 Foundations of Violence, Jantzen’s final publication, synthesizes her analysis of the psychoanalytic, religious, and philosophical dimensions of death and violence in Western culture, culminating in a constructive alternative (a feminine symbolic) that celebrates beauty, desire, and the creative impulse. Thanatos, a death drive, far from being a universal of human nature, as Freud believed, is a gendered construction of Western modernity, according to Jantzen, with precursors in Christendom and classical antiquity. Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle provide the genealogy of violence in Western thought that Jantzen critiques here, while Plotinus stands in for all those other-worldly seekers who gesture toward release in another world. What was to be a six-volumed study on Death and the Displacement of Beauty in the western tradition can be comprehended in incipient form in Jantzen 1999.