Vibrant Death

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.

Auteur

Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies, Linköping 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)

Contenu

Overture: Travelling to the World of the Dead - A Triptych

• *Chapter 1: Queering Death and Posthumanizing Mourning - Introduction

Interlude I: Lacrimoso e Lamentoso (Crying and Lamenting)

• *Chapter 2: The Excessive Mourner

Interlude II: Vibrato Bruscamente (Abruptly Vibrating)

• *Chapter 3. The Vibrant Corpse

Interlude III: Silenzio Appasionato (Passionate Silence)

• *Chapter 4: Is the Wall of Silence Breachable?

Interlude IV: Ardente e Ondeggiante (Burning and Undulating)

• *Chapter 5: Miraculous Co-Becomings?

Interlude V: Milagrosa (Miraculous)

• *Chapter 6: Pluriversal Conversations on Immanent Miracles

Interlude VI: Glissando (Gliding Between Pitches)

• *Chapter 7: Doing Posthuman Autophenomenography, Poetics, and Divinatory Figuring

Interlude VII: Con Abbandono e Devozione (With Self-Abandon and Devotion)

• *Coda - Between Love-Death and a Posthuman Ethics of Vibrant Death