Life & Death

Catalog description

Life and death are often taken as simple opposites. For example, some claim that life is defined by a body's ability to perpetuate itself and that death is marked by the cessation of this capacity. Freud, however, famously argued that that life itself is marked by a death drive that repeatedly attempts to return the body to the stasis of the inorganic. He argued that "only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death-instinct—never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life." What is life? What is its relationship to death? What lives are deemed worth defending and which marked by death? What is the role of the sexual and the queer in this nexus? In this course, we will read works of theory alongside films and fiction in the attempt to answer these questions. Readings may include: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man; Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks; Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death; Patrice Douglass, Engendering Blackness.