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

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

Author: Julie Reshe

Publication date: July 2026

Format: PDF digital edition

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

Publisher: Negative Press

*Cover image provisional

Cover artwork by Guridi

ABOUT THE BOOK

While belonging to the tradition of philosophical pessimism and negative philosophy, these essays approach love, rather than our awareness of mortality, as what most deeply touches the wound of 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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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: 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

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, 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.