Book Reviews

parallax, 2011, vol. 17, no. 4, 124–129 Book Reviews Enduring Death: Hauntings of According to Smith, the death-drive retains a critical imperative in contemporary philosophies of Literature and Art death, but despite the term entering common parlance – or perhaps because of this – its edge has Robert Rowland Smith. Death-Drive: Freu- blunted. Smith sharpens up the edginess of the dian Hauntings in Literature and Art. death-drive in a series of chapters that question and (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) recall the strange logic of a drive to death in order to provoke an incisive interruption and revision of this The subtitle of Robert Rowland Smith’s Death- logic. One central question asked is: why is a drive to Drive announces a ghostly Freudian haunting of death necessary at all? In Freudian psychoanalysis literature and art. This visitation by Freud, the human psyche’s fundamental logic consists of coming without full authoritative presence, drives wish fulfilment, that is, the pursuit of pleasure. Why Smith to posit a compelling and creative – albeit then, Smith asks, would Freud propose a drive strange and spectral – reading of aesthetics and its towards death? Is death not unpleasurable? With his relations to death and the deathly. But Freud is essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud not the only ghostly presence in this book, absent appears to be breaking his own rule.1 Yet these presences abound: death and the death-drive terms, it turns out, are not so secure. Pleasure is itself, as the text’s central themes, refuse to appear defined by Freud as a lessening of tension, as an as such; the aesthetic moment both arrives and absence of unpleasure, that is, as a quenching relief withdraws as the argument circles its thesis; that ‘begins to look like death’ (p.4). Both securing psychoanalysis, subjectivity, pleasure, philosophy and undoing the position of pleasure as the principle and politics shimmer in and out of focus, and of life, Freud ultimately sets the sights of this Jacques Derrida, in whose memory the book is pleasurable death-drive on a withheld trace of an dedicated, provides more than a hint of his own earlier state that had yet to come alive, a minimal spectrality. While this abundance of indistinct state of the inanimate that precedes all life and to figures risks overflowing to produce an opacity and which it seeks to return. What Freud’s ‘beyond’ of a density that threatens the task of this book the pleasure principle effects then is a tautology reviewer – it also, perhaps, gestures appropriately where ‘life, that is pleasure, seeks death, that is towards the form and the content of Smith’s pleasure, that is life’ (p.69). This total levelling of argument in Death-Drive. terms is held at bay, for Smith, only via the recursive production and separation of the id, ego, and super- Despite this clamour of indistinct ghosts, Smith ego, perceived as united in the figure of the subject skilfully manages to produce a rich, rigorous and and that allows for mythos, drama and rhetoric that inquiring introduction to the death-drive in Freud narrate pleasure and death as polarized. – one that would be useful both for those unfamiliar with Freud’s work and for seasoned I will return in a moment to the importance Smith readers of psychoanalytic theory. This is a densely attributes to this dramatics of the death-drive but theorized text and, as such, it would be impossible first, in order to continue to locate the terms of his to do justice in the space of a review to all the thesis, I will address the status of death ‘itself’ as complexities and subtleties of Smith’s arguments. I Smith defines it. In Chapter 2 the status of death is will thus limit myself to providing a broad considered in relation to thought, rationality and overview of the characteristics of the death-drive the Enlightenment via Adorno and Pocock; but in that pertain to the originality of Smith’s foray into general the book suggests that death as death, is a this subject matter before speaking directly to this necessity that must come inevitably to end life, and thesis as it pertains to the aesthetic. such necessity, according to Smith, paralyzes parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online parallax http://www.tandfonline.com 124 thought, rendering death unthinkable. The fact to Freud’s theory by configuring the death-drive that we can have no conceptual access to the as ‘evil for evil’s sake’ (mal pour mal).3 For Derrida, experience of this radical alterity does not, death, in remaining radically other, introduces a however, render death as the reverse of life for force without force – a death-drive – which Smith: death is in life both insofar as it must end operates in silence, leaving no traces of its own, life (the two sides of one coin metaphor), or it is in only ‘lovely impressions’ as an ‘erotic simulacrum’ life the guise perhaps of an perpetual mourning – a death that is in fact ‘life’. In being also ‘cruelty that confuses life and death in a more Derridean for cruelty’s sake’, this death-drive, Smith sense.2 Death is always both absent and present. In explains, remains without the need of justification, Chapter 1, Smith turns to the philosophical basics justice or principle – it is without alibi. Thus it is of death through the figures of Pascal and ‘essential’ for it cannot be justified away or placed Heidegger to argue, following Heidegger, that in any higher category (p.99). As Smith elabor- death is more imaginary than real, and, as such, ates, the English term ‘sake’ signals both self- once again finds itself in the space of rhetoric or the protection, of one’s own inmost (and which as such artistic. This death then is barely there, a death cannot be presented), and a justification in public without presence bears the remnant of a force that for my sake: ‘Its authenticity harbours in this one could equate to a certain driven-ness. It is inexpressible living singularity forced to defend barely there both in the Freudian sense of a death itself by an exposure that ruins – by definition – kept in reserve, never appearing as symptom but that sakeful innerness’ (p.101). Death is reconfi- referring in its pleasurable repetition to the absent gured here then as productive of a drive that state of inertia to which life is driven to return; and institutes error for no reason, for its own sake, that in a more Derridean sense pursued by Smith in frees the death-drive from its psychic bonds and Chapters 4 and 5, where death drives life via its institutes a deviation not from the right path (as in spectral presence as infinite deferral. It is in the Freud) but from pathness itself, from the teleology play between these two ghostly deaths that haunts of a return to death – allowing, Smith affirms, all this text that I would locate Smith’s drive to other paths to be laid. In destroying all necessities consider the life and the death of aesthetic for the sake of its own necessity (which can never artworks themselves. be rendered present as such), death’s drive destroys all structures, principles, categories, and For Derrida and for Smith, Freud’s levelling of clears a path for the absolutely unexpected event. terms results in a death-drive devoid of destruc- tion. According to Freud, the ego cannot wish for In following Derrida’s aporetic path Smith offers a its own death, it can wish only for pleasure, and version of the death drive as a ‘self destroying thing therefore all seeming self-destructive tendencies without a cause that leaves both “lovely such as suicide must be accounted for. As Smith impressions” and, in its form as irreducible cruelty, argues in Chapter 3 via an analysis of Durkheim also animates beings psyches and souls’ (p.101), and Foucault, Freud accounts for suicide as a that is, providing both the living being and the misdirected sadism, where the super-ego as the ‘dead’ artistic object. It is when Smith shifts this representative of the social, destroys a self that has argument to pursue his increasingly urgent taken on a unpleasurable character. Suicide is concern for the aesthetic, for a certain ‘art for then in fact murder: social pressures cause sadistic art’s sake’, that he begins to forge a path of his pleasures that would properly orientate the own. For Smith suggests that the self-positing of destructiveness of death outwards to the world, the artwork itself might present the singularity of to be directed inwards towards the social an absolute event. He provides the example of representation of the self taken on by the super- Mark Rothko’s painting White over Red to reflect ego. The ego itself must always seek to fulfil its the status of this aesthetic moment, a moment in wishes (for this is its defining characteristic) and which the artwork destroys itself in its generality, then redeem this pleasure through its own quieting its category, classification and genealogy, as it to seek its own path towards death. Freud’s death- appears as a ‘unique error’. Here, pleasure is drive conserves still the psyche’s own minimal death protected for its own sake, and thus does not reside as inertia. in any given psyche as Freud would have it: in order to appear the painting must break with In order to position his aesthetic death-drive everything not itself. Any relation to the world of Smith undertakes in Chapter 4 a reading and a classification, of schools, names and histories the revision of Derrida’s own reframing of Freud’s artwork partakes of would be a relation from speculations.

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