Sister Death : political theologies for living and dying

Life and death are commonly seen as representing the starkest of binaries: Death is the ultimate adversary of all that lives. Beatrice Marovich argues that such understandings of mortality have been deeply influenced by a strain of Christian political theology that has left its mark on both religious and secular narratives. Adapting the figure of “Sister Death” from Saint Francis of Assisi, she calls for recognizing that life and death are family. Drawing on a wide range of sources―from Toni Morrison to Jacques Derrida, psychoanalysis to grassroots “death positive” movements―Marovich critiques a racialized political theology that pits life and death against each other in a state of endless war. In a time of extinctions, it is necessary to disrupt this dominant story in order to apprehend death as a collective, multispecies event. Sister Death proposes an alternative view in which life and death are not mortal enemies destined for mutual destruction. Instead, they are engaged in a contested, tense, and sometimes mutually empowering form of connection―a sisterhood. Eloquent and approachable, this book deftly integrates the insights of a number of disciplines to provide a profound reconsideration of the relations between life and death. Sister Death also features a series of original works by the artist Krista Dragomer that stage an ongoing conceptual conversation with the text. "Sister Death : Political Theologies for Living and Dying (this is the final iteration of the title) borrows the figure of Sister Death from Francis of Assisi in order to stage a critique of political theologies, found in all western "religions of the book"-Christianity, Judaism, Islam-and in other traditions as well, such as Zoroastrianism, that pit life and death against each other as ultimate enemies. This metaphor activates, within our mortal bodies, a permanent state of war. And it creates a social bifurcation between people who are said to be on the side of life and others who are on the side of death-the ultimate good and the ultimate evil. The book argues that this political theology of death resonates with and is complicit in what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics, the racially motivated weaponization of death. We risk a grave misunderstanding of other people and ourselves ; we are unable to acknowledge the ecological functions of death, making enemies of dirt, fermentation, and aging ; and we cut off key dimensions of connection between the living and the dead. Sister Death argues that it is not only possible but necessary to disrupt this dominant story about life and death, which has been so influential in purportedly secular accounts of western history and politics (with analogues in a number of Asian countries); a new mythopoetic narrative is needed. Beatrice Marovich proposes alternative figurations-from sources including Francis of Assisi, Jacques Derrida, and Toni Morrison-of this life-death relation. Grassroots death awareness/positivity movements such as the Order of the Good Death, led by popular (1.6 million YouTube followers) mortician Caitlin Doughty, are reclaiming death rituals that restore the sacred space surrounding the corpse. Scholars in extinction studies, an important area within the environmental humanities, including the late Deborah Bird Rose, are concerned with how mass extinction events in the more than human world inform our own existential concerns. Afropessimist thinkers like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, following James Baldwin, have demonstrated how white thinkers have projected death onto Black people and Blackness itself. Perhaps what Jacques Derrida called "lifedeath" is not a battle in which one force is ultimately overcome or colonized but is instead a contested, tense, and sometimes mutually empowering form of family relation-with Francis, a kind of sisterhood"-- Provided by publisher Table of Contents List of Works Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Sister Death 1. Life, Death, and Lifedeath 2. The War with Death 3. The Human-Above-Death 4. Constellated Negatives 5. Sisterhood and Enmity 6. Natal Disturbance Conclusion: Into the Dirt Notes Bibliography Index