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
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).
