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Book review of Erin E. Edwards: The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2018, 240 pages.

In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living.By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits.Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life's essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: "semi-living" sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me (2011) by L'Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. ; Otyglat liv: Biokonst och biofilosofi undersöker hur biofilosofisk praktik och biokonst, alltså tänkande genom samtida hybrida konstnärliga-vetenskapliga praktiker, kan bidra till en mer nyanserad förståelse av liv än vad vi vanligtvis möter i akademiska diskurser. Med utgångspunkt i ett feministiskt deleuzianskt perspektiv, och i dialog med samtida biovetenskap, pekar biokonstnärliga projekt på det otillräckliga i att ställa frågor om livets innehåll. Projekten tydliggör istället hur det levande och det icke-levande, det organiska och oorganiska, precis som liv och död, är sammanflätade. Istället för att sätta upp fasta kriterier för liv undersöker och framställer biokonstnärliga praktiker liv som en differentiell process, i sig omöjlig att fastställa och därmed något otyglat, som överskrider uppsatta gränser mellan det materiella och föreställda. Följaktligen fokuserar föreliggande avhandling på livets ontologi så som den framträder i ett urval av biokonstnärliga arbeten: "semi-levande" skulpturer skapade av The Tissue Culture and Art Project, samt performance-konstverket May the Horse Live in Me (2011) av L'Art Orienté Objet. Förhoppningen är att en sådan ontologi kan möjliggöra framtida begreppsliggöranden av en etisk politik som undviker den antropocentriska logik som dominerar humaniora och samhällsvetenskap idag.

The article aims at reconstructing ontological, epistemological, and ethical frames of the posthumanist project, while drawing on the philosophies of Karen Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Donna Haraway. Only by defining such theoretical premises of the project one may be able to ask about and think a posthumanist collective and posthumanist politics ; Celem tekstu jest rekonstrukcja podstaw ontologicznych, epistemologicznych oraz etycznych projektu posthumanistycznego (zwanego też teorią lub narzędziem posthumanistycznym) na podstawie analizy propozycji teoretycznych Karen Barad, Gillesa Deleuze'a i Felixa Guattariego oraz Donny Haraway. Tylko dzięki tak precyzyjnemu zdefiniowaniu narzędzia teoretycznego możliwe będzie zadanie pytania o wspólnotę postludzką oraz posthumanistyczną politykę.

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. ; Funding agencies:This work was supported by The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) International Postdoc grant number 2017–0067 ; Ecologies of Death: Environment, Body and Ethics in Contemporary Art

This special issue aims to rethink death, dying and mourning through theoretical and methodological modes of queering. These modes are mobilised under three overarching themes: (1) queer (necro)politics, which focuses not only on regimes and technologies that subjugate "life to the power of death" (Mbembe 2003, 39), while rendering some lives more grievable than others, but also, on queer modes of resistance; (2) posthuman ethico-politics of death, which seeks to problematise and undermine human exceptionalism, while exploring human/nonhuman relationalities in the context of death and dying; and (3) queering death and mourning, which concentrates on nonnormative practices of remembering and mourning the dead.