Take a deep breath and read, “A herd of bison watch helplessly, with eyes and miens that call out to be read as suffused with fellow-feeling, as one of their number falls through the ice.” Let it out slowly.  Now read the rest of Making Dying Illegal.  You’re ready.

STAN SHOSTAK,
Evolutionary Biologist and Author of The Evolution of Death
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A great book can expand your powers of being, but only Arakawa and Gins, to my knowledge, have found, and continue to discover, ways to do so literally as well as metaphorically.  When I think of the entire long history of the avant-garde, they are the standard of sincerity and commitment—and when I think of the future, I see them already there, kindly waiting for the rest of us.

SUSAN STEWART,
Professor of English, Princeton University and a MacArthur Fellow
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Arakawa and Gins’ Making Dying Illegal is, like all great satire, a serious contribution to a serious problem—a problem that so far each of us has had to face for him- or herself, namely that of stopping being. Who but this singular collaborative pair has risen to the occasion of addressing death as a misdemeanor, if not a felony, on the part of the one who has died? For the first time death is treated not as a certainty or a necessity, but as an option it should be illegal to exercise. The book joins, if it does not constitute, the exiguous library of thanatosophical masterpieces. Its aim, of course, is not literary. It is corollary to the authors’ audacious imperative to take destiny in hand and reverse it.  

ARTHUR DANTO,
Philosopher, Former President of the American Philosophical Association,
Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, Columbia
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Not since John Donne has anyone so humbled death as do Madeline Gins and Arakawa in Making Dying Illegal, a volume as pioneering as it is generous.  Equal parts poetry, philosophy, legislation, blueprint, remedy, and demand, this book throws down the gauntlet and calls Dying what it really is—treason against the body.

JOSHUA EDWARDS,
Publisher and Co-Editor of The Canary
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A survival manual for the post-utopian age, Making Dying Illegal suggests that 21st century poetics will have to field some of the toughest questions raised by cognitive psychology, linguistics, radical philosophy and experimental architecture.

MICHEL DELVILLE,
Professor, Université de Liège and Director of the Interdisciplinary
Center for Applied Poetics and
STÉPHANE DEWANS,
Architect
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Death is an absurd mistake, an inconvenience to the spirit, and it is required that we outlaw it NOW!

CATHERINE FITZMAURICE,
Professor, University of Delaware and founder of Fitzmaurice Voicework
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Arakawa and Gins have once again escalated the struggle to reverse destiny, this time taking on the legal and governmental structures that would be needed for Making Dying Illegal. What if death were to be made illegal? For one, it would make those already tragic deaths in a terrorized world even more tragic. One of the secrets to Arakawa and Gins’ trajectory is that they engage our actions, particularly our embodied actions, to radically change our ethical perspectives.  Beginning with the disorienting way of looking at paintings with eyes closed, standing on a ramp, on through the highly interactive housing architecture that engages and changes perspectives, now into the wider social world, they produce the procedures that radically reverse our ordinary embodiment, and it’s taken for granted we are led farther and farther into a different destiny.

DON IHDE,
Philosopher, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University
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Reading Making Dying Illegal took my breath away. This struck me as odd, when I realised what was happening: isn’t death the moment at which our breath is finally taken away? But it’s OK, I reassured myself, because bridging the momentary absence of breathing was a quickened pulse. This was not a step toward death, but intensified living: swept into intensity.

PIA EDNIE-BROWN,
Co-Director of Liveness Manifold, a Research Collective
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Arakawa and Gins reverse destiny by affirming life’s possibilities indefinitely. In light of aging populations, their architectural procedures warrant, indeed demand, attention from policy-makers and practitioners throughout the globe. In an originary moment in the history of philosophy, the female and male voices come together in shared and mutually enlightening expression. This opening is a landing site in which gender can be engaged super-constructively for the first time.

TRISH GLAZEBROOK,
Eco-Feminist and Philosopher of science,
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dalhousie University
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Grandma Marilyn and I have spent time looking at Arakawa and Gins’ architecture. When she told me that the houses they build will help people not die, I looked up at her and asked, "Why doesn't everyone build like that?"  Yesterday she read to me from Making Dying Illegal.  When I told her that I thought dying had always been illegal, she began to cry.

JOSEPH FALCEY,
Age 9
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Early in the 20th century, thinkers such as Bergson and Heidegger fundamentally questioned the assumption that time and its experience should be thought of in spatial terms, and especially in terms of Newtonian spatiality.   But what of space itself?  Is space correctly thought of in temporal terms?  Bachelard suggests not, and the work of Arakawa and Gins presents this rejection in its most rigorous form.  What would be the ne plus ultra of the experience of non-temporalized space?  Thinking of space as a vessel of pure immortality.  This is the core of Arakawa and Gins’ challenge to us – one that is well worth taking up.

FRED RUSH,
Associate Professor Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
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The grand synthesis presented here – theoretical physics, molecular biology, philosophy, political science, medicine and architecture combined – presents a person with the means finally to accept the true and full enormity of all that she can be. Making Dying Illegal supplies readers/patients with a whole array of new concepts (architectural body, organism that persons, landing site, bioscleave and biotopology) through which to counter commonly accepted reductionist conceptions of bodily orientation that may lead to dysfunction and disease.   As quoted from their book, “a unified field theory that does not account for the body, bodily actions, and the history of individual bodies or organisms could never represent the universe.”  I believe the architectural body to be the long-awaited next step in healing and health. The body, as architectural body, does not have separate cause-and-effect linear mechanisms; it lives instead as a dynamic interactive totality, not only within itself but also within the environment, from this point on to be counted an essential part of bodily integration.  

FRANIA ZINS,
Physical Therapist and Feldenkrais Practitioner/ MSPT, CFP
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Making Dying Illegal is a provocative treatise for the 21st century that firmly places the subject in the present, obliging it to account for its surroundings. Gins and Arakawa deliver a usable meaning dependent on the body’s interaction with the world; employing a set of evolving procedures, which they name architectural procedures, they accomplish through their radical interdisciplinarity what poets, artists, and philosophers have attempted for decades—a retooling of phenomenology. Making Dying Illegal forces Cartesian dualism to recede and diminish—taking with it into oblivion its metaphysical and teleological ramifications—the Grand Narrative; the subject-object divide; logical, objective signification; even Death itself.

CHRISTINA MAKRIS,
Doctoral Candidate, University of Sussex
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Antonin Artaud once wrote, in a 1947 letter to André Breton: “We shall die only because we were once made to believe so.” More than half a century later, the strange, new, single yet collective voice of Arakawa and Gins emerges, loud, unmistakable, buoyant and large, to fight the persistently ingrained, species-unfriendly belief. Biotopology tells the story of bodies responsive to the philosophy of TNT— three explosive letters that should no longer stand for trinitrotoluene, but for the only explosive worth writing about: To Not To, the life elixir and electuary of To Not To Die. Some books are for reading. Others are palpable flesh made word.

MARIE-DOMINIQUE GARNIER,
Professor of English Literature, University of Paris 8-Vincennes
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With baby boomers sobered by the prospect of now entering the bow-out final phase of their lives, we need more and better perspectives on our mortality.  This demanding, eclectic, challenging and exotic book helps, as it offers a fresh angle on life, death, and all that goes in between.  Admirers of the Built World, in particular, will find much to ponder, as will everyone who has ever looked with awe at timeless structures. No easy read (the language is arcane), and no fast read (nearly every page gives one pause), the book is well worth the candle – and then some!

ART SHOSTAK,
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Drexel University and Editor of Viable Utopian Ideas
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Arakawa and Gins are the uttermost modern of fleet honey-hunters who postulate, then materialize vastly original pith-points which in turn move to trump Time as we know it, to near Time as applied Love, nakedly passing through our pervasive dysbiosis. Making Dying Illegal is an extraordinary invitation to witness and coact in this sinewy transfiguration; the lofty map that meets the mystery.

LISSA WOLSAK,
Poet
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1. The most self-serving bit of legislation ever proposed. If this goes through, we’ll be forced to pour tons of money into reversible destiny construction contracts, just to stay in compliance, i.e. alive. These guys are like Halliburton, only the other way around.
2. Poet/painters turned anti-death architects, now they’re messing with the legal system. The parapoetic drift continues, boldly doubting where no doubt has gone before.
3. An anti-dying statute, the first-ever treatise on biotopology, intimate correspondence with the artists, cameo appearances by Chief Seattle, young Werther and Frankenstein, and, finally, detailed do-it-yourself instructions for creating your very own reversible destiny architecture. This book is the bonus disc with all the special features.

ALAN PROHM, Ph.D.,
University of Art and Design, Helsinki and Poetic Research Artist
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Shoplifting and double-parking are illegal but dying is not?! Gins and Arakawa address the greatest affront to human life — dying. Moving readers away from death-accepting literature — "stages of grieving," "coping with death," and the whole host of cultural rituals associated with dying and death — they posit spatial poetic calibrations of body capable of drawing members of our species away from Thanatos Boulevard.

MARILYN SLUTZKY ZUCKER, Ph.D.,
Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric, Stony Brook University
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It is normal to decry excess deaths as untimely and unnecessary. But what, this book asks, if all deaths were excess and unnecessary? What if the familiar "human condition" could be changed? Could it become normal to have no deaths?

DAVID KOLB,
Emeritus Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy, Bates College
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In making the body the center of an analysis of what architecture can do, Arakawa and Gins lend new meaning to our dislocated posthuman lives. Making Dying Illegal is not merely an important step in the direction of what appears to be the primary purpose of art/architecture in our time — it marks a radical new turn for life to take in the 21st  century.

KLAUS BENESCH,
Professor, University of Bayreuth
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Are we ready for Arakawa and Gins?  For the impact of Making Dying Illegal?  For at long last having it within our power to choose never to die? What a long-standing crime it has been on the part of our society against its elders that a choice of this nature could never be offered to them before!

MARTA M. KEANE,
Rehabilitation Consultant, Founder and President of The Strategies Group
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I would make this visionary book mandatory reading for all those worldly, all-too-worldly philosophers, corrupted poets and lazy minds who lead their lives as if dreaming were not far more important than living. Making Dying Illegal compels us to see life in a different light. That dying should be outlawed, that death should be subjected to nothing less than the capital punishment—this should scare to death our garden-variety teachers of intellectual conformism and apostles of academic commonsense.

COSTICA BRADATAN, Ph.D.,
Assistant Professor of Humanities, Texas Tech University
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Certainly allowing oneself to be legislated towards ongoingness looks forward to a future in which jokes are finally really, really funny because the so-called last laugh will be stretched out. That's all such legalities will ever be: an ultra-long, ecstatic elasticity. Even the cynics, even those citizens who hurt others, will submit to the wondrous, jumbo-hearted edicts of ha and ha and haaaaaaaaaaaaaa. A super-radical statute for all those fed up with bucket-kicking and farm-buying.

JAKE KENNEDY,
Poet
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We know that Socrates welcomed death as a release from the limitations of embodied life, and this thought, from the beginning of philosophy, through almost all religious traditions, and right through to Heidegger's thought that our existence just is a being-unto-death, has shaped the way we think of our finitude.  What if we could think differently?  What if we could think against the presumption and the entire history of that presumption?  What if we could shape our world so that death was something less than our destiny?  It's a thought worth thinking.

SHAUN GALLAGHER,
Philosopher and Experimental Psychologist,
Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida
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Feeling domesticated, sublimated, ontologically inert? Tired of the same old habitual, pre-determined, teleological fixations that ground us (quite literally) six feet under?
For God's sake, organisms that person, what (in the hell) are we doing here?
Architectural anarchists Arakawa and Gins are here to assist, but don't expect a helping hand, more a kick in the backside!
Through Making Dying Illegal the pale imitation of life as the “self” is issued an ultimatum… To deliver up to life all that it deserves.
As self-appointed spokesperson for the species, let me say, “We are eternally grateful.”

RUSSELL HUGHES,
Doctoral Candidate/Lecturer, RMIT
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With awareness becoming aware of its awaring, the possibilities are unending.

STACY DORIS,
Poet
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EARTHLINGS: RED ALERT.  A new constitution has arrived. You hold in this book a Declaration of Rights for the newly determined life of our species. Building upon their stunning Architectural Body, Arakawa and Gins project and construct a world and a life where the defeatist presumption of mortality no longer rules. 

HANK LAZER,
Poet/Administrator
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Inductive reasoning points to the supposed truth of deductive reasoning's syllogistic super-star major premise: All men are mortal. Oh yes, billions have died. Even so, this fact does not imply the future demise of all the living. It only indicates that we all face a strong probability of dying — if the laws governing mortality remain constant. Fortunately, Arakawa and Gins are masters at exposing inconsistencies of the allegedly constant. This book demonstrates that the logic behind universal mortality is growing weaker by the minute; we simply do not know enough about our bodies to foredoom them. The existence of this possibility obviates death as a destiny and transforms it into a problem to be solved — a serious ethical issue. We need to refigure everything. Mortality might not be necessary. Clearly, this work marks a major step in our collective evolution.

ALEX DUENSING,
Poet Laureate of Braddock, PA 
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In Making Dying Illegal humans confront their commitment to closure, and “subjectivity” meets its maker in the very operations of organism-person-surround. Such a book should make it impossible to go back to the tin cans and string of our historically determined bodies. Could there be a more subversive, dangerous, or important book?  

JONDI KEANE, Ph.D.,
Lecturer in Cross-Arts Practice, Griffith University
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I delight in contemplating the opposition that Making Dying Illegal will occasion.  For example, those who advocate a "right to life" will, no doubt, find fault with any attempt by humankind to disturb the divine scheme (intelligently designed?) that includes death.  Thus, we may anticipate advocacy of a right to die (free of criminal sanctions) by the right-to-lifers.  A perfect circle for the reactionaries!  A perfect irony for the rest of us!

HOWARD J. FREEDMAN,
Attorney
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With the architectural procedures of Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan for inspiration, I discovered and enunciated four temporary landing sites over a decade ago: the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. Since then events have precipitated their merger along both synaesthetic and co-anesthetic lines. Upon encountering Arakawa and Gins' work, I was surprised and delighted at their rigorous articulation of an approach that meets the needs of this new paramodern building we are inhabiting. But now we have Making Dying Illegal X-raying the niche of the final cultural blindspot and opening the way for a democratization of the architect's impulse. Plus, perhaps more importantly, it provides a completely original entrée to the present surround, the Mystery Body—that ever uncharted and unchartable milieu.
                                                                                
Making Dying Illegal X-rays the niche of the final cultural blindspot and opens the way for a democratization of the architect's impulse.

BOB NEVERITT,
Paramedia Ecologist
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Arakawa and Gins seem to know that where and what we are give rise to where and what we are—but the question is how to get this where and what going.  “Take a turn for the less unknown” and find out how you wind up. Making Dying Illegal keeps pointing up what means, so I’d say read this book and let your “approximative views blossom forth.”

CHET WIENER,
poet
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The Marxian motto aptly applies: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." While trans-humanists — despite all their seeming radicality and the changes they are about to bring to human beings and the world — remain firmly grounded in Cartesianism: splitting mind from body, body from environment, Arakawa and Gins go all the way:  in order to reverse destiny, science and philosophy have to find their own footing again. To cut off organisms from their surroundings for the sake of philosophical or scientific reduction should be unthinkable, yet it has been thought — almost exclusively.  Those who want to change their fate have to start where they start.  This is what Arakawa and Gins are about to achieve. 

DAGMAR BUCHWALD,
Independent Scholar
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Arakawa and Gins are surely right to see architecture (conceived in its fullest sense) as fundamental to changing our destiny or even – who can tell? – reversing it forever, so that death shall have no dominion. Do not go into that good night at all.

RONALD SHUSTERMAN,
Professor of English, Literary Theory and Aesthetics, University of Bordeaux 3

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Gins and Arakawa have rethought what constitutes a person. They propose an extraordinary approach to living that, with sustained inquiry, praxis, and adherence, translates into perennial nondying. Consider this book, then, as—at the very least—a philosophical invitation; or as—at its most revealing—the essential handbook for transcending mortality.

PATRICK PARDO,
Poet
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Feeling the urgency of our planetary situation, Arakawa and Gins have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the process of inventing a response that measures up. Some may feel Arakawa and Gins overshoot the mark, but those people should be the first to question their own ethical response to this world.

DANIEL ROSS,
Philosopher and Filmmaker
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A witty mesh of gates that opens up our daily awareness that comes with “death.”

FLORENTINE SACK,
Architect and Architectural Theorist
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If all this seems absurd to you, I suggest you more closely consider the status quo. The challenges posed by Arakawa and Gins pry at the gaps of what we take for granted and at the foundations of many issues considered insoluable. If you let yourself be productively provoked into articulating your discomfort with their texts, you might notice that things aren't the way you thought they were. You'll be one step further.

JOST MUXFELDT,
Philosopher
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uncompromising transwayfulformations cradle and field an offer of whole body capabilities, eventing, evidencing, assembling procedures, compassioning “many scales of action at once” -  this radical, visionary, interrogatory project outsentiencing its multidimensionality, unsettling, reAnewing my heart, calling open to how much has been left out/into being/FEARLESS, courageous, “which to my joy, is now”

MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN,
Poet
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Impossible, you say?  Well, then sit back in your movie theater and watch yourself propelled toward doom: Enraptured or skeptical; it’s all the same.  Or act.  Can’t decide?  Well, then read Arakawa and Gins’ new volume Making Dying Illegal and learn that until, like a free radical, you drift against the major flow, beyond Duchampian skepticism and Deleuze’s vitalist rapture, and you feel your way through a “biotopology” of an enacted life lived in an architectural surround.  Whatever is forbidden is mandatory.

MARTIN ROSENBERG,
Independent Scholar
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They say that death is inevitable and "natural," and that it is a "law of nature," and that’s that, but— DID I EVER GIVE IT MY VOTE?

JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ,
Edward S. Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University
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Fined for dying . . . . What if reversing destiny were a legal issue? Arakawa and Gins’ latest book is not just a utopian statement but a ground-breaking quest for new radical thinking which revives the optimistic stance of modernism.

FRANCOISE KRAL,
Associate Professor, University of Paris 10 - Nanterre
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Thanks to their unwavering faith in the force of language, Arakawa and Gins have reinvented the genre of the groundbreaking manifesto for the 21st century. Architectural bodies of all countries, unite!

SIMONE RINZLER,
Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Paris 10 - Nanterre
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