Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of The Ahuman Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020), Posthuman Ethics (2012), and Cinesexuality (2008).Traditional Western attitudes towards death deal with it as a painful inevitability, something that has to be navigated as a trauma and a taboo. They focus essentially on the ‘management’ of death, an anthropocentric practice prioritising the human life above every other type of existence.
Patricia MacCormack explores how we can develop a ‘death activism’ – a variety of tactics and posthuman practices which celebrate death, its inevitability, its forms, from the slow to times of crisis, and how trauma and mourning emerge as their own forms of expression. Crucial to the foundation of death activism is the dissymmetry with which different deaths are met including the mass death of nonhuman animals and ecologies.
Death Activism is a feminist, queer, postcolonialist enquiry, that seeks to queer death – making queer our usual familiar death habits and trajectories of thought, toward a jubilant activism that can transform death into a more democratically equal, and a more jubilant force for life.
Acknowledgements
Prelude
Chapter 1: Danse Macabre: Queer Romances of Fascination and Fear
Chapter 2: Global Mourning: Pandemic, Trauma and Mass Death
Chapter 3: The Denial of Desire: Suicide and the Right to Death
Chapter 4: Abolitionism: Mass Death and the Nonhuman Animal.
Chapter 5: Capital Zombies, Death and Disability
Chapter 6: The Unspeakable Death (that is not Death)
Chapter 7: Goth Culture, Occulture, Aesthetic Death Culture
Conclusion: The Difficult Joy of Death Activism
References
Index
Ways of thinking allied with “posthumanism” have received increasing interest across a number of disciplines, predominantly in philosophy and the humanities, but also in biology, law and ethics, and art theory and creative practice. Indeed, we contend that the field’s potential implications extend to the majority of academic disciplines. Focusing on emerging trends, cutting-edge research and current debates, Posthumanism in Practice presents work in and across multiple disciplines that investigates how posthumanism can affect change.
The questions that posthumanism raises, of what it means to be human, the nature of our relationship with the world, our relative importance, our obligations, entanglements, potentials and limitations, speak to every aspect of life, This series will address questions such as: What are the implications and entailed effects of the revelations of contemporary science and philosophy? Can our laws, societies, and egos hold up to our becoming less special? What can we do, and how might thinking differently enable us to act differently?
Works in this series will pose these kinds of questions and offer practical answers, suggestions and provocations. The aim is to inspire work that isn’t occurring often or loudly enough, and to promote a wide variety of voices which are left outside of the arenas where they might be most usefully heard. Disciplinary conversations also often remain siloed, but posthumanism is inherently an interdisciplinary concern; the field questions (but doesn’t necessarily reject) the usefulness and stability of existing disciplinary boundaries. As such, this series will prioritize works which bring insights across those boundaries and which demonstrate the real-world potential and/or risks of posthumanist ideas.