The Body of This DeathExamining the AIDS pandemic and Japanese A bomb literature, this book asks the question of how the experience of unimaginable and unrepresentable loss affects the experience and constitution of the social and the discourses of history. It argues that those objects which are presumptively given to thought under the rubrics of AIDS and Hiroshima Nagasaki pose an essential threat, in their existentiality, to conceptual thought and, ultimately, to