How can we love without losing ourselves? Why is passion so destructive? And what does it mean to love the dead?

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead” wrote Bertrand Russell. His words cast love and death as the two most powerful forces shaping our existence, the crucial threads from which we weave the narratives of our lives.

Love and death are central to the human endeavour to understand the world. Timeless themes in philosophy and art, they have endless cameos in popular culture and continue to be interrogated by philosophers, novelists, musicians and poets alike.

In literature, from Romeo and Juliet to the Great Gatsby, the trope of dead lovers, destroyed by passion, has become cliché. Love is compared to madness, fire, a prison, even hell; in fact, it seems strangely close to death itself. In psychoanalysis, Freud argued that, although conflicting, Eros and Thanatos are deeply intertwined, while BDSM emerges out of the shadowy relationship between eroticism and violence.