Let Me Live Again by William Kentridge: The Undead and the Poetics of Absence

William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (detail). Picture: J Scott

Johannes Scott, September 2025.

The recent exhibition A Natural History of the Studio at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York foregrounds William Kentridge’s performative approach to filmic animation. The installation reveals the artist’s hand in motion—drawing, erasing, and redrawing episodic scenes that often gesture toward political critique. Conceptually, Kentridge positions the studio as a metaphoric site of cognition, an “expanded head” where fragmented thoughts are reassembled into visual poetry.

Among the recurring animations is a still-life montage: a transparent glass vase filled with water and cut flowers, a sketched portrait, and a phrase stenciled across pages from an account ledger. The phrase, animated in stages of handwritten completion, pleads the impossible: to be reanimated from death and “live again.” This plea emanates from the remnant objects within the scene—the amputated flowers and the portrait—each severed from its living source, one biological, the other political. Their appeal articulates a desire for wholeness and reintegration with the lost corpus. Yet this desire emerges from a liminal state: neither fully alive nor entirely dead. It is the voice of the undead.

This vampiric condition—the undead as a site of suspended vitality—is a familiar motif in contemporary theory. In biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer explores how sovereign power sustains itself through the glorification of its own corpse. Drawing on the medieval concept of the corpus mysticum, Agamben, in The Kingdom and the Glory, reflects on the paradox of political continuity: “The King is Dead! Long Live the King!” The sovereign body, even in death, persists through symbolic transfiguration. The body politic, always haunted by its necrological double, survives by virtue of the desire projected onto its dissolution. It is already dead, yet kept alive by the political imagination—a supra-stasis that suspends the moment of collapse.

In psychoanalysis, Freud assigns ethical weight to the undead. In Totem and Taboo, he recounts the myth of the primordial, incestuous father, whose murder by his sons ends his tyranny but gives rise to the incest taboo—a law that survives as the undead residue of repressed desire. Antigone, in Sophocles’ tragedy, similarly inhabits the space between two deaths: symbolically castrated and awaiting execution, she refuses to relinquish her ethical desire for justice. Shakespeare’s Hamlet too, confronts the undead in the ghost of his father, whose unresolved death demands symbolic closure. Most poignantly, the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos declares: “We have nothing left to lose. We are already dead.” Here, the undead becomes a revolutionary condition—a refusal to be fully absorbed into the symbolic order.

Slavoj Žižek, in Enjoy Your Symptom, examines the undead in mass culture as figures that threaten to dissolve into the formless slime of presymbolic substance. Vampires, zombies, and distorted bodies are not merely liminal—they are “more alive than life itself,” accessing a primal life force untouched by symbolic death. Žižek argues that the undead destabilise ontological binaries: life and death, animate and inanimate, sacred and profane. This residue, which escapes symbolisation, is what Lacan identifies as the objet petit a—the object-cause of desire. It is the nonhuman within the human, the excess that renders the subject more than human.

In Let Me Live Again, Kentridge mobilises the vase as a melancholic vessel for the undead. The transparent glass contains not vitality, but severance: cut flowers suspended in water, amputated from their source. The phrase “live again” is not a call to life, but to repetition—to the impossible return of what is forever lost. Through a psychoanalytic lens, the vase becomes a site of mourning, a placeholder for the unpossessable remainder. It is not a container but a frame for absence, a poetic ruin of wholeness. The montage itself threatens to unravel, disintegrating into charcoal smears and a trash of pulp—back to the graphite rubble from which the animation emerged.

Kentridge’s work stages desire not as fulfilment, but as haunting. The undead remnants—cut flowers, spectral portraits, fragmented phrases—evoke a longing that cannot be satisfied. They are not symbols of life, but of its impossibility. In this way, Let Me Live Again becomes a meditation on the aesthetics of loss, the politics of survival, and the psychoanalytic structure of desire.

Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.