Let me begin this inquiry into one of our more sinister psyches of our universal mind with a short definition.

Necrophilia (from the Greek nekros, meaning “corpse,” and philia, meaning “love”) is a paraphilia characterized by sexual attraction to, or sexual activity with, corpses.

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5-TR), necrophilia is categorized under Other Specified Paraphilic Disorder, as it involves intense and persistent sexual interest in atypical objects or situations—in this case, the deceased.

Academic / Clinical Descriptions

Rosman and Resnick (1989), in their landmark paper “Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia” (Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 17(2)), define the necrophiliac as:

“An individual who experiences recurrent, intense sexual urges or behaviors focused on corpses, which may serve as a means to avoid rejection, anxiety, or competition involved in normal human relationships.”

According to Aggrawal (2009) in A Classification of Necrophilia (Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 16(6)), necrophilia is defined as:

“A sexual attraction toward corpses, ranging from fantasies about sexual contact with the dead to actual acts involving a corpse.”

The Ontological Ritual

The necrophiliac is often prone to impulses that lead him to become intimate, often, with those he himself has killed. Yet, murder here is not the topic of focus nor of import to this inquiry. Instead, I want to focus on the action and mental positions he occupies within his framework whilst he is presently engaged in this act of sinister sexual expression.

Most of the time, we assume these individuals to be bound by some inward sickness, some torment that sways between justice and the foundation of theistic divinity. In his solitary alignment with his utmost silent spirit, he, as a middleman between rebirth and death, finds himself shackled to a hopeless reality that is, in itself, contained and contaminated by social cues. These cues can even be noted as possibly coming from the deceased he has encounters with. The memorable symbolistic forbiddenness and finitude of this ultimate symbol, image, and even river of pulse are the wonders this individual pursues.

If we suggest a necrophiliac decides to cut off the head of the corpse, this cannot be considered violence as we know it, nor is the act of having sex with the corpse considered rape, because there is nobody home to feel the pain of such violence. It is a soulless and borderline frictional smokescreen from both parties present. That is to say, the necrophiliac is only presently engaging with one deceased.

Consent here does not exist. Spirit or identity are no longer here; therefore, the body of said victim or persons snatched from their graves isn’t capable of obtaining justice, for there is no human condition for the application of this non-lifeform. This is if the individual has been taken whilst deceased; if the individual murdered this victim, then these things are things that happened prior, during conscious awareness, before they were killed.

Moral categories like rape or violence presuppose a living subject who can suffer or consent. In short, ethical language collapses at the threshold of death. The moral order, based on our seemingly inherent intersubjectivity, ceases to function when the “other” is gone. Thus, what remains is not brutality but a framework of vaudevillian gestures upon a wasteland of imagination. The spectator becomes the lively symbol of both the corpse and the necrophiliac themselves, connected as performer and spectator.

Duality. Contradictory.

I would like to point out that I am delivering you the internal navigational mapping of his imaginative episodic deliveries, whilst at the same time criticising the boundaries of our human-imposed condition and its unfitting necessity.

The victim’s presence as a dead being is an offering to the earth. With the inevitability of his own death, he seeks himself in death, not through denial or fear, but through fusion. Therefore, we find the invertibility of the deceased transcending life, death, and ultimately returning life back to the earth.

His sexuality becomes a metaphysical gesture, an elegant yet disturbing type of surrender to the reality where all vitality collapses into stillness. Even he himself may find, through this impossibly tormenting fusion of scenery, that he is not isolated from humanity as perhaps he has always entertained internally, accompanied by self-chatter characteristic of the freak or outcast.

Necrophilia then is not a deviation from humanity but an extreme form of identification with the human condition itself. This man is in between life and death. So, to love the dead intimately and obsessively is to attempt to love the end of all things. This representation leads him to join the race of the extinct. He seeks not some delusional immortality for the corpse, for decay, as we know, is absolute, but immortality in perception, in witnessing the continuum of existence where his life and future nature coexist.

He here finds himself.

His pleasure is neither entirely sexually fixed as we have often fixed our love to our spouses or the like. Pride is at the core of his engagement. He approaches the dead with confidence, tailors his presence freshly to the environment where mortality dominates. This is not shame but mastery. In the performance of these acts society deems degrading, he asserts the vessel of the biological self in absolute terms. The necrophiliac challenges the natural order of relational experience by divorcing desire from the requirement of reciprocity.

He engages, he plays, he dominates in the absence of consent, yet in this absence, consent is irrelevant because the other cannot suffer. Once again, the space he occupies is sinister, feminine, and childlike simultaneously, which all embody the episode’s personal and sexual contentment.

Ed Kemper cut off his mother’s head and performed oral sex with it, and did many other things with her corpse. One in this space must be proud of this painting they are sketching. It is a certain pride that is only obtained through the rejection of nature, of life. A revolution against the sincerity of nature and his own being.

His acts of sexual engagement, his handling of the body, his violence towards it, are not mere transgressions against the living. They are not violent in the traditional sense, because the capacity for suffering is absent once again. What he performs is a theatre of extremes. The body is both canvas and participant in a vaudevillian like minded display. One can draw the carousel sensory experience to the liking of it.

To strike, to caress, to manipulate limbs is not harm but a ritualised encounter, a negotiation with the presence of life extinguished. In this duality, he inhabits both ends: living and dead, observer and participant, subject and object. This is circular. One can outline a political relation to such means; the relevance of this circular phenomenon is to attend himself to the means of the end, to live the finale repetitively.

He inhabits also the possibility of becoming connected to death itself, for in the reaper the bone is grown, and the bone, being the remainder of all living flesh, becomes his mirror and his inheritance. The necrophiliac does not destroy; he restores an equilibrium between what lives and what cannot. He enters a dialogue with death through these pulses of his realisation at the disgust of mankind, and in his own pursuits of these frictional pulses, the corpse is foreseen as a restoration to his inner brokenness.

In the corpse, he confronts a perfect stillness that no living lover can offer him. He is met with no resistance, no denial, no reflection of his inadequacy. What he receives is the still and eternal gaze of the universe made fleshless, ultimately were addressing the desire to retreat back to birth not retaliate against the notions of an anxious state.

To understand him is to enter the logic of a man whose sexuality has transfigured into ontology. His actions are not simply sexual acts but investigations into being itself. If we strip away our moral panic, we find a man attempting to resolve the paradox of existence through ritual, one that he cannot maintain individually by himself. He must be accompanied by a corpse so that he can relive the reality and pattern of our biological limit.

The corpse, once human, now lies beyond all human categories. It is not person, not thing, but something suspended between both. The necrophiliac touches this suspension and momentarily harnesses it. He becomes the medium between vitality and decay, and that is why his aspirations are secretive and must remain solitary in order to pursue.

I am not suggesting through necrophiliac orgies either that the same vitality of his pursuits are the same. It must be privatised and monetised through his own intentions. That is why he is isolated during these moments. The monetisation is his fragile innocence in the face of this terror. Hence why he may even find it humorous and behave cynically during these intervals, the cycles of his cognitive demonstrations are patterns of the allegories of the myths of man.

This is why his acts cannot be simplistically confined to some reductionist sickness. They form an ontology of contact, a merging of biology and metaphysics. He is not trying to erase death but to possess it, to hold it still, to make it tangible and familiar whilst being alive and conscious of this strange impossibility.

To almost be dead but living. He reflects this way. Therefore Necrophilia is not an avoidance of life but an exaggerated confrontation with its conclusion. Where others avert their eyes, he pursues his vision, continues to touch, continues to speak to that which no longer speaks back. In violent and disturbing manners, it is obvious that the violent nature emerges as a consequence of his sought out imaginative dimensions.

He is both nighttime philosopher and nursery child in his play. Madman and connecter. His actions are primitive and sacred at once. The butchering, the seuxal acts, the positioning of the body, each becomes part of a choreography that borders on worship. He is worshipping the named eternal silence, making projective art from decomposition. There is a cruel tenderness in this, one that collapses the moral frameworks by which society defines decency and horror.

To call it a pursuit of love or admiration that drives this man would be inaccurate, for love and these alternates requires response. To call it domination misses its essence, for what is there to dominate when the other cannot resist?

It is closer to a pursuit of harmony, however inverted, where the living and the dead meet in one body, one scene, one gesture. The necrophiliac enters this meeting not as a conqueror but as a participant in the grand decay of himself and all things surrounding his cognitive inclinations. He once again restores himself by destroying himself whilst physically engaging with the deceased.

He shatters himself from the glory of living inside the body of a dead person.

This act is not a defiance of death but an acceptance of it so absolute that it becomes transactionally erotic. The corpse no longer holds horror for him because he has moved beyond the limits of what life allows. He does not seek beauty in the flesh but in its undoing, in the tenderness of entropy. For him to be with the dead is to be with the future. Every kiss upon the corpse is a recognition of his own eventual state. Every caress, every insertion, is a rehearsal for his coming disappearance.

Perhaps the necrophiliac is not entirely alien. Perhaps, in every lover’s act, there hides this faint echo of the same drive, the same yearning to merge so fully with another that individuality dissolves. The difference is only that he takes this yearning to its terminal point, where the other no longer exists to resist or reciprocate. The gap that lies here is his pursuit to kill.

He invades at will. But invasion is wrong too.

Specifically, necrophilia represents our rotting mirror of human intimacy. It is love stripped of reciprocity, compassion stripped of vitality, desire stripped of future. It is the end of communication, and yet it speaks more clearly about our terror of isolation than most forms of love ever could. It is ultimately the grand gesture in an attempt to pursue one’s means.

He is not seeking redemption, nor even pleasure in its ordinary form. He is performing the collapse of meaning and, in doing so, revealing the fragile scaffolding upon which all morality rests. His actions are unspeakable because they expose the silence beneath all our speech. In this framing, he can be considered the metaphorical incubus, yet his drive to seek only the deceased restores his metaphor and maintains the grounding of some fragile positioning between lunatic and shaman.

Editor’s Note:
This essay examines necrophilia not through sensationalism, but through its metaphysical and psychological dimensions. It studies the necrophiliac as a mirror of the human condition, as one who confronts the boundaries of life, death, and desire with a gaze that most would turn away from. Within this inquiry lies an exploration of consciousness at its furthest edge, where the impulse to touch and to understand becomes indistinguishable from the instinct to return to origin.

Written by Bailey Booth.

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