The Philosophy of the Macabre, or Morbid, or Horror...

• The philosophy of the macabre is an analysis (deconstruction?) of, precisely, the “absence” of death, the macabre, morbid, horror, (in the sense of such terms as taken from/applied to related ideas found in the work of Georges Bataille) etc., from the “instrumentally rationalized” everydayness of (post-Enlightenment) post-industrial, culture/society, which is to say the dimension of Objectification/production/utility, etc...
• What is meant by “absence” of death, especially given the prevailing notion of “if it bleeds, it leads,” is (at least for starters) that the field of representations under such an umbrella is a “trace” rather than a “presence.” (Derrida) – For example, we might cognize or rationalize that we know/understand the presence of death in war, in capital punishment, in the production of a commodity of “meat” in the food industry, etc., but all that we really know/understand are signs/signifiers/symbols/codes/representations of death (Baudrillard, et al.), not the experience of confrontation with (Bataille), or the showing of, death/macabre (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3-4) 

• Certainly, one could argue that we can never really have direct/immediate access to “real-world” death/horror, etc., without being in a given situation (e.g. a soldier in combat), and even more so that one cannot really experience death (Heidegger/Derrida), thus it seems that the analysis comes back in some way, but perhaps only to a certain extent, to “representation.” More precisely, the concern is with the absence of the “reality” of death/horror in the dominant socio-cultural fields of representation, perhaps most particularly with mass media…
• The order of things (system…) marginalizes, and keeps absent, the “truth” of death/horror, in order to maintain/reproduce itself (status quo).
• If confrontation with the reality, the “presence,” of death generates an affect that cracks open subjectivity and engenders “communication” (“community” – Bataille, Nancy) – then such affect in/on the societal level would/could cause a disruption of the system.
• A disruption (break) of the system (“Event?” – Badiou/Žižek) would/could radically transform the social order.
• However, this raises the question of the “conditions of possibility” that are needed to frame such an experience in order to lead to a revolutionary break (Kant?, Foucault?, Bataille – on the recognition of the subject in the “object”)…
• The conditions of possibility must frame the phenomenological “experience” in order for the affect to emerge. – Here too, the conditions of possibility themselves are bound up in/by the order of things that produces the very framework that excludes/precludes/occludes the “reality” of death/horror in the first place, as said, with the intent/purpose of reproducing/perpetuating instrumental rationality. (Butler, Frames of War)
• If, as Derrida suggests, at the presupposed “center” of any system is an “absence,” then, in that death is the absence in question, the presupposed center is the prefabricated/prevaricated construct of individuality within our system built on the notions of production, preservation of discontinuity, appeal to the future, etc