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

This book elaborates the political and intimate possibilities of going beyond the tendency toward destruction that Freud identified in human nature. Martínez argues that Eros is the force that can help us resist this destructive drive, and that resistance must take the form of unceasing ethical vigilance and political action.

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.

Rosaura Martínez Ruiz (Author)
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.

Judith Butler (Foreword By)
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Their many books include The Force of Nonviolence, Giving an Account of Oneself, and Gender Trouble.

Ramsey McGlazer (Translator)
Ramsey McGlazer is Assistant Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress.