By Robert Rowland Smith
Robert Rowland Smith takes Freud's paintings at the death-drive and compares it with different philosophies of demise - Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida specifically. He additionally applies it in a brand new option to literature and paintings - to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, between others. He asks no matter if works of art are lifeless or alive, if creative creativity isn't really a kind of destruction, and even if our skill to be seduced by means of high-quality phrases capacity we don't placed our selves prone to death.
In doing so, he proposes a brand new concept of aesthetics during which works of art and literary texts have a death-drive in their personal, now not least through their defining skill to show clear of all that's actual, and the place the consequences of the death-drive suggest that we're regularly residing in imaginary, rhetorical or 'artistic' worlds. The booklet additionally offers a priceless advent to the wealthy culture of labor at the death-drive seeing that Freud.
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Additional resources for Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art (The Frontiers of Theory)
Sample text
Put more simply, the death-drive is the instinct to come back to life, not to die, but to haunt. Which suggests that life itself, rather than being fully alive, is already a form of energetic haunting. The death-drive could therefore be a differential energy, a haunting not-thereness within life, which, having returned, seeks only to go back once more to the state of nothingness. Life and death work together in this haunted, energetic loop in which each seeks to minimise the other, and, despite the rhetoric, there is no metaphysics outside of this play of the inorganic versus the organic.
It is, if you like, the ‘principle’ of art to exonerate itself from worldly concerns; its condition of possibility is that it rejects all that is, even if subsequently it comes to host, as it were, worldly material. The reader might hear in this allusions to ‘art for art’s sake’, but the privilege I refer to is not in that sense ‘aesthetic’, not about an ideal. The opening gesture of the artwork, before it exists, will have been to destroy for its own purposes the phenomenal world it finds itself in.
And in his Da! 14 It’s hardly a clear account, but Lacan seems to be saying that any deathliness in the game can be read as a negative phase en route to a conclusion, somewhat as in Hegelian dialectics, and the desire to do away with the toy, to destroy it, leads on to a place where the whole scene takes on new meaning for the boy. ’ – in time, thus realising a reintegration at a higher level of desire, the reintegration formerly threatened by the deathly or aggressive instincts. Which is to say the words spoken are as important as the toy, for its these that have the power to stage a symbolic cohesion that the game alone falls short of.