Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Robert Rowland Smith

Robert Rowland Smith compares Freud's work on the death-drive to other philosophies of death, particularly those of Pascal, Heidegger, and Derrida, and applies it to Shakespeare, Mark Rothko, and Katharina Fritsch. Smith asks whether artistic creativity is actually a form of destruction and whether the seduction of fine words places us at risk of death.

He proposes a new theory of aesthetics in which artwork and literary text have a death-drive of their own, the effects of which translate into imaginary, rhetorical, and "artistic" worlds. Smith also provides a valuable introduction to the rich scholarship on the death-drive since the time of Freud.

Related Subjects

• Literary Criticism and Theory

Series

• The Frontiers of Theory (Edinburgh University Press)

About the Author

Robert Rowland Smith is the author of Derrida and Autobiography and the founding editor of the award-winning journal Angelak.

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