"how closely related passion was to death"

"I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it." - Michel Foucault.

Foucault, a French philosopher and historian is noted to have said, "Complete total pleasure... for me, it's related to death."

Passionate love or Eros, dominated by sensual desire and longing, was studied and refined as a concept by Plato, in his famous work Symposium. Plato said Eros helps the soul remember beauty, and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth.

Sigmund Freud referred to Eros in terms of libido, and as the life instinct innate in all humans. Eros is the desire to create life, favours productivity and construction and battles against the destructive death instinct of Thanatos. In early psychoanalytic writings, the instincts arising from Eros are also shown as opposed by forces from the ego.

Destrudo was a term introduced by Edoardo Weiss (1935) to denote the energy of the death instinct that opposes the life instinct of Eros.