture, her case is not the only sign of the escalating problematization

of voice in democratic citizenship. We hear progressively louder calls to grant the

rights of citizenship to non-speaking bodies as voices and choices are projected onto

more and more forms of life. Just as end-of-life activists resecured Schiavos self-

sovereign rights by attributing voice to her silent body, pro-life abortion protesters

imagine talking fetuses.113 Environmental rights activists speak in the name of

Mother Earth.114 Animal rights organizations ventriloquize endangered species,

livestock, and household pets.115 In a parallelism that cuts across the partisan

political spectrum, advocates for the rights of these speechless bodies herald the rise

of a prosopopeic form of citizenship.

Although the political and ethical entailments of attributing voice to these various

live bodies are certainly not reducible to one another, they collectively interrupt and

reconfigure the democratic articulation of voice, life, and rights. Like Schiavo, these

speechless forms of life have emerged as surplus-figures of citizenship that

problematize the democratic conjuncture of sovereignty and biopower: these live

bodies exist as biopolitical objects without the capacity to govern their lives as

sovereign, speaking subjects. Moreover, like Schiavo, these surplus-citizens call for

prosopopeic rhetorics that endow them with voices in order to incorporate their

speechless bodies within the reflexive democratic logic of self-representation.

Yet, even as the prosopopeic ascription of voice to bare life attempts to reestablish

the self-representational capacity on which democratic citizenship depends, it reveals

the ruse underlying that self-representational logic. As these surplus-citizens belie the

phonocentric sleight-of-hand that underwrites self-representation, they show how all

democratic citizens require what Bruno Latour calls speech prostheses. He explains,

no beings, not even humans, speak on their own, but always through something or

someone else.116 That is, even citizens who appear fully capable of representing

themselves through speech require prosopopeic prosthetics. As the public response to

the Schiavo case illustrates, speechless citizens bring speaking citizens face to face

with the vulnerability of their own voices. Speaking citizens depend on prosopopeic

prosthetics, in this case living wills, to extend their capacity to symbolically and

politically represent themselves. As prosopopeia becomes a pervasive rhetorical form

that crafts US citizenship today, it exposes a mutability*an undecidable silence*atthe heart of democracys logic of self-representation.

As speechless citizens have brought the prosopopeic form to the forefront in

contemporary American political culture, the impact of prosopopeia touches even

those citizens whose capacity for self-representation seems most secure. When

applied to bodies without speech, prosopopeia allows us to imagine self-governing

citizens where there were none, to imagine that life itself has a voice. However, when

applied to speaking bodies, the projection of sovereign voice onto bare life can

undermine citizens capacity to govern their own lives. Thus, even while various

branches of the Florida and US governments maneuvered to protect Schiavos right to


choose her own life or death, 48 of the 50 United States, including Florida, legally

deny end-of-life patients who can speak the right to choose their own death through

physician-assisted suicide.117 Ventriloquizing the bare life of an already-speaking

citizen pits that citizens bare life against his or her political life, ultimately justifying

the make live biopolitical agenda of the American democratic state. As prosopopeia

imagines bare life to speak for itself, this trope enables the democratic state apparatus

to speak in its name. To the extent that the prosopopeic politicization of bare life

becomes a commonplace of American citizenship, life itself becomes sovereign.

The rhetorical transformation of mute, life-bearing bodies into voiced, rights-

bearing citizens signals this increasing politicization of bare life. However, it

demonstrates that the politicization of bare life need not lead inevitably to a

thanatopolitical state, as Agamben suggests, in which stripping citizens down to their

bare lives dehumanizes them and justifies the states sovereign decision to kill them.

The prosopopeic mode of politicizing bare life does the opposite: it personifies bare

life and inscribes it with the sovereign right to speak for itself. As Schiavos case

illustrates, the politicization of bare life may take this more thoroughly democratic

form, in which bare life is not merely a voiceless object. Instead, bare life becomes the

site of a vocal projection that rhetorically constitutes it as a self-governing*and thus,democratically governable*subject.

Notes

[1] For an exemplary treatment of the extension of womens liberation and civil rights rhetoric

to animal and environmental rights, see Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of

Environmental Ethics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

[2] Jason Edward Black, Extending the Rights of Personhood, Life, and Voice to Sensate

Others: A Homology of Right to Life and Animal Rights Rhetoric, Communication

Quarterly 51 (2003): 31231. Although Black does not specifically address environmentalrights rhetoric in this essay, Nash shows how tropes of personhood and voice also apply

there.

[3] Black, Extending the Rights, 3213; Nash, Rights of Nature, 3.[4] For a state-of-the-art review and critique of this body of scholarship, see Eric King Watts,

Voice and Voicelessness in Rhetorical Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001):

17996.[5] For example, Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,

Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Sidney Verba,

Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in

American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

[6] Watts, Voice and Voicelessness in Rhetorical Studies, 181.

[7] Abby Goodnough, A Right-to-Die Battle Enters its Final Days, New York Times, October 15,

2003, A12.

[8] Right to Die Comatose Womans Force-feeding Resumes, World News Tonight, American

Broadcasting Corporation, October 21, 2003, http://web.lexisnexis.com/univers (accessed

13 November 2008).

[9] Jonathan Turley, Temptation Tops the Constitution, USA Today, March 23, 2005, A13.

[10] Denise Grady, The Best Way to Keep Control: Leave Instructions, New York Times, March 29,

2005, F5.

396 M. Foley

[11] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 197576,trans. David Macey (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 239.

[12] Ibid., 241. For a thoroughgoing Foucauldian analysis that situates the Schiavo case within

the larger discourse formation of right-to-die rhetoric, see Todd McDorman, Controlling

Death: Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy, Communication and Critical/Cultural

Studies 2 (2005): 25779.[13] Michel Foucault, The Political Technology of Individuals, in Michel Foucault: Power, Vol. 3,

ed. James Fabian (New York: The New Press, 1991), 404.

[14] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 910.[15] Ibid., 11.

[16] Aristotle, Politics, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 11.

[17] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8.

[18] Ibid., 15.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., 122.

[21] Ibid., 165.

[22] Ibid., 164.

[23] Ibid., 165.

[24] For example, Jeffrey Bishop, Biopolitics, Terri Schiavo, and the Sovereign Subject of

Death, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29 (2008): 53857; Joshua Perry, Biopolitics atthe Bedside: Proxy Wars and Feeding Tubes, Journal of Legal Medicine 28 (2007): 17192.

[25] Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 372.

[26] An Act Relating to the Authority of the Governor to Issue a One-time Stay, Florida. Public

Law, 2003418 (October, 21 2003).[27] John Ellis Bush, Schiavos Life and Death, New York Times, June 18, 2005, A12.

[28] The Economist, The Sad Case of Terri Schiavo, March 26, 2005.

[29] The Economist, Whose Life is it, Anyway?, November 1, 2003, 27; Newsweek, Mail Call:

Dreams of Revolution, August 15, 2005, 11; New York Times, Congress, the Courts and the

Terri Schiavo Case, March 23, 2005, A5; E. J. Dionne Jr., A Thin View of Life,

Washington Post, March 25, 2005, A19.

[30] Foucault, Political Technology, 415.

[31] Bush, Schiavos Life and Death.

[32] National Public Radio, E. J. Dionne and David Brooks Discuss the Death of Terri Schiavo,

All Things Considered, March, 31 2005.

[33] National Review, Corner Extra: Frist on Terri Schiavo, March 18, 2005, http://

www.nationalreview.com/comment/frist200503181027.asp (accessed November 13, 2008).

[34] Delimited within this essays scope, I focus narrowly on the opposition to state intervention

that these rights-based discourses shared. For an in-depth rhetorical analysis of the complex

ethical controversy the Schiavo case provoked between right-to-die and right-to-life

movements, see Michael Hyde and Sarah McSpiritt, Coming to Terms with Perfection: The

Case of Terri Schiavo, Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 15078.[35] Deborah Sharp, Fla. Court OKs Letting Woman Die, USA Today, October 15, 2003, A3;

New York Times, Jeb Bushs Move in the Schiavo Case, June 21, 2005, A4; Tampa Tribune,

Divided by Belief, March 22, 2005, 13.

[36] Rick Lyman, Protesters with Hearts on Sleeves and Anger on Signs, New York Times,

March 28, 2005, A1.

[37] The Economist, The Misery Goes On: Terri Schiavo, March 26, 2005, 29.

[38] Philip Kennicott, Symbol of Emptiness: Terri Schiavo Was a Woman, Not an Idea,

Washington Post, April 1, 2005, C1.

[39] USA Today, Fla. Battle over Life, Death is Outrageous, October 27, 2003, A11.


[40] Danielle Knight and Kenneth Walsh, Case of Fiddling While Rome Burns?, US News &

World Report, May 2, 2005, 14.

[41] Sacramento Bee, Terry Schiavo and Her Life, March 22, 2005, B6.

[42] St. Petersburg Times, Terris Legacy, April 1, 2005, A20.

[43] Francis Harris, The Family Dispute that Divides a Nation, Daily Telegraph, March 22,

2005, 12.

[44] St. Petersburg Times, By the Numbers: Theresa Marie Schiavo: 19632005, April 1, 2005,A6.

[45] Abigail Trafford, Terri Schiavo and the Reality Gap, Washington Post, March 29, 2005, F6.

[46] Clinton Taylor, Where Theres No Will, American Spectator, March 22, 2005, http://

www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id7920 (accessed November 13, 2008).[47] Washington Post, Congress, the Courts and the Terri Schiavo Case, March 22, 2005, A16.

[48] New York Times, Theresa Marie Schiavo, April 1, 2005, A22.

[49] Joyce Purnick, Passing Buck on Schiavo Cheats Public, New York Times, March 24, 2005,

B1.

[50] Adam Liptak, In Florida Right-to-Die Case, Legislation that Puts the Constitution at

Issue, New York Times, October 23, 2003, A20.

[51] New York Times, The Legacy of Terri Schiavo, April 2, 2005, A14; Turley, Temptation.

[52] William Bennett and Brian Kennedy, The Right to Life: Protecting One Woman, National

Review, March 24, 2005, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bennet_kennedy200503

240814.asp (accessed November 13, 2008).

[53] Schiavo v. Bush, No. 03-008212-CI-20, 2004 WL 628663 (Fla. Cir. Ct. 2004), 9.

[54] Bush v. Schiavo, 886 So. 2d-136 (Fla. 2d DCA 2004), 9.

[55] Ibid., 8.

[56] Dana Milbank, GOP, Democrats Look for Symbolism in Schiavo Case, Washington Post,

April 1, 2005, A12.

[57] An Act for the Relief of the Parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo, Public Law 1093 (March 21,2005).

[58] Ruth Miller, On Freedom and Feeding Tubes: Reviving Terri Schiavo and Trying Saddam,

Law and Literature 19 (2007): 174.

[59] Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Boston, MA: Cambridge

University Press, 1999), 41.


[61] Aristotle, Politics, 11.


[63] Ibid.

[64] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins


[65] Ibid., 1112.[66] Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron

(London: Verso, 1993), 8.

[67] Howard Johnson, Death with Dignity, New York Times, October 28, 2003, A22.

[68] Thane Burnett, Sounds of Life, Death: Terris End Loud, Divisive, Toronto Sun, April 1,

2005, 5.

[69] Kennicott, Symbol.

[70] Goodnough, Right-to-Die Battle.

[71] Emily Nghiem, The Battle over Terris Life, Newsweek, November17, 2003, 16.

[72] Abby Goodnough, Comatose Womans Case Heard by Florida Court, New York Times,

September 1, 2004, A14.

[73] New York Times, A Life Ends, and a Nation Pauses to Reflect, April 1, 2005, A22; New York

Times, Schiavo, the Courts and the Rule of Law, March 26, 2005, A12.

398 M. Foley

[74] Liza Hall, A Nation Gripped by a Drama of Life and Death, New York Times, March 22,

2005, A22.

[75] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 157.

[76] Thanks to Randall Iden and Randall Bush on this point. See also Lisa Keranens generative

remarks on prosopopeia in end-of-life decisions: Cause Someday We All Die: Rhetoric,

Agency, and the Case of the Patient Preferences Worksheet, Quarterly Journal of Speech 93

(2007): 198.

[77] Paul de Man, Autobiography as De-facement, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 926.

[78] Paul McHugh, Annihilating Terry Schiavo, Commentary 119.6 (2005): 32; Kennicott,

Symbol.

[79] Kennicott, Symbol.

[80] In re Guardianship of Schiavo, No. 90-2908-GD (Fla. Pinellas Cir. Ct., 11 February 2000), 9.

[81] Ibid., 3.

[82] Terry Schiavo Judge Grants Right to Die, Good Morning America, American Broadcasting

Corporation, October 15, 2003, http://web.lexisnexis.com/univers (accessed November 13,

2008).

[83] Taylor, No Will.

[84] William Saletan, As She Lay Dying, New York Times, November 6, 2005, G38.

[85] Jeff Jacoby, Praying for Certainty, Boston Globe, March 24, 2005, A15.

[86] Taylor, No Will.

[87] de Man, Autobiography, 928.

[88] USA Today, A Way to Avoid Schiavos Fate, January 27, 2005, A10.

[89] New York Times, As an American Tragedy Unfolds, March 25, 2005, A16.

[90] Living wills enact a different form of prosopopeic substitution than the Patient Preferences

Worksheet that Keranen analyzes in Cause Someday We All Die, 198. Instead of

substituting proxies signatures for patients autonomous decisions, living wills perform

self-substitution: patients own signatures substitute for their speech.

[91] For example, Jane Bryant Quinn, Capital Ideas, Newsweek, June 25, 2007, 26.

[92] Michelle Singletary, Be Sure to Have Two Wills So Theres a Way, Washington Post,

October 30, 2003, E3.

[93] Ibid.

[94] The Economist, Sad Case.

[95] Denise Grady, The Best Way to Keep Control: Leave Instructions, New York Times, March 29,

2005, F5.

[96] Anne Kornblut, First Lady Says She and President Have Living Wills, New York Times,

March 30, 2005, A12.

[97] Abby Goodnough and Adam Liptak, Governor of Florida Orders Woman Fed in Right-to-

Die Case, New York Times, October 22, 2003, A1.

[98] Amy Rosenfeld, Schiavo, the Courts, and the Rule of Law, New York Times, March 26,

2005, A12.

[99] New York Times, A Life Ends.

[100] Janet Kornblum, Living Wills Make the Scene, USA Today, April 28, 2005, D8.

[101] Manny Fernandez and Paul Duggan, End of Bitter Life-and-Death Fight Prods Many to

End-of-Life Decisions, Washington Post, April 1, 2005, A11.

[102] Marcus Franklin, Interest in Living Wills Falls after Schiavo Saga, St. Petersburg Times,

June 18, 2005, B1.

[103] Cited in Rob Stein and Karin Brulliard, Battle Prompts a New Interest in Living Wills,

Washington Post, March 22, 2005, A7.

[104] Janet Kornblum, Groups See Flood of Inquiries for Living Wills, USA Today, October 27,

2003, D8; John Schwartz and James Estrin, Many Seeking One Final Say on End of Life,

New York Times, June 17, 2005, A1.

[105] de Man, Autobiography, 927.


[106] Janet Kornblum, Living Wills Not Always Followed to the Letter, USA Today, March 16,

2005, D6.

[107] Jane Brody, Name a Proxy Early to Prepare for the Unexpected, New York Times,

November 18, 2003, F7.

[108] Jane Brody, Medical Due Diligence: A Living Will Should Spell Out the Specifics, New

York Times, November 28, 2006, F7.

[109] Living Will Laws, Alone, Cant Prevent End-of-life Disputes, USA Today, October 30,

2003, A14.

[110] Ceci Connolly, Schiavo Raised Profile of Disabled, Washington Post, April 2, 2005, A9;

Brody, Medical Due Diligence.

[111] Kornblum, Living Wills Not Always Followed.

[112] Sharon Jayson, A Living Will Clarifies Your Wishes, USA Today, March 24, 2005; Grady,

Best Way to Keep Control.

[113] Barbara Johnson, Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion, Diacritics 16 (1986): 2939;Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and

Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2553.[114] Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d

Others, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler

(New York: Routledge, 1992), 31113; Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies, in TheGreen Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (New York:

Routledge, 2000), 18992.[115] Black, Extending the Rights, 3216; Clinton Sanders and Arnold Arluke, If Lions Could

Speak: Investigating the AnimalHuman Relationship and the Perspectives of NonhumanOthers, Sociological Quarterly 34 (1993): 33790.

[116] Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard


[117] McDorman, Controlling Death.

400 M. Foley

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