On Death Reading Group

This reading group explores different conceptions, constructions and approaches to questions of death, dying and the dead.

Ultimology as we use it describes a hypothetical area of study that looks at that which is dead or dying, meaning obsolete, at risk, endangered or wasting away. In 2020 we began hosting a reading group entitled On Death, with a goal of elaborating an understanding of the conceptual and metaphorical dimensions of death. At the beginning we gathered a group of invited participants once a month in Level Five collective studio space in Brussels to discuss close reading of multiple sources drawn from across a wide range of disciplines and geographies. The content of this reading group and the project of Ultimology seem especially pertinent at this time of crisis, risk, restriction and vulnerability. For this reason, we quickly moved this reading group online and invited participants to join us there. We host regular gatherings using the Zoom platform and respond to distributed reading including video, sound, journal articles and book excerpts, to discuss close reading of multiple sources drawn from across a wide range of disciplines and geographies. The goal is to elaborate an understanding of the conceptual and metaphorical dimensions of death, so as to support the further development of the project of Ultimology.

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The reading groups are generally hosted online using Zoom. Everyone is welcome to join the online reading group discussion. We strive to create a shared, open and intimate space in which to discuss various selected texts. We record the audio of the sessions for our research archive, and always note this in the introduction. The audio recorded is stored by us and we may transcribe it at a future date, and use anonymous extracts or quotes in published texts. We adhere to the Chatham House Rule in our documentation of these sessions, meaning "When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed." You can read more about this here.

If you are joining a session and would prefer not to be recorded, please let us know in advance. Please don't hesitate to get in touch should you have any questions or suggestions, you can contact us by email at info@departmentofultimology.com

Previous reading group gatherings and their reading material are listed below.

Session X

The story of the dust

Thursday August 26th,18:30 Irish time / 19:30 CET

A reading group in collaboration with Catalyst Arts Belfast

"Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed."
Carolyn Steedman, Dust, Manchester University Press, 2001
Excerpt from Chapter 8: The story of the dust

This session is hosted in conjunction with the group exhibition Concealed in the half-light, curated by Rachel Botha at Catalyst Arts Belfast, August 5 - September 2 2021.

In this reading group we will look at a chapter from the book of essays Dust, by Carolyn Steedman. This book offers a fascinating perspective on endings and death, through an account of the development of modern history writing and the practice of archivisation. Drawing our attention to the matter of dust, Steedman describes the legacy of the work of nineteenth century historian Jules Michelet, who described how his inhalation of the dust of the French Archives Nationales ‘gave life’ to the dead whom he studied. Knowing 'that the material presence of their dust, the atomistic remains of the toils and tribulations, the growth and decay of the animal body, was literally what might carry them, through his inhalation and his writing of History, into a new life. He knew that they were 'not capable of loss of existence'.'

In this session we will read through the chapter together and then hold a collective discussion and reflection on the text. The excerpt is available as PDF here:

Session IX

A Measure of all that Matters

Tuesday March 16th 14:00 Irish time / 15:00 CET

A reading group and listening session hosted in collaboration with Jessica Foley and Engineering Fictions.

"The tracking and enumerating of death has a long history with roots deep in Anglo-American religious and civic practices that make it clear that death counts are anything but neutral registers. Rather, they exist in complicated technosocial assemblages that permit certain kinds of being and becoming for both the living and the dead. If counting the dead is a way of forming social and historical communities, then we need to understand the impact that our media forms have on shaping those communities."
Jacqueline Wernimont’s Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018.)
Excerpt from Chapter 2: Counting the Dead (pages 26-34)

How to fathom it? It’s become a ritual for many of us, since the first emergence of coronavirus in Wuhan, to check the numbers. How many cases, how many people counted, tested positive, died of Covid. Looking at the graphs, is the line rising up or beginning to droop? In this reading group and listening session we explored how our encounters with the scale of death in this pandemic are mediated. Responding to excerpts from Jacqueline Wernimont’s Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018.), we discussed the ways in which death has been measured, communicated and displayed in previous pandemics.

For this event we developed a new format - a listening session - in collaboration with Jessica Foley, curator and host of Engineering Fictions, a writing workshop devised to support transdisciplinary inquiry, thought-experiment and communication through word-play, conversation and writing. For this session of the Reading Group, Jessica invited us to listen and watch a text she collated, and guided us to open up a conversation around it.

Session VIII

Theorising Ashes

Thursday December 3rd 19:00 Irish time / 20:00 CET

In this reading group we will discuss the paper Between Subjectification and Objectification: Theorising Ashes by Zuzanna Dziuban. This is a chapter from the book Mapping the ‘Forensic Turn’: Engagements with Materialities of Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond, edited by Zuzanna Dziuban, and begins with an account of the scandal surrounding the work of Swedish sound and visual artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who, allegedly, exhibited a work created using paint he made from the ashes of human remains collected in a crematorium at a Jewish concentration camp in Poland. The paper goes on to discuss the ethical questions surrounding this act, and more broadly the 'ontological multiplicity of human remains'.

1. Z. Dziuban, Between Subjectification and Objectification: Theorising Ashes, in Mapping the 'Forensic Turn', 2017, new academic press Vienna

Session VII

The Work of the Dead

An online session in September 2020 discussing a chapter from the fascinating study The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, by Thomas W. Lacquer. This is an expansive book, which has been a very helpful resource for this project generally, and it touches on material from previous reading groups, including ritual, history, anthropology and archaeology, offering a very accessible insight into cultural history. Thomas Lacquer, according to the book, "examines how even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters-for individuals, communities and nations."

As preparation for this reading group attendees read the chapter proposed:

Part 1: The Deep Time of the Dead

Section 3. The Cultural Work of the Dead.

Session VI

Stages

This reading group was co-moderated with Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, and as a group we examined an extract in recorded audio from Rachel’s own work, her book Stages: On dying, working and feeling.

Stages is a book of hybrid nonfiction that explores and documents Rachel’s experience as writer in residence at a residential care home. Published by Thick Press, who write:

“Can care be enacted through art? Inside a cathedral, staff members from a nursing home work with an artist to perform a poetic text about caregiving, loss, and taking the time to feel one’s feelings. In the months leading up to the performance, the artist navigates her twenties—and art and life converge in unexpected ways. Weaving between oral history and poetic prose, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff has created a stirring work of hybrid nonfiction that takes us behind the scenes of artmaking and caregiving. Melding curiosity, humility, playfulness, and self-deprecation, Stages is an inquiry into the work it takes to sustain a meaningful life.”

As preparation for this reading group we invited attendees to listen in advance to recorded audio, a reading by Rachel of the text, as a listening meditation. Rachel invited participants to listen while walking, lying down, or in any calm setting away from a screen.
After listening, we invited the group to reflect on the following set of prompts by Rachel, briefly noting their responses in writing:

What is one thing that is ending in your life? (It can be large or small.)
What is a way that we could mark and memorialize the endings and losses in our lives? (If useful, focus on the ending you named.)
Growing up, how was grief made visible or public around you?
What is the role of grief in public around you now?
What would you like it to be?

Session V

Learning to Live and Die

This session was co-moderated with Tom O’Dea, an artist and art practice researcher in the Orthogonal Methods Group at CONNECT in Trinity College Dublin. His work is focused on examining the political and philosophical implications of techno-scientific practices.

This session's reading, selected with Tom, was Rosi Braidotti's essay, Non-Fascist Ethics: Learning to Live and Die as Affirmation from Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (BAK and The MIT Press 2019) and Once Out of Nature, chapter from Mark O'Connell's book To Be a Machine (Granta 2017).

Session IV

Death and Social Identity

We co-moderated this online reading group with Jonatan Spejlborg Juelsbo, an artist, educator, janitor and co-founder of the LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. He is currently also studying an MA in Death, Religion and Culture.

The session's reading, suggested by Jonatan, was Chapter 8, Married Life After Death, from the book Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity, co-written by Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey and Glennys Howarth.

Session III

The Irish Wake

Considering the possibility of the Irish wake as Ultimological, in our first online session we took a close look at it as a ritual with three texts, an excerpt from the memoir of Kevin Toolis, My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach us to Live, Love and Die (2017), an excerpt from Sean O’Suilleabhain’s Irish Wake Amusements (1967) and a paper by Henry Morris, Irish Wake Games (1938).

Session II

Necropolitics

Reading: Mbembe, Achille, Necropolitics, title essay from the collection Necropolitics

Location: La Chapelle, Level Five, Brussels.

Session I

Representation of Death

Reading: Hertz, Robert Death and the Right Hand, Routledge Library Editions, 2004. Part A: A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death, Part 1. The Intermediary Period

Location: La Chapelle, Level Five, Brussels.

Other news

PhD research

We are happy to announce that Fiona Hallinan will undertake a PhD project at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium, developing the concept of Ultimology. Her doctoral project is entitled Ultimology, or the study of endings, as a point of entry for imaginative discourse, and will be a four year long practice-led research into the potential of Ultimology as a concept in an education context. The PhD supervisor is Nancy van Sieleghem, LUCA School of Arts and co-supervisor is Mick Wilson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. We will share material, updates and events relating to this research here.