‘It's Only Us, Hyenas, Who Profit Out of It’: Wrecked Cars, Leaked Humans, and the Death of the Person-car

Abstract

In this paper, I aimed to show the part of the world of waste management that prefers to be hidden (Sosna, 2021) – the world of auto salvage yards. These places deal not onlywith end-of-life vehicles but also with totaled cars that might bear traces of dead humans. I focused on the analogy between human bodies and car bodies. Sometimes,these bodies – as assemblages – share a similar fate; their organs and spare parts can be disassembled and used in different contexts. Cars and humans are divisible individualscomprising a complex of separable parts and can be dismantled. This operation happens at places of second chances – hospitals and auto salvage yards – which share a similarspatial arrangement, employ all sorts of instruments and tools that enable the smooth running of the operation, and observe rituals in connection with dirt. Organs ofhumans who died during a car accident or later in the hospital can be commodified the same way as the parts of the car they were driving.