however is itself called into question by the topic of the death drive), Freud transfers to his grandson, as to the metonymical object, the burden of his own sudden fright caused by Sophie’s death. The link of grandfather-father/daughter-mother/son-grandson forms the chain of functions that can be directly related to consideration and confirmation of the factor of heredity in repetition, of which Freud writes in the same text. It is indicative to mention that Freud’s reaction to his father’s death (23.10.1896) was entirely different, described in his letters as the “heaviest loss in one’s life”, so that Freud “cannot write at all”, not even to thank colleagues for condolences.10
By the 1990s, a canon of the feminist interpretations of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle had already been established. Nevertheless, a comprehensive, literary ground-breaking reading of this text is offered by Elisabeth Bronfen in the chapter “The Lady Vanishes” of her 1992 book Over Her Dead Body.11 Bronfen describes the rhetorical strategy of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as such that it self-reflexively repeats its thematic concerns.
Repetition is doubly inscribed, for one by the death drive; directed toward reduction of tensions; toward an original of complete identity; toward an animate state anterior and posterior to which both precede and follow the life, and then it is inscribed by the pleasure principle, which is directed toward production of tensions through division of unity; separation leading through the detour of substitution to the production of new unities.12
Bronfen explains how, in this interstice, repetition serves to acknowledge the death drive beyond the pleasure principle in the sense that the mother/infant dyad must be renounced and translated into supplementation because the division death threatens is always inherent in this pleasurable unity.
In my reading of the wider context of the essay, the symbolic structure of the Empire worked out with similar materialist features for Freud, therefore and likewise it had also to be renounced by him while he was actively retaking the position of his rejection of it – after the Empire had been already “gone” – in the immensity of the death’s over-presence, leaving behind the crack and the interstice of much larger dimensions. The structure of the “departed” Empire in the prospect of the coming nationalism/Nazism as well as the rebelliousness of the forthcoming vast domain of socialist revolutions (analogous to that of the scientific launching of psychoanalysis by Freud)13 as aptly exemplified by Freud’s focus on his small grandson’s games – is yet another platform of the “maternal realm” that Freud uses for his theoretical articulation. According to this, Freud’s textual distribution of the observed child’s four performances only reinforces the importance of the missing link of this narration to the first part of the chapter that discusses traumatic neurosis as Freud’s difficulty to display the reference to his own social-existential reality of the violence-riven post-war condition.
The child’s two games of repetitively throwing away his toys, and the game of pulling one item back14 as an interpreted reference to the child’s mother Freud describes in the main text, adding his (and Sophie’s) arbitrary semantic coding of the sounds the child exclaimed ([o-o-o-o] fort-da, as denoting “gone-back”). However, the most important act of the boy crouching down beneath the full-length mirror saying that himself he is “gone” (“baby o-o-o-o-o!”) 15 is moved down to a footnote. It is widely claimed that Freud refused to acknowledge an interdependence between the theoretical formulation of the death drive and the experience of his daughter’s death, because an acceptance of the intersection between a real event of death and a theoretical speculation would counteract the solace this piece of writing was to afford to Freud. It is a common place in interpretations (by D. W. Winnicott, J. Lacan, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, J. Kristeva, etc.) to read Freud’s description of these games as Freud’s self-representation of representation (of a departure) and the necessary return of and to the self, only more so because Freud persistently endeavored to separate the impartiality and authority of his theoretical insight from the open reference to his own trauma caused by Sophie’s death. Still, the question remains, why does Freud, who certainly has other possibilities for controlling his loss, react finally like the one and half year-old child when he, not mentioning his daughter’s death, sacrifices for the sake of the grapheme of his text, the dead Sophie for the second time in his text? Hence, we could also assume that as much as Freud’s concept of the death drive came out of his most intimate emotions, hints, resentment at the power of death, in the concrete case of his deceased daughter, it also came out of his own fright caused by his own facing compulsively the murky post-Empire developments. Or, also, his foreseeing the looming national-socialism, intuitively or theoretically, which would be in line with his psychoanalytic discipline.
Since Freud tried to deny any autobiographical connection, let us recall his own sentence from the same text, that in a person “only ego is resistant, but not the unconscious” (whose only endeavor is “to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action”).16 Accordingly, the intersection between the autobiographical and rhetorical strategy of self-reflexivity, the repetitive erasure of Sophie in the displacement from the daughter’s significant part to that of a grandson (as a blind spot) – can make for my claim that the common experience of fright as the turning point in the post-war reality is seen in the repetitive phenomenology of the mirror that takes hold of Freud’s narration. And that the whole authority of Freud in this text is moved to the footnote that describes the child’s fright from his encounter with his own reflection in the mirror (which is not his mother) and his hiding from himself. To hide from the mirror or to enter the mirror – that is how I would formulate the strategic ambiguity of the epistemological and ontological within the witnessing function.
2. The Mirror in Death
At this point, let us reach for “Anna of all the Russias”, as Akhmatova was called,1 not a minority at all, yet herself choosing to be a minority, already when she took her pen name from the Tatarian maternal side of her father (replacing her father’s surname Gorenko with the Tatar name Akhmatova, as relating to her more distant family lore).2 This memorable woman author3 of the same post-Great-War period, after the crash of the Russian Empire, at the onset of Bolshevism, much younger than Freud, was exposed to much tougher circumstances of getting destitute, enduring official scorn, the execution of her recently divorced husband and the father of her son, the lasting and terrible stigmatization, banned publication, close surveillance, persecution, the imprisonment and murders of those closest to her.4 In spite of all that,5 Akhmatova introduces a different view on repetition and repression than the one Freud offers. Likewise, in all her reticence, her quite generous love-life with equally imperiled or persecuted Russian intellectuals6 considerably challenges Freud’s simultaneous speculations on life and death instincts, and (those which he postulated prior to them) of the singularity of ego and plurality of sexual procreation.7 Furthermore, amidst her utterly frightening situation, it is the phenomenology of the (allure of the) mirror that gives Akhmatova a life apart from life so as if to make some other Anna experience the cruelty, against which Anna mirroring art, spirit, and tradition consolidates her witnessing self, repetitively.
Akhmatova’s poems don’t say that we repeat because we repress, but on the contrary – that we repress because we repeat, that we forget because we repeat, that we repress because we can live certain things only in the mode of repetition. Or, also, that we are bound to repress especially the representation that negotiates what was lived before, connecting it to the form of an analogous or identical object. As Freud himself wrote in his text, in some normal people, not neurotics, also there is a perpetual recurrence of the same thing – if it is related to an active behavior, “there is an essential character trait remaining the same, compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences”,8 while the last sentence of the text’s second chapter suggests that “the consideration of these cases and situations – which have a yield of pleasure as the final outcome – should be taken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject matter”.9 And, while the later
