ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on modalities of repetition that are of the order of the death drive in specific stylistic forms, in this instance forms emerging from the visual artworks of Yitzhak Livneh: witticism in its Freudian inflection and the use of frames as stylistic dominant. Livneh makes it possible to isolate an aspect of the relation between the art object's inherent cedability and the repetition inherent to the death drive. The laughter-inducing effect of Livneh's painting series is the product of the contingent encounter between death as a theme in the painting and the representative of death in the material remainder from which the painting is made. The Witz effect created by the appearance of the skull/ball amalgam in Livneh's painting series, then, partakes of a complex conceptual move of the painterly representation of the relation between death and representation.
