this article proposes to reconsider the work of the American contemporary artist Andres Serrano, including his 1992 series of chromogenic proofs entitled The morgue, which exhibits a group of carcasses photographed in a real morgue. I am talking about reconsidering Serrano’s work because the series in question has already been the subject of several studies. However, critical rhetoric about this series has never addressed the consequences of this invasion of privacy for the deaths. In this article, I explore how Serrano manifests its awareness of the vulnerability of deaths, not by addressing the ethics of its choices, but by looking at how this reification of bodies nevertheless perpetuates a form of posthumous subjectivity, an issue rarely addressed in the fields of art history and cultural theory. Framing and development, titles, aesthetic choices, body fragmentation (which sometimes conceals or favours the face), as well as the offending nature of action involving theft in a mortuary environment: all these elements affect the types of identity arising from gender specificity and diverse connotations giving a significant proportion to pathology and crime. Serrano’s ability to act indirectly becomes apparent in his work, when the artist transcends the order of power generally granted to living people and removed from the dead (body presence effect, contact capacity, visual access). By extending to the dead a notion of subjectivity which follows Judith Butler’s thoughts, I will demonstrate that Serrano’s cadavers remain highly vulnerable to the violence involved in any representation.