Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The books ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The books posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine 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 fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning Is intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine 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.

Reviews

Lykke challenges the entrenched dualist, Christian, secular, and colonial understandings of death and mourning by allowing her excessive mourning to continue unbounded ... By opening the door to a new understanding of death and mourning, Lykke leaves the reader with a deep sense of love and connection to the world and has us join her in asking, what if every critters death was vibrant * Journal of Lesbian Studies *
Composed of ashes, pearls, diatoms, longing and audacious thought, this book takes the reader beyond the life/death threshold, to an encounter with the posthuman that is both spectral and inexorably material. Nina Lykke takes posthumanist scholarship to a new place. * Maggie MacLure, Professor Emerita, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK *
Through an interweaving of dimensions such as photography, poetry, storytelling, opera, miraculous co-becomings and philosophical reflections, Vibrant Death invites us to a process of un-learning of death beyond the idea of static nothingness. This book is a radical, sensorial and transformative project * Katja Aglert, independent artist and Professor of Art, Linkping University, Sweden *
Vibrant Death is simply stunning across all registers: affective, methodological, theoretical and poetic. As a magical travelogue, its range and depth of inquiry around the issues of death and mourning are fearless and startlingly innovative. Lykke gives us a relentlessly posthuman, queerfeminist text that beautifully exemplifies an erotics of connection. * Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm University, Sweden *

Author Bio

Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies, Linkping University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is also a poet and writer, and is author of Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing (2012) and editor of Writing Academic Texts Differently, Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing (2014)