What kind of thinking happens when we consider concepts that seem to define life itself—like sex and death—when we think comparatively and globally? And what kind of particular ideas of those do we face today in the era of permanent war, forensic technology, and climate change? How do we understand, in theories of comparison (whether they be in comparative literature or in anthropology or other fields) the cultures of death and of sexuality that sit alongside those of sex and death but cannot be reduced to it? The talk addresses how the literary and psychoanalysis navigate these different scales—the individuated and the collective—to address these questions of comparative thinking in the context of the global.