Keynote Speaker
Keith Crome, Manchester Metropolitan University
The immanent play of life and death: Eros and Thanatos as intensities within the field of desire
This presentation examines Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy as a radical philosophical meditation on the relation between life and death. I argue that it reveals that Eros and Thanatos are not opposed drives but dissimulative dimensions of becoming. Through analyses of desire, repetition, embodiment, the sublime, and nihilism, I argue that life is constituted through an unceasing tension between creation and destruction. Death is not the negation of life, but as an immanent condition of transformation that continually opens existence to new possibilities of becoming.
