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Part 1 The ancient world: Eros and Thanatos, change and loss in the ancient world; All worlds fail through weariness - Ecclesiastes; escaping desire - Christianty, Gnosticism and Buddhism. Part 2 Mutability, melancholy and quest - the renaissance: fatal confusions - sex and death in early modern cultures; Death's incessant motion; death and identity; Desire is death - Shakespeare. Part 3 Social death: the denial of death?; degeneration and dissidence; between degeneration and the death drive - Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Part 4 Modernity and philosophy - the authenticity of nothingness: the philosophical embrace of death - Hegel; Heidegger, Kojeve and Sartre part 5 The desire not to be - late metaphysics and psychoanalysdis: dying as the real aim of life - Schopenhauer; Freud - life as a detour to death. Part 6 Renouncing death: the philosophy of Praxis and emancipation - Feuerbach, Marx, Marcuse. Part 7 The aesthetics of energy: fighting decadence - Nietzsche against Schopenhauer and Wagner; ecstasy and annihilation - Georges Bataille; in search of potency - D.H. Lawrence. Part 8 Death and the homoerotic: wrecked by desire - Thomas Mann; promiscuity and death; the wonder of pleasure.