Reincarnation via Microbes: A New Materialist View of Death, Decay, and Generative Undoing

This interdisciplinary essay is positioned at the intersection of microbiology and new materialist philosophy, with the goal of challenging the dominant Western narrative of the corpse as inert waste. By drawing on microbial decomposition, human death is reconceptualised as “generative undoing”: a staged, agential process of unbinding and recombination performed by microbial actants. Modern practices of sequestering and sanitising human remains stem from a complex cultural inheritance, where Cartesian mind–body dualism features prominently as a philosophical foundation for devaluing the corpse, a perspective that has since been extended by necropolitical agendas. When an alternative microbial lens is used, the corpse emerges as a vibrant, agent-driven ecosystem called the thanatobiome , where internal microbial partners orchestrate staged decomposition and liberate atoms and molecules for re-assimilation into new life, an activity that comprises a literal, biological reincarnation of substance. How the bounded self can dissolve into distributed, ecological existence is revealed through the Japanese Buddhist art of Kusōzu and ecological phenomena like whale falls in order to explore this ontological transition in depth. Importantly, emerging practices, including eco-friendly burial suits and legalized natural organic reduction (human composting), already align death practices with this microbial reality. It becomes possible to ground a necro-ethics in material reincarnation that is oriented toward the Chthulucene, where ecological decomposition becomes a final act of care and resistance against necropolitical logics, and death is thereby positioned as the redistribution of agentized material selves. By revising cultural narratives and practices the dead can be honored as an ongoing presence and as vibrant participants in the planet's vitality.