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
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