PIONEERS, PROBATE, POLYGAMY, AND YOU

Abstract

The point is this: as we start to spin out our own wonderful and grotesque ideas about love, marriage, death, and wills, religion, and Marx, we also need to start thinking of marriage and family commitments as wills in and of themselves, pondering the implications of making the family a supernatural relation of terror, longing, loss, and arrest. The Last Will and Testament that we are always making when we are in families, when we "I do," is shot through with a deep connection between love and property that keeps us wishing that we could survive our deaths. The will is an explicit instrument of law, and the probate court makes up for wills that might not be there, and this legal realm keeps describing, securing, transforming, and codifying the terms of the family by way of the property of the person that will transcend the limits of her or his body, her or his "sensuousness," which means her or his body, but also the very tactile relationships she or he has with people, places, and things. The will is like a revelation: even when we will become as dead as a table, we're hoping there is still a way to make our wills extend indefinitely into some eternal future. The will is helping us think that we can do something religious: something like cheat death.