Negative Essays on Death, Love, and Depressive Realism (2026)

​

Author: Julie Reshe

Publication date: July 2026

ISBN PDF: 978-1-0666599-4-4

ISBN EPUB: 978-1-0666599-9-9 (forthcoming)

ISBN paperback: 978-1-0666599-1-3 (forthcoming)

ISBN hardcover: 978-1-0666599-3-7 (forthcoming)

Publisher: Negative Press

Cover artwork by Guridi

​

About the book

While belonging to the tradition of philosophical pessimism and negative philosophy, these essays approach love, rather than mortality, as what most deeply wounds being. Love knows the darkest truth that death only conceals. The book consists of thirteen Negative Essays, including Feminist Satanism, Depression as Compassion, and Trauma as Initiation.

​​

Contents

Preface

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: Toward a Negative Theory of Trauma

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

​

To be cited as: Reshe, J. (2026). Negative Essays on Death, Love, and Depressive Realism. Negative Press.
 

About the author

Julie Reshe, PhD, is a philosopher, writer, and author of a negative psychoanalytic approach. She is Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis at GCAS, a Visiting Lecturer at University College Cork, and a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin. Her recent books include Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (Palgrave, 2023) 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.

​

​The PDF edition is available now.

Paperback, hardcover, and EPUB editions are forthcoming.