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

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a philosophy of love, trauma, depression, suicide, motherhood, Satan, entropy, and aging — written against therapeutic culture and the tyranny of positivity

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Author: Julie Reshe

Publication date: 30 August 2026

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

ISBN EPUB: 978-1-0666599-9-9

ISBN paperback: 978-1-0666599-1-3

ISBN hardcover: 978-1-0666599-3-7 

Publisher: Negative Press

Cover artwork by Guridi

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About the book

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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.

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On Negative Essays

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“Negative Essays is a brave, unsettling, and deeply moving book. Julie Reshe refuses every easy consolation and every therapeutic injunction to transform suffering into recovery. Through death, depression, humor, love, motherhood, disability, and aging, she develops a radically relational account of existence: we do not suffer alone, because we never exist alone. Negativity is not the opposite of love but its most intimate condition—the wound through which we are exposed to one another. At once philosophically incisive and painfully personal, these essays bring thought as close as possible to what thought usually keeps at a distance. A remarkable and necessary book.”

— Catherine Malabou

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“Julie Reshe is the philosopher of the negative. In addition to her radical reading of the death drive, Reshe here develops a negative philosophy that undermines previous forms of pessimism by locating negativity in our essential involvement with others, not in isolation. It is precisely this involvement with others that is the source of the worst of our wounds rather than any existential loneliness. Reshe radically redefines negativity and the idea of community by turning all expectations about both on their heads. It’s a startling book not to be missed by anyone who’s ever felt destroyed by someone else.”

— Todd McGowan​​

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"I pride myself on knowing Hegel’s “night of the world”: that pure abyss of negativity that constitutes the subject. And yet Negative Essays is like a map that marks the location of the candle I secretly lit in the basement, the cupboard light that glows through the cracks of a closed door, the torch I’ve hidden under the duvet.

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These essays are so uncompromising that they rob the reader of that last defence against the suffering of being: reflection upon it. While the work is philosophically rich, the words have such an existential intensity that you cannot help but feel the burn of the black sun they describe.

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There is no escape into fantasy here. No therapeutic cure, political utopia or religious salvation. So, with all that in mind, why would I ever put myself through the hell of reading these essays? Because of the sheer enjoyment each one produces."

— Peter Rollins

 

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

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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.

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PDF edition is available here.