Book Reviews Enduring Death: Hauntings of Literature and Art

The subtitle of Robert Rowland Smith’s DeathDrive announces a ghostly Freudian haunting of literature and art. This visitation by Freud, coming without full authoritative presence, drives Smith to posit a compelling and creative – albeit strange and spectral – reading of aesthetics and its relations to death and the deathly. But Freud is not the only ghostly presence in this book, absent presences abound: death and the death-drive itself, as the text’s central themes, refuse to appear as such; the aesthetic moment both arrives and withdraws as the argument circles its thesis; psychoanalysis, subjectivity, pleasure, philosophy and politics shimmer in and out of focus, and Jacques Derrida, in whose memory the book is dedicated, provides more than a hint of his own spectrality. While this abundance of indistinct figures risks overflowing to produce an opacity and a density that threatens the task of this book reviewer – it also, perhaps, gestures appropriately towards the form and the content of Smith’s argument in Death-Drive.