There is much debate today around a crisis in Queer Theory. It is a crisis defined by a perceived imbalance between the relevance of theory as aesthetic performance and its inability to account for the materiality of speech, language and the reality of queer lived experiences. The title of this conference ‘Call to Life’ addresses this perception. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s idea of the self as a co-relation between sameness and otherness, Enda McCaffrey (Nottingham Trent University) will challenge the ethics of (non) relationality in French Theory and in the context of Edelman’s (2004) and Puar’s (2007) ‘ethics of death’, and will propose an ethical re-reading of theory’s crisis with alterity. This is also the subject of McCaffrey’s forthcoming book Bodies Without Organs: French Theory and Homosexuality (2015).