The Aesthetic Imperative of Death, pt. 2

All organic life must inevitably
die. The death drive,however, introduces a certain ambiguity into this inevitability, transforming a biological necessity into a modality of wish fulfillment, an aesthetic possibility. Death, then, exists as a pathos, not a thing in itself that makes itself apparent to us, but as a promise - a promise of inanimate sufficiency, of intact near-nothingness - the object of all our striving. The death drive obliges us, its inclination to arrest life, to freeze it in a slow and gelid rest. Here, in this effort to contain the colors and inconsistencies of animate living in a sedated stasis,
a deathly aesthetic begins to take shape.

The death-drive seeks out the pleasurable quasi-nothingness from which primordial life emerged and to which it must, in death return. The aesthetic of the drive, then, is one that lies on either side of the animate; it is an aesthetic in which life creates a characteristic chasm.
All the same, the death drive is a preservational drive. It can only preserve what it knows - life. If the death drive wishes to carry on, it must be satisfied with life at its bare minimum, an extreme sleepiness that only insinuates death. In its block of ice, the heart must still beat ever so slightly.

The aesthetic of death, then, is one in which in that moment of ghostly stillness so desired, there remains a trace of the entropy of animate life. It is a grainy photograph that suspends living matter in time and space yet forces us to consider its ever-vibrating particles. It is the visible bullet wound in a taxidermied animal, mounted in a glass case forever caught in in flight or on the hunt, yet bearing the sign of its mortality - its authenticity.