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.

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 Paul's 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