Conclusion: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Death Drive

• Published in: Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination pp. 171 - 176
• Main Author: Bonikowski, Wyatt
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2013
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: death drive; Good Life; Young Man; Sir Will-I-am; civilization; American Psychiatric Association; Septimus's Death; Jenny’s Narrative; Masochistic Jouissance; Ford’s Portrayal; Septimus’s Suicide; Ford Madox Ford; Valentine Wannop; Masochistic Passivity; Woolf's Idea; Pleasurable Repetition; Freud's Lecture; Aesthetic Sublimation; Home Town; Soll Ich Werden; Draw Back; modernist imagination; Rebecca West; Moral Masochism; Traumatic Wartime; Ford Madox Ford’s Parade; First World War
• ISBN: 9781409444176; 1409444171; 9781138273108; 1138273104
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315608921-6

Freud discusses civilization's demand for the ‘renunciation’ of satisfaction than the possibility that the drives can be redirected, and renunciation has its own dangerous consequences, such as an increase in feelings of guilt leading to moral masochism and the tyranny of the superego. One of the primary arguments of this book is that writing opens a space analogous to that of analysis, a space in which the death drive can find expression through the formal and figurative resources of literature. The modernist imagination after the First World War is indelibly marked by the death drive, and each of the novelists in the book creates a form that calls attention to the impossibility of repairing shattered illusions or of clinging to fantasies of a world. Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf have created forms of the novel that allow the traumas of war to find expression, but it is Woolf in particular who pursues the notion of aesthetic sublimation. Freud discusses civilization's demand for the 'renunciation' of satisfaction than the possibility that the drives can be redirected, and renunciation has its own dangerous consequences, such as an increase in feelings of guilt leading to moral masochism and the tyranny of the superego. One of the primary arguments of this book is that writing opens a space analogous to that of analysis, a space in which the death drive can find expression through the formal and figurative resources of literature. The modernist imagination after the First World War is indelibly marked by the death drive, and each of the novelists in the book creates a form that calls attention to the impossibility of repairing shattered illusions or of clinging to fantasies of a world. Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf have created forms of the novel that allow the traumas of war to find expression, but it is Woolf in particular who pursues the notion of aesthetic sublimation.