Vibrant Death
Subtitle: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning
Edition: First edition
Series: Theory in the New Humanities
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 16 December 2021
Language: eng
Format: eBook (PDF)
ISBN-13: 9781350149731
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 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, queerfeminist 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 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 death's 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 "I"'s 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"
Table of contents: label: Overture
title: Travelling to the World of the Dead – A Triptych; label: Chapter 1
title: Queering Death and Posthumanizing Mourning - Introduction; label: Interlude I
title: Lacrimoso e Lamentoso (Crying and Lamenting); label: Chapter 2
title: The Excessive Mourner; label: Interlude II
title: Vibrato Bruscamente (Abruptly Vibrating); label: Chapter 3
title: The Vibrant Corpse; label: Interlude III
title: Silenzio Appasionato (Passionate Silence); label: Chapter 4
title: Is the Wall of Silence Breachable?; label: Interlude IV
title: Ardente e Ondeggiante (Burning and Undulating); label: Chapter 5
title: Miraculous Co-Becomings?; label: Interlude V
title: Milagrosa (Miraculous); label: Chapter 6
title: Pluriversal Conversations on Immanent Miracles; label: Interlude VI
title: Glissando (Gliding Between Pitches); label: Chapter 7
title: Doing Posthuman Autophenomenography, Poetics, and Divinatory Figuring; label: Interlude VII
title: Con Abbandono e Devozione (With Self-Abandon and Devotion); label: Coda
title: Between Love-Death and a Posthuman Ethics of Vibrant Death