Vibrant Death - A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning

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.>

Product details

• Authors: Nina Lykke
• Assisted by: Rosi Braidotti (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.12.2023
• EAN: 9781350187825
• ISBN: 978-1-350-18782-5
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 232 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Theory in the New Humanities
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, PHILOSOPHY / Metaphysics, RELIGION / Sexuality & Gender Studies, Ethics & moral philosophy, Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology, Philosophy: metaphysics and ontology, Ethics and moral philosophy, Religious aspects of sexuality, gender and relationships, Religious aspects of sexuality, gender & relationships