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Comment by mablopoule | Hacker News Reader

Well, if it's not a significant item, does it need to be changed in the first place, then?

I agree though about passing things that could be preserved, but it usually involves a tradeoff, when things are too costly to maintain, or old building needs to give place for new one. Even museums aren't the place for a collective diogen syndrom.

The slightly heinous thing about this case though is that no tradeoff at all seemed to be involved for this book, no cost of preservation was cited, it's just modifying the past on the lights of very temporal values.

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> The slightly heinous thing about this case though is that no tradeoff at all seemed to be involved for this book, no cost of preservation was cited

The tradeoff is that we have two potential futures here:

Option A: Someone's skin non-consensually remains used as the cover of a book.

Option B: Someone's skin is returned to their family or buried, and the book is re-covered.

What is the benefit of Option A?

The binding of the book is part of it's value.

It's an almost 150-old piece of skin. Everyone who interacted with that poor woman is long since dead. Everyone who interacted with someone who interacted with that woman is either dead or in mid-to-late 70s, that's how far this is. I would be surprised if there was a 'family' who waited for this moment, and who would ask anything else than just to cremate the piece of skin.

I'm parisian, and part of my family is in the region for a long time, and yet it's not like I'm mourning every day because potentially some ancestor's tibia is being used as decoration in the catacombe.

It's balancing the value (of a human skin book cover) about substitution (a book cover of any other material).

It's not that human skin is being used for a purpose: it's that the purpose is trivial and provides no benefit above substitution.

The analogy would be if your great-great-grandfather's tibia were being used to hold a door open.

Well at least I would brag that I have a great-great-grandfather at Harvard :D.

Joke aside, I see your point.

The one detail I was unable to find was "What is the book about?"

Ironically, I think I'd be okay with my skin adorning an anatomy textbook!

Oh, I haven't realized that the name of the book wasn't in English! It's "Des destinées de l’âme", which translates to "Of the fates of soul".

From what I've gathered it's a writer/poet/actor striken by grief who ponders about what happens after death, and about the notion of a soul, both historically (he seems to be speaking a bit about hinduism and greco-roman conceptions of a soul), philosophically, and theologically.

While this still doesn't justify the initial act of using someone skins, knowing the title in french makes it clear that there is a posthumous thematic, I haven't realized that it may not be obvious to non-french speakers.

Yeah, the title was easy enough to translate and mentioned in most English news, but I was disappointed that none of the articles (or anywhere else I could find on the internet) summarized the book's content.

That's definitely a bit more debatable, for thematic purposes as you said, but I think I (personally) would want some utility in the book (instead of a more artistic or philosophical work) to justify a skin cover.

> it's just modifying the past

I'm not sure what you mean by this; obviously the "history" of the book is known and not being suppressed. Nobody is denying the origin of the book; if it had been a significant historical artifact, I'm sure the judgment would have been different. "You're destroying history!" is a common refrain when Jim Crow-era statues commemorating confederate generals are removed, or when, e.g., the name of a military base is changed. This does not mean that history is being destroyed! Anyone is still welcome to learn anything they want about these historical figures & events.

So, with the same argument, nothing of value was lost when taliban destroyed the statues of Buddha, since we can read about those in books?

There's value in physical artifact too, it's sad to destroy those out of righteousness.

As for the statue, where those statue removed or destroyed/melted ? If it's the latter, then yes it's also historicidal, even if it's for the 'bad guys'.

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