Download Cover Image

Eros

Beyond the Death Drive

By (author) Rosaura Martínez Ruiz

Foreword by Judith Butler

Translated by Ramsey McGlazer

Pub Date: October 5, 2021

ISBN: 9780823298273

Page Count: 208

Formats:

Price: $90.00

Buy Now

Description: Eros considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Rosaura Martínez Ruiz argues that when the pleasure principle comes into contact with the death drive (the human tendency toward aggression or cruelty), the psyche can take detours that, without going beyond the limit of the pleasure principle, can nevertheless defer it. Eros reflects on these deviations of the pleasure principle, in the political sphere and in the intimate realm.

Following these erotic paths, Martínez argues that the forces of the death drive can only be resisted if resistance is understood as an ongoing process. In such an effort, erotic action and the construction of pathways for sublimation are never-ending ethical and political tasks. We know that these tasks cannot be finally accomplished, yet they remain imperative and undeniably urgent.

If psychoanalysis and deconstruction teach us that the death drive is insurmountable, through aesthetic creation and political action we can nevertheless delay, defer, and postpone it. Calling for the formation and maintenance of a “community of mourning duelists,” this book seeks to imagine and affirm the kind of “erotic battalion” that might yet be mobilized against injustice. This battalion’s mourning, Martínez argues, must be ongoing, open-ended, combative, and tenaciously committed to the complexity of ethical and political life.
Reviews: This new book challenges us to rethink who we are, to what world we belong, and how best to engage the challenge to change and create in a world in which state powers continue to exercise forms of cruelty in the name of exclusion and destruction. Martínez asks us to consider what it means to be members of an erotic battalion, those who seek and enact love in public space to defeat the forces of destruction that so often cover their traces. This theory asks us to practice proactive resistance as a collectivity, to take up negation, erotically and ethically, to dismantle sovereign cruelty, and to oppose, in all its forms, annihilation.---Judith Butler, from the Foreword
Table of Contents: Foreword by Judith Butler | vii
Introduction | 1
1. The Economy of Alteration: Resistance and Violence | 21
2. The Economy of Sacrifi ce: Melancholic Elaborations | 45
3. Beyond the Limit of the Death Drive: Eros | 65
Postscript: Toward a Community of Duelists | 145
Notes | 155
Bibliography | 169
Details: ISBN-13 9780823298273
Published: 2021-10-05

Trim: 5.000in x 8.000in x 0.000in
Contributors: Foreword: Judith Butler
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Their books include Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024), What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022), The Force of Nonviolence (2020), Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
By (author) Rosaura Martínez Ruiz
Rosaura Martínez Ruiz is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is the author of two books in Spanish and is a member of the advisory board of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs.
Translated: Ramsey McGlazer
Ramsey McGlazer is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Department of Italian Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020), published by Fordham University Press in the Lit Z Series.