Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning

Vibrant Death is a radical materialist theory of death that challenges Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings, combining philosophy and poetry-based knowledge seeking. It explores the speaking position of a mourning, queer-feminine "I" who contemplates the relationship with their dead beloved lesbian life partner. Through the lens of a posthuman, queer-feminist revision of autophenomenography, Nina Lykke argues that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing with the deceased facilitates vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, rethinking death from a new perspective.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 27 July 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Vibrant Death is a groundbreaking work that combines philosophy and poetry to explore a radically new materialist theory of death. It challenges traditional Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings of death and offers a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism, and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queer-feminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism, and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queer-feminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry and autobiographical stories. They are analyzed through the lens of a posthuman, queer-feminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queer-feminine "I" who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body and the new assemblages with which it has merged through deaths material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fifty-five million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queer-masculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject.

Weight: 458g
Dimension: 153 x 234 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350187825