"I'm conducting research into how the dead enter the lives of the living, among us, today, and how they make them act." This is how Vinciane Despret, a contemporary philosopher, presented the work that will culminate in this book.
As soon as we make a minimum place to run away from the official culture that requires us to publicly recognize that after death there is nothing and that imposes on us the social mandate of "mourning", experiences and stories multiply. The one who puts on her grandmother's shoes, the one who writes to her deceased son, the one who carried the ashes to the top of a mountain, forensic anthropology, the deceased who appear in dreams or make signs, funerals, popular traditions, séances, American television series ... The dead are among us, and they are active: they influence, transmit, unite, mobilize, transform and transform us.
The question, then, is not whether the dead exist or not, but what their mode of existence is. Resisting the explanatory temptation of the social sciences and psychology, and following the accounts of "those who remain", Despret asks under what conditions the existence of the dead is prolonged, what sustains them and puts them at risk, and mainly what they are capable of and what they make us capable of.