Robert Rowland Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640393
- eISBN:
- 9780748671601
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640393.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death — those of Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. It also applies it in a new way to literature ...
More
This book takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death — those of Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. It also applies it in a new way to literature and art — to that of Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. The book 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 ourselves at risk of death. In doing so, the book 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.Less
This book takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death — those of Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. It also applies it in a new way to literature and art — to that of Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. The book 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 ourselves at risk of death. In doing so, the book 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.
Robert Rowland Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640393
- eISBN:
- 9780748671601
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640393.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This postscript offers a somewhat less analytic, more meditative, reflection on many of the themes developed in the chapters before it, beginning with an encounter with a sculpture by Katharina ...
More
This postscript offers a somewhat less analytic, more meditative, reflection on many of the themes developed in the chapters before it, beginning with an encounter with a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch.Less
This postscript offers a somewhat less analytic, more meditative, reflection on many of the themes developed in the chapters before it, beginning with an encounter with a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch.
