Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

ISBN-13: 9780748640393 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 256 str.

Robert Rowland Smith

Opis

Robert Rowland Smith takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death--Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. He also applies it in a new way to literature and art - to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. He asks whether artworks are dead or alive, if artistic creativity isn't actually a form of destruction, and whether our ability to be seduced by fine words means we don't put our selves at risk of death.In doing so, he proposes a new theory of aesthetics in which artworks and literary texts have a death-drive of their own, not least by their defining ability to turn away from all that is real, and where the effects of the death-drive mean that we are constantly living in imaginary, rhetorical or 'artistic' worlds. The book also provides a valuable introduction to the rich tradition of work on the death-drive since Freud.

Spis treści

Note on the Text; References; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Foreword; Introduction; 1. Memento Mori; 2. The Death Drive Does Not Think; 3. A Subject Is Being Beaten; 4. White Over Red; 5. Literature - Repeat Nothing; 6. A Harmless Suggestion; 7. The Rest of Radioactive Light; Post Script - Approaching Death; Index.