Julie Reshe
Ukrainian philosopher
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Julie Reshe is a Ukrainian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst and a visiting professor at University College Cork and University College Dublin. She is known for her works on negative psychoanalysis and is a Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies.[1][2][3]
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Julie Reshe | |
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| Education | |
| Education | Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (PhD) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alenka Zupančič |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy |
| Institutions | Global Centre for Advanced Studies, University College Cork, University College Dublin |
| Main interests | philosophy of sexuality, philosophy of education |
| Notable ideas | negative psychoanalysis |
| Website | https://www.juliereshe.com/ |
Philosophy
Julie Reshe advances a radically “negative” alternative to contemporary therapeutic culture, which she sees as dominated by compulsory positivity, self-improvement, and the promise of healing. She rejects the assumption that suffering individuals are exceptional cases in need of cure and instead poses a provocative question: what if the entire social order is terminally ill? In this view, the widespread psychologization of society—where personal growth, self-care, and emotional repair are treated as universal solutions—becomes a form of ideological management. It offers false hope, encourages “self-cure,” and ultimately sustains disappointment. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Reshe challenges redemptive narratives in education and therapy. Like Jacques Lacan, she resists messianic positions that promise salvation, transformation, or harmony between individual and collective good. For her, the culture of positivity—“wishing people well”—conceals a denial of structural lack and antagonism.
In education, she critiques developmental and progressive models that frame learning as continuous upward growth. While engaging with Catherine Malabou and her concept of plasticity, Reshe warns against reducing plasticity to flexibility—where students appear active but are still shaped within predetermined frameworks. Even critical pedagogies risk becoming another form of managed transformation that sustains the fantasy of wholeness or self-realization. Instead, Reshe emphasizes “destructive plasticity”: the capacity not merely to be formed but to have form shattered. This negative orientation resists therapeutic redemption and refuses the promise that education, analysis, or self-work will deliver completeness. Her project ultimately insists on confronting lack, breakdown, and structural sickness rather than masking them with optimistic narratives of cure and progress.[4]
Various authors have engaged with Reshe's work in their discussions of pessimism and pessimistic traditions[5], of negativity and feminist critique,[6] and in the context of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.[7]
Books
- Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, Springer International Publishing 2024[8]
- Death and Love: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives, edited with Todd McGowan, Routledge 2025