The State is a Murderous Life-Support Machine: A Conversation about Death

Abstract

This paper (taking the form of a conversation between its two authors) asks in what ways Sean Bonney's work of the 2010s might be considered an agitated historiography of death under the specific social relations presented by the UK/EU during this period. The extremism of the Letters Against the Firmament (2015) lies in the way they make felt fully that austerity is not a merely problematic policy but a policy that kills, i.e. explicitly-yet-often-invisibly causes death. The title of Bonney's final book-length publication Our Death (2019) seems to go even further in its demand for solidarity – through its use of a strange plural pronoun. In close-reading these works in their relation to death, dying, the dead, we place especial emphasis on 1) a perspective of sociological realism, discussing the communities as much as dividing lines of the distribution of death in the 2010s and how these are negotiated by Bonney; 2) the poet’s romantic and melancholic streaks, leading us to suggest that Cancer and Our Death might be considered as dark love poems calling for an orgy of skeletons; 3) how Bonney’s poetry formulates a leftist, dialectical theory of death torn between resistance to state murder and a no future-embrace of death: in the refusal to live while others die.

Keywords

• Sean Bonney
• poetry
• militant poetics
• marxism
• austerity
• death