In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud modifies his thesis, elaborated over many years, that the psyche functions on the basis of the pleasure principle and recognizes the role of the death instinct as its controller, accepting the obsession with repetition as a drive that it also operates outside of that principle and is forced, in short, to establish a new structural framework (or topology) of the mind.

The extraordinary and paradoxical collaboration between the death instinct and the pleasure instinct is useful to me to expose my idea that the ridiculous participates in the expression of sublime content in many works of contemporary art.

Busto and Monge draw as George Eliot wrote, that is, neatly, fluidly and virtuously, without style. They forget that they are doing a job (with some kind of intentionality) and remain anchored in the occupation of drawing for drawing’s sake. With distraction they reproduce details that float around a void that we could see as a figure or a silhouette. This figure remains empty as an inverse description of everything that the drawings that float around it say. It is crying out for content.

Far beyond the pleasure principle. An essay on the ridiculous sublime with Freud as a pretext is a book by Almudena Baeza with drawings by Cristina Busto and Álvaro Monge, edited by Joaquín Gallego Editor (Madrid, 2022).