Vibrant death : a posthuman phenomenology of mourning
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Vibrant death : a posthuman phenomenology of mourning
（Theory in the new humanities）
Bloomsbury Academic, 2022
- : hbk
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
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
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
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