Vibrant Death
Lecture-performance by Nina Lykke
Monday 20 October 2025, 16:00 – 17:00
Organised by Anaïs Chabeur & Khristine Gillard
Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She co-founded the International Network for Queer Death Studies and the International Network for ECOcritical and DECOlonial Research.
During ARTICULATE 2025 Lykke will give a lecture-performance drawn upon her book Vibrant Death.
Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, embodied knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death. The book is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. Its posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories.
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 the possibility 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.
>> This lecture-performance is part of the research festival ARTICULATE 2025