{"id":14049,"date":"2026-04-01T14:58:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T18:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=14049"},"modified":"2026-04-01T14:58:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T18:58:38","slug":"julie-reshe-negative-psychoanalysis-for-the-living-dead-philosophical-pessimism-and-the-death-drive-palgrave-macmillan-2023-144-pgs-isbn-978-3-031-31200-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2026\/04\/01\/julie-reshe-negative-psychoanalysis-for-the-living-dead-philosophical-pessimism-and-the-death-drive-palgrave-macmillan-2023-144-pgs-isbn-978-3-031-31200-7","title":{"rendered":"Julie Reshe, Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023; 144 pgs. ISBN: 978-3-031-31200-7"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julie Reshe, <\/span>Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive<\/span><\/i>. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023; 144 pgs. ISBN: 978-3-031-31200-7\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

everet smith, Emory University<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Julie Reshe\u2019s <\/span>Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive <\/span><\/i>(2023) offers an alternative to psychoanalytic parameters and practice. Traditional psychoanalysis, Reshe accuses, presents a twofold problem. First, as a practice that advocates for overcoming trauma, psychoanalysis traffics in a problematic utopianism which promises that our lives may one day be free from strife. Second, this \u201cpositive\u201d bent of psychoanalysis misunderstands the human condition in assuming that negativity\u2013\u2013embodied most strongly in the death drive\u2013\u2013is a problem to overcome. Reshe extends Freud\u2019s insights on the death drive in <\/span>Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> although Reshe\u2019s version of the death drive claims loyalty to its pioneer, Sabina Spielrein (8). Accordingly, Reshe\u2019s challenge to psychoanalysis is that negativity is a feature, not a bug, of human experience; the death drive is central to all life, human or otherwise. Reshe argues that the death drive\u2013\u2013in turns referred to as negativity, destruction, lack, nothingness, and emptiness\u2013\u2013is central to the subject, society, and nature. The book consists of three original essays (plus an introduction and conclusion) that advance Reshe\u2019s thesis regarding negativity and three interviews with Reshe\u2019s favored interlocutors: Catherine Malabou, Todd McGowan, and Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first chapter argues for the priority of negativity in biological processes. Expanding Catherine Malabou\u2019s theory of destructive plasticity \u201cinto a more general negative-anthropological model that would be accurate to describe anyone\u2019s life\u201d (19), Reshe critically addresses prevailing understandings of psychology and neuroscience that maintain a \u201cpositive\u201d orientation (4-5). To reorient this understanding, Reshe positions negativity as central for subject-formation, which she claims has been frequently disavowed. \u201cAt best,\u201d she writes, \u201cwhen destructive processes are discussed, [this] corresponds to the theologically understood Hegelian dialectics\u201d (27). This \u201ctheological\u201d dialectic recuperates destructive tendencies into \u201ca higher positive formulation\u201d (27). Contrarily, out of destructive processes, such as the death of synapses in the human brain, emerge \u201cliving figures of death\u201d (Malabou 2012a, 198). Whereas according to Reshe the Hegelian dialectic prioritizes the positive at negativity\u2019s expense, destructive plasticity grants the death drive \u201ca form of its own\u201d (Reshe, 26). Psychoanalysis has \u201cfailed to grasp\u201d the importance of such destructive figures, which Reshe maintains are not positive but are negative in character: living forms of the death drive, \u201calterity with no remedy\u201d (26).<\/span><\/p>\n

The trouble with the positive orientation of psychoanalysis is that it \u201cprecludes seeing the destructive processes in subject [sic], society, and nature as being central and formative,\u201d rendering negativity merely a \u201cnecessary deviation to be overcome by positive formation\u201d (28). This is the theological and teleological perspective touted by Hegelianism and neuroscience, among others, which disavow negativity\u2019s formative function for subjectivity. Offering a correction to this over-valuation of positivity in the realm of neuroscience, Reshe provides three destructive correlates to the positive processes identified as central to the field (29). Since these occur alongside neurosciences\u2019 three positive foci, \u201cone could equally claim that destructive processes are central and define plasticity\u201d (31) rather than the opposite, that the positive processes are central. Reshe therefore concludes that \u201cneurobiologically, failure and destruction are dominant, while positive products are their optional by-products\u201d (31).<\/span><\/p>\n

The book\u2019s middle section (chapter three and an interview with Todd McGowan) expands the territory of negativity to include the social world. Just as the subject is constituted by a negative core on the level of its psychology and the literal formation of its living tissue so is the social bond. Reshe advances theorizations of the death drive that relegate it to the realm of subjectivity, building on McGowan\u2019s theorization of the \u201csocial death drive\u201d to argue that society is also essentially \u201cconstituted by the death drive\u201d (57). Contrary to McGowan, however, Reshe is critical of the centrality of the psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment, or <\/span>jouissance<\/span><\/i>, for the death drive. Enjoyment for Reshe is simply positivity by another name, aligning McGowan\u2019s theory of the social death drive with the \u201cpsychoanalytic self-help\u201d she rails against and which is ultimately a hedonistic, masochistic discourse \u201cthat teaches the art of enjoyment through suffering\u201d (60).<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshe emphasizes the failure of our most well-loved psychoanalytic concepts to truly \u201crealise [sic] the suffering of the other\u201d (60). This precludes \u201ccompassion,\u201d or \u201csharing the tragedy of the other,\u201d which requires understanding suffering as void of meaning and as something that does not lead by necessity to enjoyment. Reworking the Lacanian formulation of the death-driven but enjoying subject, Reshe argues that society and the subject are co-produced in a \u201cnegative dialectic\u201d (62), wherein neither exists but each acquires the semblance of existence through the apparent existence of the other (65). This tautological relationship between society and the subject elides the constitutive nothingness of their emergence. Moreover, for Reshe, <\/span>jouissance <\/span><\/i>supports this semblance of existence by obscuring the nothingness at the heart of life. This lack of basis for either the subject or society is universally shared, insofar as our mutual feeling of nothingness weaves the fabric of the social world, binding us to one another in a shared experience of emptiness that is rarely acknowledged but is devastatingly and non-redemptively painful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshe\u2019s fifth chapter continues her project of widening the reach of the death drive, extending into the natural realm. Psychoanalysis has tended to enshrine the death drive as something we peculiarities of nature are uniquely afflicted with, resulting in a characterization of the human as not-quite-natural. Reshe references Nietzsche\u2019s definition of humans as \u201cmore ill, uncertain, changeable and unstable than any other animal\u201d (103-104), solidifying the human being\u2019s place as a fallen creature whose purity was lost when it attained knowledge of itself as a thinking being. This discourse, from Nietzsche to Freud to Lacan, consists of \u201ca rumination about the animalistic health that was lost by humans after they diverged from naturalness\u201d (103). This is also the story of what Reshe calls \u201cthe profane version\u201d of evolution that understands evolution as the survival of the fittest and, accordingly, abides by the same theological and teleological terms encountered in Reshe\u2019s early criticisms of neuroscience (101).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With the help of Zupan\u010di\u010d\u2019s work in <\/span>What is Sex?<\/span><\/i> (2017), Reshe argues that rather than being a story about genetic triumph and adaptation, nature is full of genetic mutations and abortions. Animals, be they human or non-human, share in nature\u2019s constitutive lack: \u201cThe difference between [animals and humans] is not the difference between whether or not they are more adapted or less adapted; they rather differ by the types of failures they are\u201d (108). Turning to the depressive realism of philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, Reshe offers that the human\u2019s special form of failure is an \u201cacute awareness\u201d that makes us \u201cunsuitable for life\u201d (108). The tragic over-acuity of humans is the actualization of nature\u2019s central nothingness, the destructive disorder at the heart of all things living. Like humans and society, nature also has a death drive: \u201cThe human death drive is not a rupture from nature; it is the most radical inclusion into the inner rupture that constitutes nature\u201d (111). Nature\u2019s truth has not been accounted for by psychoanalysis, Reshe accuses, and when it approaches doing so the motivating negativity of nature risks being covered over by the terminology of enjoyment and the positive outlook that Reshe believes buttresses everything from natural science to philosophy to psychoanalysis.<\/span><\/p>\n

If these fields have fallen short of their potential by disavowing negativity, what is to be done? Reshe declares her refusal to answer this question on multiple occasions, since to remain negative her practice must avoid offering programs, solutions, and ameliorations of any kind (vii, 133). Regardless, in scattered moments Reshe offers suggestions as to what her negative insight might contribute; for example, the ability to realize the suffering of others and oneself. This is the foundation of what Reshe calls \u201ccompassion\u201d or, at other times, love. In being dead together, Reshe identifies the possibility of a \u201cpro-social self-negation,\u201d something that is \u201cin the form of nothing\u201d and is, ultimately, wasteful in its meaninglessness (62). This traumatic-yet-loving suffering, on an individual level, bonds us to the other compassionately and allegedly in the absence of enjoyment. Politically and clinically, this means that a \u201cnegatively oriented psychoanalysis inherently resists the very possibility of a healed, harmonious non-suffering society\u201d (75). Reshe claims this puts her negative practice at a remove \u201cfrom all sorts of political and psychological projects\u201d (75), since these trade in \u201cpositive political agendas focused on the praxis of facilitating positive social change\u201d (75).<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshe\u2019s work leaves us with a handful of problems. Some are internal to her philosophical pessimism and her attempt to delimit a novel form of \u201cpsychoanalytic\u201d practice, while others emerge in her discursive exchanges with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory. The most acute issue, the status of the death drive, is no surprise given its centrality to Reshe\u2019s argument. The character of the death drive has been, of course, widely debated in psychoanalytic discourses within and outside of the clinic (maybe most especially there). The chief problem with Reshe\u2019s use is its imprecision; Reshe\u2019s philosophical pessimism uses \u201cdeath drive\u201d interchangeably with such disparate terms as \u201cnothingness,\u201d \u201cnegativity,\u201d \u201cdestruction,\u201d \u201cself-destruction,\u201d and even \u201csuicide.\u201d This conceptual flimsiness stems from her unilateral rejection of desire, evidenced in her criticisms of the Lacanian subject, whose enjoyment\/<\/span>jouissance <\/span><\/i>she proclaims is \u201chedonist\u201d and \u201cmasochistic\u201d (60). Reshe takes issue with Freud and Lacan\u2019s apparent yoking of the death drive to the pleasure principle, since \u201cthis is problematic [because] you still bring up the [sic] pleasure \u2026 [<\/span>jouissance<\/span><\/i>] is attached to pleasure\u201d (48). This rejection of desire and Reshe\u2019s equivocation of desire with pleasure and sex may be found across her work (2017).<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshe demands a death drive free from enjoyment for reasons consistent with her self-declared project of decoupling negativity from positivity. The death drive cannot both enjoy and be negative, since enjoyment, whether achieved by orgasm or other means, gives the death drive a positive bent in which it overcomes itself by attaining (or failing to attain, as is often the case) its desire. \u201cThe concept of jouissance implies that pleasure is all we want or what we are destined to be looking for,\u201d she criticizes, and as such this position falls \u201cback under Hegelian dialectics\u201d (38). Thus, Reshe demands that we reject enjoyment, insisting that we lean into the emptiness of the death drive. Yet, Reshe commits the cardinal sin of attaching negativity and positivity at every turn\u2013\u2013such is the structure of argument and, indeed, of thought, as Hegel noted throughout his work. To stake a claim as to the primacy and purity of negativity, Reshe repeatedly argues that negativity is what <\/span>constitutes<\/span><\/i> the subject (and society, and nature; cf. pgs. 25, 27, and 43). In other words, negativity <\/span>builds<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>creates<\/span><\/i>\u2013\u2013hallmarks of the positivity that is inherent in the movement of the negative. Reshe is compelled to demonstrate this positive underbelly of the negative whenever she appeals to its centrality with regard to subject-formation, the structure of society, and the evolutionary development of species. Reshe does not see that one can have positivity and productivity (that is, one can desire) without yoking oneself to a \u201ctheological\u201d or \u201cteleological\u201d worldview that sweeps destructive impulses under the rug, insisting that they are perversions that offer only roadblocks to human perfection. In a manner consistent with the dialectical problem of opposites, Reshe offers a theology of the negative that is just as one-sided as its opposite: the positive orientation that plagues philosophy, psychoanalysis, and natural science. Nothingness is already Being; disavowals of this fundamental relationship leave one turning in circles, as Reshe certainly does throughout this book.<\/span><\/p>\n

The conceptual vacuity of the death drive also affects the internal consistency of Reshe\u2019s project. Insofar as she defines life as the death drive, which she equates with meaninglessness, this creates a conceptual problem for her work whenever she attempts to articulate an upshot to seeing the world as she does. For example, Reshe harbors a hope (dare I say, a desire) for her project: that her negative practice can overcome the preclusion of \u201ccompassion,\u201d which she describes as \u201csharing the tragedy of the other\u201d (60). Reshe repeatedly characterizes the subject as tragic while simultaneously defining life as meaningless. The very idea of tragedy is, however, deeply imbued with meaning\u2013\u2013particularly for psychoanalysis. That something (a life, say) is tragic cannot be stated in a vacuum; we are compelled to determine what it is about that life that makes it so (mistakenly killing your biological father and fathering children with your biological mother, say). Refusing to determine the precise manner in which a life is tragic evacuates the conceptual significance tragedy, something Reshe cannot in good faith commit to, since the idea of tragedy is fundamental to her depressive realism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, in making the death drive so profoundly and flatly negative, Reshe is forced into some strange positions. For example, Reshe takes issue with \u017di\u017eek\u2019s discussion of the trauma of the wars in Sudan and Kongo (\u017di\u017eek 2008, 11), claiming that it renders people from Sudan and Kongo as belonging \u201cto the group of the living dead, while \u2018we\u2019 are those who are only haunted by the spectre of occasional trauma\u201d (40). For Reshe, the trauma of lack is what we \u201cmost profoundly share\u201d (61), and so it is an absurdity for \u017di\u017eek to make any statements about the specific traumas of, say, the experience of a civil war. Life is meaningless suffering; to delimit it in any more specified terms covers over the emptiness that constitutes the social bond. Yet, is it not precisely by virtue of Reshe\u2019s ontological flattening of the death drive<\/span> qua <\/span><\/i>suffering into a single, continuous flatline that suffering is rendered meaningless? In declaring all of our suffering to be ontologically indistinguishable, the world certainly does appear to be a vast, endless expanse of identically pointless suffering.<\/span><\/p>\n

I agree with Reshe: life is suffering. Yet, \u201cbecause we suffer we acknowledge we have erred\u201d (1977, 284). Hegel\u2019s declaration in the <\/span>Phenomenology <\/span><\/i>is an early iteration of what Lacan would define as the forced choice, the <\/span>tragedy<\/span><\/i>, of human existence. Yes, we suffer, but we do not all suffer in the same way; yes, we lack, but our individual and collective paths to either address or avoid this lack have actual, concrete consequences in the world. These consequences generate different kinds of suffering. We can always suffer differently\u2013\u2013such is the odyssey of the death drive, of <\/span>jouissance<\/span><\/i>, our chosen paths to death. Adjudicating whether we want or how we will execute that different kind of suffering can only occur in the fraught space of meaning-making, namely politics and\/or the clinic. In the absence of politics, which Reshe evacuates of any effectiveness in her project, the suffering generated out of the conflict in Sudan is granted the same weight as the personal suffering experienced by an academic publishing lectures on her Patreon. Suffering may be a natural part of living, but flattening suffering into a universal ontological state risks naturalizing disparate, sometimes incommensurable sufferings\u2013\u2013a consequence highlighted in one of Malabou\u2019s responses to Reshe in her interview, where Malabou contends that creation and destruction coincide, making peace and terrorism indistinguishable (51-52). In the vacuous space of abstraction Reshe has created, terror and peace, destruction and creation certainly do become indistinguishable, even apolitical. This is the danger of a project like Reshe\u2019s, which at every turn denies the political dimensions of creation and destruction in its rejection of desire and disavowal of how our interests appear in the world as always already politicized.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Works cited<\/span><\/p>\n

Hegel, G. W. F.. 1977. <\/span>Phenomenology of Spirit<\/span><\/i>, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press.<\/span><\/p>\n

Malabou, Catherine. 2012a. <\/span>New Wounded<\/span><\/i>. New York: Fordham University Press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshe, Julie. 2017. \u201cLove is Tender: A critical approach to pansexualism\u201d in <\/span>The Materiality of\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice<\/span><\/i> eds. Anna Malinowska & Michael Gratzke.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julie Reshe, Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023; 144 pgs. ISBN: 978-3-031-31200-7\u00a0 everet smith, Emory University Julie Reshe\u2019s Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive (2023) offers an alternative to psychoanalytic parameters and practice. Traditional psychoanalysis, Reshe accuses, presents a twofold problem. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[107,327,106,295],"class_list":["post-14049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-lacan","tag-pessimism","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-social-and-political-philosophy","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 04:40:04","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14050,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14049\/revisions\/14050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}