Published by Metales Pesados, Guerrero’s book argues that the archive transcends its funerary nature: through his reading of the archives of Reinaldo Arenas, Delmira Agustini, Severo Sarduy, and Pedro Lemebel, among others, he argues that the materials of those who have died—photographs, manuscripts, personal objects—continue to produce forms of life and somatic permutations capable of challenging the sharp division between life and death.

This new edition includes an afterword by Catherine Malabou, who takes up this insight from her own concept of plasticity: not merely as flexibility or adaptability, but as the capacity of a form to change—constructively, but also irreversibly or destructively—without completely losing its identity. The dialogue between these two lines of thought raises a common question: if the archive is plastic, what kind of transformation is possible after the death of the person who wrote, drew, or inhabited those materials?

That question inevitably leads to another, more methodological one: how does one investigate the living? If the archive is not an inert repository but a body that continues to change form, investigating it also requires transforming the tools with which it is approached. Guerrero has insisted that the critic does not merely describe the archive from the outside, but rather touches it, handles it, and allows oneself to be affected by it; the authority of the archive, far from being fixed, is dispersed among the many hands—those of archivists, readers, and affective communities—that contribute to its composition.

Richards approaches this conversation from a related question, developed in her work on archives—particularly in the case of Lorenza Böttner: what methodologies are needed when the archive one wishes to investigate is scattered, incomplete, or outright inaccessible? Her own answer, developed in dialogue with thinkers such as José Esteban Muñoz, Ann Cvetkovich, and Jack Halberstam, proposes “cruising” as a research tactic: a way of approaching the archive that does not wait for the document to appear in its entirety, but rather improvises, pursues clues, and makes the search itself part of the knowledge produced.

In this conversation, Richards and Guerrero will bring these two ways of conceiving the archive into dialogue as a method for discussing what is inherited from a body that no longer writes, and how thinking of the archive as a living, changing space also transforms the way we research and write about art and literature. It is also an invitation to celebrate a book that insists that the end of a life is not necessarily the end of its writing.