Abstract

What happens to a culture in which the death drive has been totally repressed and turned into a narcissistic desire to consume? Alexander Bove’s response to A. Kiarina Kordela’s first book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, puts ethics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and biopolitics in conversation with each other. Drawing out a gap in Kordela’s logic, Bove concludes that the insertion Levinas’s concept of the face allows us to conceptualize the role of the death drive in ethics in late capitalism.