Fire and Ash: The Poetics of Life and Death

2025-10-06
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Theme Overview

From myth to modernity, from the tragic stage to the fragmented screen, the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos—Life and Death—has remained one of the most profound and recurring motifs in human imagination. To commemorate the 10th year of Erothanatos, the issue seeks to revisit and reinterpret this perennial tension between vitality and mortality, creation and dissolution, desire and negation.

The theme invites explorations into how writers, artists, and thinkers negotiate the paradox of existence: the drive to live, love, and create that is always shadowed by an awareness of decay and death. How does Eros sustain meaning in the face of Thanatos? Can the aesthetic or erotic impulse redeem the inevitability of death—or does it, paradoxically, stem from it?

Possible Areas of Inquiry

  • Philosophical and psychoanalytic readings of Eros and Thanatos (Freud, Nietzsche, Bataille, Lacan, etc.)

  • Representations of life and death in literature, film, theatre, and visual arts

  • Eroticism, mortality, and transcendence in myth and ritual

  • Death and desire in contemporary literary or cultural theory

  • Ecocritical perspectives: life and death in nature and posthumanism

  • The politics of life and death: biopower, necropolitics, and resistance

  • Poetic aesthetics of mourning, loss, and renewal

  • The body as the site of both eros and thanatos

Submission Guidelines

Erothanatos welcomes original, unpublished research papers, essays, translations, and book reviews engaging with the theme from interdisciplinary perspectives—literature, philosophy, cultural studies, performance studies, and related fields.

  • Submission Deadline: May 15, 2026

  • Publication Date: July 01, 2026

Manuscripts should follow the MLA 9th Edition format and be submitted through the journal’s website:

https://erothanatos.com/journal/index.php/ojs/login?source=%2Fjournal%2Findex.php%2Fojs%2Fabout%2Fsubmissions

About the Journal

Erothanatos (E-ISSN: 2457-0265) is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal devoted to the intersections of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. It provides a platform for rigorous scholarly engagement with the entwined energies of life and death—of Eros and Thanatos—in textual and cultural production.

 

Editor-in-Chief:
Subrata Biswas
Email: editor.erothanatos@gmail.com