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List of contents
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
About the author
Nina Lykke, Emerita-Professor, Dr. Phil., Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Honorary Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. She participated in the building of Feminist Studies in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly for many years. She is also a poet and writer, and co-founder the International Network for Queer Death Studies. Her current research focuses on posthuman eco-poetics, the queering of cancer, death, and mourning in posthuman, queerfemme-inist, new-materialist, decolonial, eco-critical and spiritual-material perspectives. Author and co-author of numerous monographs such as Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010), Vibrant Death (2022), Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters (2024), and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies.
Summary
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.
Foreword
A phenomenology of mourning and loss that arrives at a poetic-philosophical reimagining of death.
Additional text
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.
