ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how certain aspects of corporate driven reform, for example its language of audit and its quantification of the life world, diminish our humanity, and both channel and are fueled by the death drive. If the death drive is a drive to psychically numb or number ourselves and neoliberalism provides conditions under which this drive grows in intensity or finds free rein, what hope is there? Freud offered as a response that hope lay in "the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers,' eternal Eros". Could anyone who knew the history of New Orleans or Chicago and their African American communities have made such a comment? Such astonishing views are justified by an appeal to a purported rise in test scores in New Orleans. Numbers on tests justify statistics on the numbers of lives lost, a number which erases the lives of all those dead and displaced.
