Death Drive

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at Texas A&M University-Victoria, USA. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symploke, editor-in-chief of American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. He is author, editor, or co-editor of 40 books. His recent books include Happiness (2022), Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (2023), and Out of Print (2024).Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, USA and Visiting Distinguished Professor at Ewha Womans University, Republic of Korea. He has held visiting appointments in Bochum, Paris, and Beijing. He has published eleven books, sixteen edited volumes, and many articles; his latest book is Theory Does not Exist: Comparative Ancient and Modern Explorations in Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric (2024).

This cutting-edge collection of essays transforms our understanding of the death drive in Freud and his antecedents and successors. Written by a distinguished cohort of scholars, the chapters engage with the most challenging developments in recent psychoanalytic and cultural theory from Foucault’s biopolitics to queer theory and Afro-pessimism.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Death DriveJeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA) and Paul Allen Miller (University of South Carolina, USA)Part 1: Freud on the Death Drive—Philosophical Readings1 Take it to the Limit: Ontology Beyond the Pleasure PrinciplePaul Allen Miller (University of South Carolina, USA)2 Baudrillard on the Death DriveJeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA)3 Trauma and the Breakdown of All Grammars: Listening to the Wound as VoiceMaría del Rosario Acosta López (University of California, Riverside, USA)4 Death’s Drive in Hegel and FreudShannon M. Mussett (Utah Valley University, USA)5 Aristotle’s Erotic Sublime?Emanuela Bianchi (New York University, USA)Part 2: Poetics of the Death Drive—Literary Connections6 Moral Masochism, Sexuality, and the Death Drive: Freud and Late JamesDavid Greven (University of South Carolina, USA)7 Elegy, Queerness, and the Lacanian Death DriveSara Lindheim (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)8 Reading Beyond the Death-Drive: Living PhantasmsDaniel T. O’Hara (Temple University, USA)9 Death - Automation - LanguageAdriana Michele Campos Johnson (University of California, Irvine, USA)10 Antigone’s GazaMario Telò(University of California, Berkeley,USA)Part 3: Critique of the Death Drive—Theoretical Confrontations11 The Queer Life of Auto-repugnancy in FreudPenelope Deutscher (Northwestern University, USA)12 Labor and DesirePeter Hitchcock (The City University of New York, USA)13 Derrida’s Cruelty DriveBrian O’Keeffe (Barnard College, Columbia University, USA)14 Black Ressentiment and the Politics of the Death Drive: A Fanonian MeditationZahi Zalloua (Whitman College, USA)15 Paraontology and the Death DriveNicole Simek (Whitman College, USA)Notes on ContributorsIndex