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...