TERESA DE LAURETIS, born and educated in Italy, is Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. The author of numerous, widely translated, works in semiotics, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, literary and film theory, she writes in both English and Italian. Her books include Alice Doesn't (1984), Technologies of Gender (1987), The Practice of Love (1994), Soggetti eccentrici (1999) and Figures of Resistance (2007), a reader of her essays in feminist film theory, edited by Patricia White.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Death @ Work Basic Instincts: An Illustrated Guide to Freud's Theory of Drives The Stubborn Drive: Foucault, Freud, Fanon The Queer Space of the Drive: Rereading Freud with Laplanche Becoming Inorganic: Cronenberg's eXistenZ , Virtuality, and the Death Drive The Odor of Memory: On Reading Djuna Barnes with Freud Notes Bibliography Index

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 'This remarkable book by the well-known semiologist Teresa de Lauretis...is an indication of [the author's] ability to understand the present.' - Division Review