Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture

Review Essay New Directions in Queer Theory: Recent Theorizing in the Work of Lynne Huffer, Leo Bersani & Adam Phillips, and Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman

“…Huffer, theorizing from her own queer relationship, analyses how the ego informs the seemingly banal and everyday world of work — there is a version of the ‘ideal ego’ evident in organizations, and those who cannot achieve it are excluded or excludable. Her argument that individual psyches are located within both sides of the binary, that is, individuals are both oppressors and oppressed, takes us to Bersani's advocacy, via the example of the sexual act of barebacking, of a new relational model of being that involves dissolution of the ego so that self and others merge (for similar arguments, see Dean, ; Dollimore, ). Berlant and Edelman acknowledge that there is very little sex in their discussion, which focuses on the intercourse of conversation or non‐sexual intercourse, but their text is redolent with sexual metaphors.…”

In Biomedicine, Thin Is Still In: Obesity Surveillance among Racialized, (Im)migrant, and Female Bodies

“…Indeed, one researcher correctly recognizes that obesity is often explored as non-white, non-western, and "Non-American" [133] (p. 16). Others recognize that obesity is connected to metaphors of disease and plague that threaten contagions, loss of immunity, degeneration, social death, and species extinction [47,134]. The same type of moral panic is raised when race intersects with issues such as obesity.…”

Eros and Thanatos: A psychoanalytic examination of death in the context of working life / Eros i Tanatos: psychoanalityczna perspektywa śmierci w kontekście miejsca pracy

“…In Freud's return to the death drive this writing occurred at a time when the ravages of the First World War could be understood and that the violence and aggression of war was very much on the surface. The clash of desire and civilization leads Freud to the notion that there is something impossible about the fulfilment of human desire [Dollimore 2001].…”