In 1993, the body of former Philippine dictator, Ferdinand E Marcos, was moved from Honolulu, Hawaii, where he died in exile, to a private mausoleum attached to his ancestral home in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Preserved and placed in a refrigerated coffin while his wife, Imelda, lobbied for his burial at the Heroes’ Cemetery, Marcos’s body remained on display until 2016, when permission for his interment was granted by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the Marcos Mausoleum prior to the controversial burial and at the protests that came in its wake, this essay examines the sense of loss and longing that has animated the rise of authoritarian nostalgia. Banished yet unburied, the dictator’s embalmed corpse, I suggest, speaks to what remains unmourned under democracy and which thus always threatens to return—namely, a figure of unfettered freedom and authority, whose power might be said to extend over life, death, and time itself. I argue that it is this figure—the figure of a sovereign gone missing—that authoritarian nostalgia takes as its object and which grows more seductive in light of the hollowing out of popular sovereignty that has come to define the post-revolutionary experience.

1993 年，前菲律宾独裁者费迪南德·E·马科斯 (Ferdinand E Marcos) 的遗体从他流亡的夏威夷檀香山搬到了他在北伊罗戈省巴塔克 (Batac) 祖居的私人陵墓。Preserved and placed in a refrigerated coffin while his wife, Imelda, lobbied for his burial at the Heroes' Cemetery, Marcos's body remained on display until 2016, when permission for his interment was granted by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. 这篇文章借鉴了马科斯陵墓在有争议的埋葬之前以及随后发生的抗议活动中进行的实地调查，探讨了导致威权怀旧情绪兴起的失落感和渴望感。被放逐但未被埋葬，独裁者防腐的尸体，我建议，谈到在民主制度下仍然无人哀悼并因此总是威胁回归的事物——即不受约束的自由和权威的形象，其权力可以说是跨越生、死和时间本身。我认为正是这个人物——一个失踪的主权人物——是威权怀旧的对象，鉴于人民主权的空心化已经成为定义革命后经验的对象，它变得更加诱人。