Death and Love brings together notable psychoanalytic and philosophical theorists to explore the connection between death and love.
Death and Love brings together notable psychoanalytic and philosophical theorists to explore the connection between death and love.
The book examines how these phenomena shape human existence and relationships, challenging the conventional dichotomy between life-affirming and death-driven dimensions. The volume features contributions from international scholars who illustrate these ideas through various lenses, including literature, film, and theology. The chapters consider the role of the death drive in shaping social bonds, the transformative power of love beyond individual existence, and the notion that, both philosophically and psychoanalytically, love aligns with the realm of death.
Death and Love will be essential reading for academics and students of philosophy, psychoanalysis, existentialism, theology, and psychology. It will also be of interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to all readers wishing to explore this thought-provoking topic.
Introduction
SECTION I: Lacanian Reflections: Love in Literature, Film, and Media
1. Between Nowhere and Goodbye: Love Clichés (and beyond) in Literature and
Film
Gautam Basu Thakur
2. Til Death Do Us Part: Lacking in Love or Loving Lack
Stephanie Swales
3. (Courtly) Love and Death (Drive)
Russell Sbriglia
4. An Ethics of Shame: Love, Media Pleasures, and Monsters
Jennifer Friedlander
SECTION II: Through Death to Love: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical, and
Theological Insights
5. On the Subject of Love
Richard Boothby
6. Love and Death under Erasure: Lessons from the Phoenix (and Diotima)
Michael Marder
7. From Death to Love: The Transformative Event in Pauls Christian
Discourse
Leon S. Brenner
8. Embracing Suffering Beyond the Death Drive in Catherine of Siena's
Writings
Mark Gerard Murphy
9. Death Driven by Love
Peter Prosen
SECTION III: Beyond the Finite: Existentialism and Psychoanalysis in
Interplay
10. Existentialism After Finitude: The Transcendence of the Unconscious
Todd McGowan
11. Why Is the Death Drive Not Identical with Being-Toward-Death?
Simone A. Medina Polo
SECTION IV: The Disintegrating Power of Love: Spielrein, Weil, and Kristeva
12. Simone Weil on Death: Exploring Intersections with Freud and Spielrein's
Death Drive
Wanyoung Kim-Murphy
13. In Search for Adult Sexual Tenderness in Freud, Kristeva and Bersani
Stephanie Koziej
14. The Spielrenian Death Drive and the Negative Affect Regulation Processes
Arvin Bains
15. Spielrein's Negative Psychoanalysis: Mother Death Calling,
Julie Reshe
Julie Reshe is a Ukrainian-born philosopher and the author of Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive (2023). She teaches at University College Cork and the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, Ireland.
Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author of several previous books and co-host (with Ryan Engley) of the Why Theory podcast.
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