Living Each Other’s Deaths and Other Negative Essays (2026)

Author: Julie Reshe

Edition: 1st

Publication date: June 2026

ISBN eBook: 978-1-0666599-4-4

ISBN Print: 978-1-0666599-1-3

*Cover image provisional.

About the book

There is nothing for us to live except the loss of each other. To be in the world is to be with others, and to be with others is, at its most intimate, to be already losing them. These essays trace the structural bond between death and love. While belonging to the tradition of philosophical pessimism, negative philosophy, and depressive realism, they place love, rather than our awareness of mortality, at the center of cruelty and suffering. The book consists of thirteen Negative Essays, including Feminist Satanism, Depression as Compassion, and Trauma as Initiation.

 

Contents

Introduction

Essay 1. Humor and Depressive Realism: Laughter as an Embodiment of the Death Drive

Essay 2. Therapeutic Society, Toxic Positivity, Critical Psychology

Essay 3. Feminist Satanism: An Ontology of Destruction

Essay 4. Trauma as Initiation

Essay 5. Depression as Compassion: Nearness to the Wound of Being

Essay 6. Between Us, Death: Being-with-towards-death

Essay 7. Suicide That Is Not One’s Own

Essay 8. Non-Therapy for a Narcissist

Essay 9. Unbecoming: Maternal Ontology and the Undoing of the Subject

Essay 10. Feminist Depressive Realism: PMS and the Tragic Grace of Cheerfulness

Essay 11. The Entropic Ouroboros

Essay 12. The Inverted World: Autism, Introversion, and the Norm of Extraversion

Essay 13. The Negative Body: Disability and Aging as Destructive Plasticity

 

About the author

Julie Reshe is a philosopher, writer, and the author of the negative psychoanalytic approach. Her recent books include Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (Palgrave, 2024) and Death and Love: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Investigations, co-edited with Todd McGowan (Routledge, 2025). Her work explores philosophical pessimism, depressive realism, trauma, love, and the death drive through philosophy, psychoanalysis, and existential thought. She is the founder of the Negative Collective and the Negative Journal. Basically, anything with the word "negative" in it is likely connected to her, while simultaneously, nothing is negative enough in her opinion.