The Death Drive: Philosophy, Literature, Theory: Jeffrey R. Di Leo: Bloomsbury Academic

The Death Drive

Philosophy, Literature, Theory

The Death Drive

Philosophy, Literature, Theory

Description

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, philosophy, and psychanalysis.

After Freud's initial theorization, the death-drive has been re-interpreted by various psychoanalytic thinkers (including Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek), philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard), political theorists (Judith Butler), queer theorists (Laurent Berlant, Lee Edelman), and posthumanists (Rosi Braidotti).

This volume brings together some of the leading thinkers and theorists of 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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: 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 Readings
1 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 Connections
6 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 Confrontations
11 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 Contributors
Index

Product details

Published	Jan 08 2026
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	288
ISBN	9781350465671
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	2 bw illus
Dimensions	234 x 156 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

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.

Maud Ellmann, Randy L and Melvin R Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of English Emerita, University of Chicago, USA