This article analyzes the rhetoric of "death" and "haunting" in curriculum studies by closely reading Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman's "Understanding Curriculum" (2002). Drawing on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I argue in the first section of the article that the rhetoric of death appears at moments when the pressures of globalization upset the disciplinary assumptions of the field. In the second section, I argue that "Understanding Curriculum" is formally a "work of mourning" by reading the book along with Derrida's writing on inheritance. The final section of the article takes up the problem of inheritance again, but turns to Friedrich Nietzsche's writings on history and a scene from Luke's Gospel to formulate a conception of the field, usually obscured by the rhetoric of death and haunting, as driven by love.