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The first collection to provide an overview of the well-known psychoanalytic theory of the death drive in literary and cultural theory, this book features contributions from a range of prominent scholars working in the area of literature and psychanalysis. After its Freudian theorization, the death-drive has been re-interpreted by various psychoanalysts (including Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek), philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard), political theorists (Judith Butler), queer theorists (Laurent Berlant, Lee Edelman), and posthumanist thinkers (Rosi Braidotti). This volume brings together some of the leading thinkers and theorists about the death-drive as a psychological, aesthetic, and theoretical principle in literary and cultural theory, examining texts by writers such as Plato, Henry James, and Ezra Pound.
List of contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Death Drive
Jeffrey 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 Principle
Paul Allen Miller (University of South Carolina, USA)2 Baudrillard on the Death Drive
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston-Victoria, USA)3 Trauma and the Breakdown of All Grammars: Listening to the Wound as Voice
María del Rosario Acosta López (University of California, Riverside, USA)4 Death's Drive in Hegel and Freud
Shannon 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 James
David Greven (University of South Carolina, USA)7 Elegy, Queerness, and the Lacanian Death Drive
Sara Lindheim (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)8 Reading Beyond the Death-Drive: Living Phantasms
Daniel T. O'Hara (Temple University, USA)9 Death - Automation - Language
Adriana Michele Campos Johnson (University of California, Irvine, USA)10 Antigone's Gaza
Mario Telò(University of California, Berkeley,USA)Part 3: Critique of the Death Drive-Theoretical Confrontations11 The Queer Life of Auto-repugnancy in Freud
Penelope Deutscher (Northwestern University, USA)12 Labor and Desire
Peter Hitchcock (The City University of New York, USA)13 Derrida's Cruelty Drive
Brian O'Keeffe (Barnard College, Columbia University, USA)14 Black
Ressentiment and the Politics of the Death Drive: A Fanonian Meditation
Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, USA)15 Paraontology and the Death Drive
Nicole Simek (Whitman College, USA)Notes on ContributorsIndex
About the author
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-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 Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (2023), Out of Print (2024), and Happiness (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).
