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Winner, 2024 Bela Kornitzer Alumni Award, Drew University
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.
— Gil Anidjar, author of Blood: A Critique of Christianity
Embracing finitude, facing but never glorifying that most difficult sibling, Sister Death guides us on a darkly mesmerizing journey. Beatrice Marovich rethinks unthinkables of routine loss and existential horror, of mass death and ecological extinction. Exposing a long political theology of death, she reveals—lucidly, beautifully—the enlivening alternative.
— Catherine Keller, author of Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement
With an intimate, probing voice, Beatrice Marovich invites us to meditate with her on death. Marovich is versed in but not constrained by Continental philosophy, versed in but not constrained by Christian theology. With these tools, she crafts a smart, subtle, and at times moving narrative, elevated to the next level by its gorgeous illustrations.
— Vincent W. Lloyd, author of Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination
There is a beauty and kind spirit in Marovich’s writing that kept me engaged.
Marovich’s writing is complex, rigorous, and theory-heavy; it is not for church book clubs. At the same time, it is also elegantly written and at times even personal.
[A] beautifully written, thought-provoking book.
The book is particularly invigorating in the ways that its arguments are presented on the page in continuing dialogue with the artist Krista Dragomer’s images. This move serves to open the book to more active engagement from its audience.
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