Fiction, Death and Testimony: Toward a Politics of the Limits of Thought

In 1915, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Freud wrote a brief essay entitled, "Our Attitude Towards Death," in which he confronted something that was definitively imposing itself in Europe: death as a daily experience. His tone is conclusive and urgent: "Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it" (47). Prior to the war, Freud believes, fiction had constituted a different mode of relation to death, a place of compensation in which "the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us" (46). In fiction, "we find the many lives in one for which we crave. We die in identification with a