Lykke challenges the entrenched dualist, Christian, secular, and colonial understandings of death and mourning by allowing her excessive mourning to continue unbounded ... By opening the door to a new understanding of death and mourning, Lykke leaves the reader with a deep sense of love and connection to the world and has us join her in asking, “what if every critter’s death was vibrant?”

Journal of Lesbian Studies

Composed of ashes, pearls, diatoms, longing and audacious thought, this book takes the reader beyond the life/death threshold, to an encounter with the posthuman that is both spectral and inexorably material. Nina Lykke takes posthumanist scholarship to a new place.

Maggie MacLure, Professor Emerita, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Through an interweaving of dimensions such as photography, poetry, storytelling, opera, miraculous co-becomings and philosophical reflections, Vibrant Death invites us to a process of un-learning of death beyond the idea of static nothingness. This book is a radical, sensorial and transformative project

Katja Aglert, independent artist and Professor of Art, Linköping University, Sweden

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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.

Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm University, Sweden

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.
Les mer
Overture: Travelling to the World of the Dead – A TriptychChapter 1: Queering Death and Posthumanizing Mourning - IntroductionInterlude I: Lacrimoso e Lamentoso (Crying and Lamenting)Chapter 2: The Excessive MournerInterlude II: Vibrato Bruscamente (Abruptly Vibrating)Chapter 3. The Vibrant CorpseInterlude 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 MiraclesInterlude VI: Glissando (Gliding Between Pitches)Chapter 7: Doing Posthuman Autophenomenography, Poetics, and Divinatory FiguringInterlude VII: Con Abbandono e Devozione (With Self-Abandon and Devotion)Coda - Between Love-Death and a Posthuman Ethics of Vibrant Death
Les mer
A phenomenology of mourning and loss that arrives at a poetic-philosophical reimagining of death.
Philosophical theory and creative writing practice are combined to create a novel intervention into scholarship on death, mourning and spirituality.
Theory is back! The vitality of critical thinking in the world today is palpable, as is a spirit of insurgency that sustains it. Theoretical practice has exploded with renewed energy in media, society, the arts and the corporate world. New generations of critical ‘studies’ areas have grown alongside the classical radical epistemologies of the 1970s: gender, feminist, queer, race, postcolonial and subaltern studies, cultural studies, film, television and media studies.This series aims to present cartographic accounts of emerging critical theories and to reflect the vitality and inspirational force of on-going theoretical debates.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781350187825
Publisert
2023-07-27
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
304

Forfatter

Biographical note

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)