interrogate

We often find ourselves attracted to harmful or destructive objects, as they allow us to repeat this pain, as if next time round we will master it, but even in this failure, or perhaps because of it, we experience the other kind of pleasure from unpleasure that Freud tries to track in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. While art’s formalisation of the processes of loss and destruction has a conservative element in the sense of possessing a binding, symbolic aspect, art that interrogates the realm of disintegrating form, operating as it does on the threshold between stability and dissolution, exhibits the dynamic of repetition compulsion that characterises the death drive (Art and Psychoanalysis by Maria Walsh).​