ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanities volume 7 number 2

august 2002

john fletcher

FREUD, HOFFMANN AND THE DEATH-WORK

his article is concerned with the early nineteenth-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom Freud called a

master of the uncanny, and with what one might callHoffmann’s theory of the death drive. In fact as a writer offantastic narratives Hoffmann doesn’t present a "theory" assuch, although the characters in his tales are quite capableof entering into sustained theoretical disquisitions on those"phantoms of the ego" of which Clara in The Sandman warns thefated hero Nathaniel in an idiom that uncannily anticipatesFreud’s own: Clara warns of dark, uncanny psychic powers thatcan lead us into madness and death, if we believe in them andso allow them to triumph. Like so many anglophone readers ofHoffmann I read him because Freud in his classic essay "TheUncanny" of 1919 has introduced us to him through hiscommentary on Hoffmann’s novella The Sandman. However, readingHoffmann’s tales, unavoidably in a Freudian framework, I havecome to wonder whether it was not so much that Hoffmann is aFreudian precursor who anticipated in his intuitive-poeticway what Freud 100 years later came to theorise systemat-ically, as that Freud should be read as a belatedHoffmannesque theorist; and nowhere more so than in thematter of the repetition-compulsion and its relation to theso-called "death instinct."1 Hoffmann, of course, wasn’t justa naive genius; apart from being a successful writer, he wasalso a composer of music, including an opera, a conductor anda dramaturge, and these careers alternated with a successfulcareer in the Prussian civil service as a magistrate andjudge. He was conversant with the psychiatric literature ofhis day and particularly concerned with the psychopathologyof the criminal cases he dealt with in his court.

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My point, however, is not really to adjudicate prioritybetween Hoffmann and Freud on the question of the deathinstinct, but to bring out a distinctive and originalunderstanding in Hoffmann’s narratives of the same psychicphenomena that led Freud 100 years later to embark on hisfinal metapsychological speculations: the theory of the lifeand death instincts as well as the theory of the superegofunction from the second topography. This is to say thatHoffmann’s tales seem to present a particular framing ofcompulsive repetitions, of inner persecutory voices and whatalso, after Freud, we might call sublimation. Embedded inHoffmann’s dramatisation of these phenomena, at least in thetwo tales I am concerned with, there is also an implicit"theory" of literary

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/020125-16 © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltdand the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10. 1080/0969725022000046224

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production, of literary production as a compulsion-to-imitate,a seductive but deadly mimesis that unleashes a daemonictransmission between writer and reader in The Sandman, while anopposite association prevails in Mademoiselle de Scudery, anassociation of literary production with a sublimatory functionthat lays the murderous repetitions of the death drive torest.

The relationship between Hoffmann and Freud, then, is farfrom being a straightforward one of reflection in whichmetapsychology explains theoretically what literature presentsin narrative form. The relationship between the two bodies ofwork is somewhat paradoxical. It is true that certainpsychoanalytic concepts enable us to recognise and begin toanalyse the inner logic of the fantastical features ofHoffmann’s tales that had seemed to early critics such as SirWalter Scott and Thomas Carlyle merely self indulgent, morbidor wilfully eccentric; that is to say, that psychoanalysis canperform something of the function of a so-called masterdiscourse. Nevertheless, the tales’ presentation of whatpsychoanalysis understands as repetition phenomena andsuperego functions are distinctively different from Freud’saccount of them. Hoffmann could even be said to make his ownintervention retrospectively in the debates that Freud’scontroversial postulation of the death instinct has provokedand to reconfigure some of the key terms in the debate. Inother words, Hoffmann’s tales both resist and reorganise thepsychoanalytic propositions whose application they appear tosolicit or invite.

repetition and the uncannyFreud’s essay on the uncanny was written during the samemonths in which he was working on his new theory of the lifeand death instincts to appear the following year (1920) asBeyond the Pleasure Principle; this was the same period in which thatother major turning point of Freud’s metapsychology wasincubating - that is the second topography of id, ego andsuperego, which was to appear in 1923 as The Ego and the Id. Inthose passages of the "Uncanny" essay that deal with themotifs of the double and repetition as sources of the feelingof the uncanny, Freud in effect sketches out the postulate ofa compulsion-to-repeat that proceeds, he claims, from the verynature of the instincts; a compulsion that is powerful enough

to overrule the pleasure principle and that is responsible forwhat Freud calls the "daemonic" character of certain aspectsof mental life. He then concludes "that whatever reminds us ofthis inner ‘compulsion-to-repeat’ is perceived as uncanny."2

Despite the essay’s reigning proposition that the uncanny isthat species of the frightening and alien that leads back towhat was once known of old and long familiar but has beenalienated by repression, i.e., the uncanny is characterised bythe return of the repressed, here instead Freud’s conclusionin the section on repetition shifts the emphasis away from thecontent that is being repeated with its combination of thealien and the déjà vu to the sheer fact of repetition itself.The uncanny feeling proceeds not from the return of the oncefamiliar but no longer recognised in itself, but from what thatrepetition testifies to: the activity of an autonomous -"daemonic" - inner compulsion-to-repeat independent of thecontent of what is repeated.3 However, the term "deathinstinct" appears nowhere in the essay and the whole train ofmetabiological speculation that goes with it in Beyond thePleasure Principle is also absent.

Similarly, with the motif of the double, Freud outlines theproduction of the double as a narcissistic constructiondesigned to safeguard the ego, and as an "energetic denial ofthe power of death" so as to guarantee the ego immortality;but the double then goes on to reverse its significance, Freudclaims, and from "an assurance of immortality, it becomes anuncanny harbinger of death" (235). With his references to theimmortal soul as the first double of the body as well as toEgyptian death masks, Freud here seems to be talking primarilyabout social practices, especially religious and funeralrites, rather than psychic structure - presumably the reversalFreud talks about is that of the reassuring immortal soulturning into the threatening ghost or revenant in popularsystems of belief, although he doesn’t make this clear. Hedoes, however, go on to outline an analogous transformation inthe development of the ego, from the

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double that. results from primary narcissism, which sounds very like Lacan’s account of the ego’s construction in the mirror phase, to the agency that is "able to stand over

against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticising the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’” (235) and which can give rise to pathological delusions of being watched. Clearly the conceptual profile of what Freud is soon to call the superegois being sketched in here, but it is sketched without the concept being named as such. The term superego does not appear in the essay any more than the term death instinct. However, the relation between the narcissistic double and theself-critical double remains unclear and is further confused by a slide in Freud’s formulation. In the one sentence he moves from describing the double as an agency that can take the rest of the ego as an object, thus attributing to it a "new meaning." It also becomes possible "to ascribe a number of things to it - above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times" (235). An aporia seems to open up here as thedouble is both the self-reproachful critic of narcissism and the narcissistic object of that self-criticism. Freud doesn’texplain how "the old surmounted narcissism" can be ascribed to the new critical agency. It is clear, however, that he wants to explain the feeling of uncanniness through the motifof a return of an earlier surmounted narcissistic stage in a later psychic formation self-critical of that very narcissism. Here, the narcissistic content of the repetition does seem to matter more than the mere tendency to return. Consequently it is not at all clear how the theme of the double relates to the autonomous compulsion-to-repeat, exceptthat both of them are held to be sources of the uncanny. Equally, it is not clear how their later avatars - the superego and the death instinct - are to be articulated together.

oedipal readingsAll these themes are in solution in Freud’s essay - thedouble, the compulsion-to-repeat, narcissism, the inner voiceor self-critical agency, the fear of death or the dead - allof them are cited as sources for the feeling of the uncannyunder the general rubric of the return of past stages inunfamiliar form in the present. However, the essay is contentto list them rather than to articulate them as a theoretical

system. What is more puzzling is that, when Freud exploresHoffmann’s novella The Sandman as his most extended example ofthe uncanny, the interpretation he elaborates virtuallyignores all these themes as sources for the uncanny in thestory, and argues instead for the story’s uncanniness being afunction of the return of the infantile castration complexembodied in the figure of the titular Sandman with his threatto tear out children’s eyes. Freud’s Oedipal reading is allthe more curious when we realise that his list of uncannythemes, explored at length in the rest of his essay but moreor less excluded from his reading of The Sandman, are in factto be found insistently all over Hoffmann’s text. Freudcouldn’t be more concerned than Hoffmann is with the double,the persecutory inner voice, the death-dealing repetition-compulsion. Paradoxically, Freud seems to scotomise almostentirely the presence in Hoffmann’s tale of those very themeshe is most concerned with in the bulk of his essay.

It is standard practice at this point for commentators onFreud’s essay on the Uncanny to criticise at length or evento dismiss his Oedipal reading of The Sandman as the imposi-tion of a psychoanalytic shibboleth on a literary text whoseconcerns are otherwise. Critics accuse Freud of aninsensitivity to the text’s literary values and constructionand of structuring a reading of the text around an attempt todiscredit the German psychologist Ernst Jentsch, who hadpublished an essay on the Uncanny thirteen years before Freudin 1906. Jentsch had attributed the feeling of the uncanny tointellectual uncertainty and had cited as a privilegedexample "doubt as to whether an apparently living being isanimated and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifelessobject may not in fact be animate."4 Jentsch had also citedHoffmann in general as a master of the uncanny, but with noparticular references.Now Hoffmann’s story, discussed by Freud but not by Jentsch,

turns not only on the

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Sandman of the title and his successive embodiments in aseries of father figures, including Nathaniel’s actualfather, but also on the figure of Olympia, the daughter ofProfessor Spalanzani, with whom Nathaniel falls besottedly in

love and who suddenly replaces his fiancee Clara in hisaffections. Nathaniel’s courtship of Olympia is a bizarre,stage-by-stage process in which he pours out his heart toher, claiming that "only you understand me completely" anddirecting at her a positive torrent of literary production:"From the profoundest depths of his writing desk Nathanielfetched up everything he had ever written: poems, fantasies,visions, novels, tales, daily augmented by random sonnets,stanzas, canzoni and he read them all to Olympia for hours onend. And he had never before had so marvellous an auditor."5

Olympia, the perfect listener, has one repeated response toNathaniel’s passionate utterances - "ah! ah!" Nathaniel’scourtship climaxes in the traumatising discovery that Olympiais in fact a mechanical doll constructed by a conspiratorialcollaboration of her supposed "father" Spalanzani and theitinerant Italian eyeglass seller Giuseppe Coppola. Coppolahad earlier sold him a telescope, spying through which he hadfirst fallen in love with the vision of the heavenly Olympia,who previously had failed to interest him at all. He laterstumbles upon Spalanzani and Coppola quarrelling over thelifeless and eyeless figure of the doll, which Coppola theeyeglass seller seizes and runs away with, leaving behind "apair of blood-flecked eyes ... lying on the floor and staringup at him," while Spalanzani, Olympia’s erstwhile "father"boasts enigmatically "… my finest automaton ... Theclockwork, speech, walk - all mine! The eyes, the eyespurloined from you!" (20). Freud is concerned to arguepolemically against the location of the story’s uncannyeffect in the figure of "the living doll" Olympia and in thereader’s intellectual uncertainty as to whether she is aliving being or a dead machine, which was the motifprivileged by Jentsch as the source of the uncanny. Freud’salternative reading privileges instead the Sandman (who asFreud points out gives his name to the story) over Olympiathe doll-woman, as the source of the feeling of the uncanny.This folkloric figure who threatens children with the loss oftheir eyes is interpreted by Freud as "the dreaded father atwhose hands castration is expected" (SE 17, 232). Freudoffers two grounds for this reading; one is the symbolism ofthe eyes and their loss, and the other is a repeated patternof triangular relations that structure the narrative.Although my larger argument is that Freud’s reading is

organised around a blind spot that scotomises in Hoffmann’stexts the presence of his own most disturbing concerns, Iwant briefly to defend Freud’s Oedipal reading in order toindicate both its strengths and limitations, so as to glimpseHoffmann’s own different configuration of their sharedconcerns.

Freud posits a "substitutive relation between the eye andthe male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths andfantasies" (231). In particular, he references the self-blinding of the mythical criminal Oedipus as a self-punishment for his incest with his mother Jocasta. Freudargues that Oedipus’s blinding is a mitigated form ofcastration, the latter to be understood as the ancient lextalionis by which the offending organ responsible for the crimeis punished, the thief’s hand cut off and the incestuousparricidal son subjected to blinding as a displaced symboliccastration.6 Freud’s argument can be supported by evidenceinternal to the tale as Hoffmann makes extensive use of thetraditional imagery of the courtly love tradition whereby theeyes are the organs of desire and shoot burning and flamingglances into the heart of the recipient. Hence, when Coppolalays out his eyeglasses which will lead to Nathaniel’s fatallove for the vision of Olympia shown him by the telescope, heinitially appals Nathaniel by offering him "lovely occe,lovely occe," and as he spread out his optical wares "athousand eyes gazed and blinked and stared up atNathaniel ... and flaming glances leaped more and more wildlytogether and directed their blood-red beams into Nathaniel’sbreast" (109). This violent and dangerous penetration andimplantation of erotic energy from eye to heart is both along-standing motif in the European love tradition and partof a series of similar transmissions of energy in the talewhich are intimately related

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to the figuration of the repetition-compulsion that drives both Nathaniel and the tale’s action into death. This motif ofpenetration and implantation by the other is the nachtriiglich, belated reworking of the original situation of primal seduction, as conceived by Jean Laplanche, with its traumatising implantation by the other of personal prehistory

of what Laplanche calls the enigmatic signifier. The eyes withtheir flaming glances are presented by Hoffmann as organs of desire and so are plausible substitutive objects of punishmentby the castratory Oedipal father figure.

Freud locates the castration motif of the loss of the eyeswithin a shrewdly observed triangular pattern of relations -firstly, the splitting of the imago of the father into goodand bad fathers, whereby Nathaniel’s own beloved actual fatheris paired with the evil old lawyer Coppelius, with whom heengages in uncanny night-time activities which lead to thedeath of Nathaniel’s father in a mysterious night-timeexplosion from which Coppelius escapes unharmed; this firstpair is then doubled by Professor Spalanzani, Olympia’ssupposed father, who appears to favour Nathaniel’s courtshipof Olympia, and the disturbing Coppola (from the Italian coppo= eyesocket), who steals the eyeless figure of Olympia. Thisproliferating father series is bound together by the fantasmof the legendary Sandman with his threat to the eyes ofnaughty children who refuse to close their eyes and go tosleep. Freud asks pertinently:

why does Hoffmann bring anxiety about eyes into suchintimate connection with the father’s death? And whydoes the Sandman always appear as a disturber of love?He separates the unfortunate Nathaniel from hisbetrothed Clara ... and he destroys the second object ofhis love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives himinto suicide at the moment when he has won back hisClara and is about to be happily united to her. (SE 17,231)

In other words, Freud points to a repeated triangular scenarioof a distinctly Oedipal cast in which the male lover isviolently separated from the beloved woman by the interventionof the father figure whose threat involves the loss of thebeloved’s eyes. This narrative pattern, Freud claims, is therefiguration in fantasy of the universal male Oedipalsituation of childhood and its accompanying castrationcomplex, whose return in adulthood it is that generates thetale’s feeling of the uncanny and not any intellectualuncertainty about the doll being alive or dead. Freud goes onto interpret Olympia, instead, not in relation to castration

and the uncanny but as a dissociated narcissistic complex ofNathaniel’s that confronts him as a person.

At this point we reach the limit of Freud’s Oedipal reading,which insulates the Oedipal dynamics he identifies from thelarger pattern of uncanny repetitions in Hoffmann’s tale. Forthe term "uncanny" is used eight times in Hoffmann’s tale,three of them in relation to the Sandman, equally balancedagainst three citations in relation to Olympia. Moresignificantly, rather than counterposing the Sandman and hisavatars to the doll as Freud does, thereby reducing her tosecondary status, Hoffmann goes out of his way to weave thefather figures and the doll together, implicating the twomotifs of the doll and the Sandman together. It is, after all,the second pair of father figures, Spalanzani and Coppola, whoconstruct the doll in the first place and metaphorically"purloin" Nathaniel’s own eyes in order to bring the doll tolife. The doll is, as Freud recognised, a satiricrepresentation of a particular male fantasy of the woman whoexists as the perfect listener, returning an admiring echo tothe male lover’s own narcissism - "ah!, ah!" However, reducingOlympia to being merely a complex of Nathaniel, as Freud does,excludes the question of the place of the woman in thenarrative structure and, in particular, the idealising malefantasy of the woman. For in Hoffmann’s narrative the figureof the woman is bound up with both the loss of the eyes, thecastration trauma and with the compulsion-torepeat leading todeath. When Nathaniel buys the telescope from Coppola andfalls for its seductive but delusional vision of Olympia,which will replace Clara the real woman in his life, we aretold he seems to hear a death-sigh in the room and fears thathe has paid too high a price for the telescope. This price, welearn only later, is the loss of "the eyes purloined from you"(120) revealed in the traumatic moment of the discov-

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ery of Olympia’s eyeless, mechanical form and which leads toNathaniel’s first attack of madness. The fantasy of the doll,the delusional gift of the fathers, binds Nathaniel into aparticular narcissistic structure of desire, while thetraumatic undoing of the fantasy of Olympia seems to unleashboth psychosis and the death drive. The loved woman as

fantasy and simulacrum, one might infer, functions to keepcastration at bay and to tame the death drive.

Hoffmann shows us these interconnections between thefantasy of the woman and the compulsion-to-repeat whichlocate the death drive at the very heart of the Oedipaldrama. By contrast, in Freudian metapsychology the successivetheorisations of the Oedipus complex, from The Ego and the Id in1923 through a run of papers in the 1920s centring on thecastration complex, take place contemporaneously with theintroduction of the death instinct but without any systematicarticulation with it. The partial exception to this isFreud’s attempt to connect the death instinct to the sadisticpathologies of obsessional neurosis and melancholia, and hishaunting remark, which has considerable resonance for anyreading of Hoffmann’s tales, that in melancholia "what holdssway in the superego is, at it were, a pure culture of thedeath instinct."7 In The Sandman, however, the Oedipalconfigurations that Freud persuasively identifies are broughtabout not at Nathaniel’s initiative, as the expression of hisdesire, but by the dogged persecutory attentions of thesuccession of father figures - Coppelius the lawyer, Coppolathe eyeglass seller, and Professor Spalanzani. Coppelius andCoppola, as their names suggest, are direct transformationsof each other and exist independently of Nathaniel, and theirexistence is vouched for by the narrator. As Freud pointsout, the effect of their interventions is not just to breakup the love-pairings that Nathaniel enters into, first withClara, next with Olympia and finally with Clara again, but toset off fits of madness that in their final occurrence driveNathaniel to suicide, a suicide that is predicted mockinglyby Coppelius the lawyer, who reappears in person fromNathaniel’s childhood after a twenty-year absence to witnessthe tale’s deathly climax. The figure of Coppelius-as-Sandmanprovokes and presides over Nathaniel’s final act of self-shattering.

hoffmann and the "pure culture" of the death-workThe tale’s image for this madness that descends on Nathaniel,identified by Neil Hertz in a brilliant discussion of thetale and of Freud’s reading of it, is the "circle of fire" orFeuerkreis.8 This is associated with the figure of the puppet who

is picked up and carried away by forces over which he has nocontrol. In both moments of madness, when he discovers thatOlympia is a mechanical doll and later when he tries to killClara, thinking she is Olympia, and then ends by killinghimself, Nathaniel’s delirium invokes this image. He bellows,"Circle of fire, circle of fire! Spin, spin, circle of fire,lovely puppet, spin, spin!," and attacks Spalanzani,attempting to strangle him (120); in the final scene,bellowing "spin, puppet, spin," he first attacks Clara andattempts to hurl her off the tower on which they are stand-ing. Spying Coppelius in the crowd below, he screams, "spin,spin, circle of fire" and finally jumps over the parapet, hislast words being Coppola’s grim play on words, "lovely occe,lovely occe" (124).

These moments look like the enactment of the classicaldescription of the death-work. I take the term from a verysuggestive essay by J.-B. Pontalis, who coins the term byanalogy with Freud’s concepts of the dream-work and the joke-work which, through the primary processes of condensation anddisplacement, produce the dream and the joke as wishful orwish-driven compromise-formations. By contrast with these,the death-work undoes complex formations, breaking up complexunities, unravelling the synthesising and binding work of thelife instincts in alliance with the ego. He argues that thedeath drive is a "fundamental process of unbinding, offragmentation, of breaking up, of bursting ... that mimicsdeath in the very kernel of being."9 What is at stake arepsychic processes that disorganise the living being fromwithin. Hoffmann’s Feuerkreis and the jerking, bellowingmaddened puppet that it reduces Nathaniel to, certainly seemcompelling representations of the

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deathly unbinding that is unleashed by the repetition-compulsion. Disintegration and death seem its defining terms. Pontalis shares this emphasis with his former collaborator andco-thinker lean Laplanche, whose work on the death drive argues that the death drive with no energy of its own apart from that of libido - Freud declined to posit a destrudo that would be the parallel but alternative energy source to the libido - is in fact but a modality or regime of the sexual drive

itself: "The death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation. "10

The distinction between life and death drives is not a question of instincts or tendencies inherent in all living matter, but of drives that operate in "the human, all too human" field of sexuality. This is a sexual death drive not bound to totalised objects or people, but passing through part-objects, zones and organs, pressing repetitively towards absolute discharge and so shattering the ego and its constructions in its wake.While the end result of the repetition-compulsion in The

Sandman bears this out, what seems to me so striking inHoffmann’s tales is the way the motifs, e.g., of the circle-of-fire and the puppet-out-of-control, bear witness to acomplex structure of repetition that, rather than itselfbreaking down or disintegrating, appears to proliferate incomplex sequences of scenes in which the component elements ofone scene are reconfigured and augmented in later scenes. Onecan trace both the circle-of-fire and puppet motifs back fromscene to scene, to what I will call the primal scene of bothHoffmann’s narrative and of Nathaniel’s biography. In invokingthis term "primal scene" I am revisiting the officiallyabandoned seduction theory from the years 1895-97 at the startof Freud’s psychoanalytic development. Here, Freud uses it toindicate a moment of originary trauma in which the subject’sdefences are breached by sexual excitations that cannot beintegrated or bound within the ego, but which are split off ina psychic quarantine that is reactivated and reworked throughassociational processes in later moments (Freud’sNachtrdglichkeit, translated by the Standard Edition as "deferredaction" for which Laplanche suggests the neologism"afterwardsness"11). Freud officially abandoned this trauma-based model of neurosis for a developmental model of thesexual drives (of which neurosis would be a specialvicissitude) based on a succession of libidinal stages,although, as Laplanche has demonstrated, it lived on in anunderground existence in Freud’s thought. Freudian sexualityas repetition begins with an other-centred, "Copernican"trauma-based model that is replaced by one in which sexualityis naturalised within an autocentred "Ptolemaic" developmentalbildungsroman of ascending stages (oral/anal/phallic). Something

similar happens with the death drive as repetition-compulsion,which begins with a consideration of war traumas and "actual"neuroses, only to be grandly biologised as a struggle ofinnate instincts through various developmental stages.

Hoffmann’s narrative not only embeds the deathly processesof repetition in the Oedipal configuration, but sees thisconfiguration as itself but a repetitive refiguring of aprimal scene of trauma in which Nathaniel spies from a closeton the uncanny night-time activities of his father and thelawyer Coppelius. The two adults appear to be making somethingin his father’s chamber with the aid of a secret forge orhearth - a circle of fire - but which involves the use of"eyes" as raw materials. In this primal scene of thenarrative, Coppelius’s call for eyes precipitates the scream-ing child Nathaniel out of his hiding place in the closet, andhe is dragged to the hearth to supply what Coppelius calls "alovely pair of children’s eyes" (91) - or "lov-ely occe" (124),Nathaniel’s last words as he precipitates to his death in thefinal scene. Spared his eyes by the pleadings of his father,his arms and legs are then violently twisted and screwed inand out in different ways by Coppelius, who works him overlike a puppet or mechanical doll, which is what one infers thetwo men are secretly making. This all-male scene hasaffinities with the primal scene in a narrower, later Freudiansense - that of a scene of violent sexual encounter betweenthe mother and the father, either overhead or overseen by thechildish voyeur. This later parental configuration of theprimal scene is in fact reproduced in a second scene of thefather’s death. Here a loud explosion

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and a violent exit of someone from the house (presumablyCoppelius) wakens Nathaniel to confront not his father andCoppelius at work before the secret hearth in his study, butthe parental couple: "Before the billowing hearth, his faceblackened with smoke and hideously distorted, my father laydead on the floor, my sisters lamenting and wailing allaround him, my mother unconscious beside him" (92). Althougha realist explanation is implied and later stated by Clara(the two men working together, the mother’s belated arrivalon the scene and fainting), what the scene presents is a

familial configuration with the parental couple lying side byside at its centre. This second scene resumes the earlier onesubstituting the mother for Coppelius as the father’s partnerat least at the level of its scenic (if not narrative) form.Both are transgressive and dangerous scenes of making.

The scene’s symbolic components - the threat to the eyes,the implied making of the doll, the treatment of Nathaniel asa mechanism or puppet, the hearth with its flickering flameand the "brightly gleaming substances" drawn out of its smokeand fire, finally the alliance between the much-loved fatherand Coppelius-as-Sandman - recur throughout the tale in sucha way as to determine Nathaniel’s fate. In commentingselectively on Hoffmann’s tale I have by a process oftheoretical bricolage drawn on elements of Freud’s conceptualarmoury from both the early and officially abandoned theoriesof seduction and trauma to the later theories of the Oedipusand castration complexes. I have done so in order to try totrace the ways in which Hoffmann embeds the most extremeforms of the compulsion-to-repeat leading to death, not in astruggle of grand biological forces - the life and deathinstincts so called - but in a proliferating and baroquelycomplex symbolic machine or series. This series is unleashedby an originary moment whose traumatic elements are encodedin a governing fantasy or mise-en-scène that has a seeminglyautonomous power to increase and multiply unto death.

Hoffmann’s vision of the death-work is not simply that of awork of unbinding, fragmentation and entropy, although allthese result spectacularly from its operations. Rather, thedeath-work in Hoffmann’s texts appears to operate through andas a kind of symbolic or cultural machine. It involves morethan the psychodynamics of one subject, Nathaniel the fatedprotagonist, even though Nathaniel himself offers up his lifestory in the tale’s opening exchange of letters as if it werean exemplary proto-psychoanalytic case study. The death-workalso involves a process of transmission between people thatcirculates throughout an ever-widening circuit. The figure ofthe Sandman is not just a paranoid Oedipal projection of adisturbed young man, but a generative representation whichcirculates from generation to generation. As I have arguedelsewhere,12 Nathaniel inherits the idea of the Sandmaninitially from his mother and his nurse. The Sandman whosprinkles sand in children’s eyes is a fanciful

personification of the red, sore eyes of the child reluctantto go to bed, first invoked by his middle-class mother whodoesn’t believe in his actual existence but explains him as afigure of speech. It is Nathaniel’s old nurse who nextelaborates the Sandman as the cruel and punitive figure ofpeasant folklore, who steals naughty children’s eyes andcarries them in a sack up to the moon to feed his ownchildren. So Nathaniel acquires the fantasy of the Sandmanfrom the older generation and the cultural traditions theytransmit.It is the mystery of the relation between the Sandman and

his beloved father - "what it could be that he had to do withmy father" (88) - that drives him to spy on them in the firstplace. This is the formative moment from which, as from thetraumatic power of the scene, Nathaniel dates his"possession" by the Sandman, tracing it back to this primalscene and asserting that "Coppelius was in reality an evilforce which had taken possession of him as he was hiding andlistening behind the curtain" (103). As he spies on the twomen he is distressed to see his father’s "gentle honestfeatures" distorted "into a repulsive devilmask. He lookedlike Coppelius" (91). After his father’s death, he isrelieved to note that "his features had again grown mild andgentle, as in life" and he is consoled by the thought that"his bond with the diabolical Coppelius had in any event notplunged him into eternal damnation" (94). The father’srelation to Coppelius, however,

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remains enigmatic and it is as if in this scene Nathanielinherits this figure from his father as a persecutory paternallegacy. The Sandman is also the "dreadful voice"13 who speaksNathaniel’s literary production and hence he is the veryfigure of a daemonic possession by the power of transmittedrepresentation. In Hoffmann’s text the Sandman as both theagent and fantasmatic embodiment of the death drive is thevery figure of transgenerational transmission, of culturalinheritance and reproduction as the persecutory relay of adeathly, mortifying enigma, of a past that contains anuntranslatable reserve. Paradoxically, the repetition-compulsion here powers cultural apparatuses, and while it mayunbind or shatter its hapless or fated bearers such asNathaniel, itself constitutes a cumulative, ramifying form ofbinding that is both deathly and libidinal.

In his work on the psychopathology of inheritance and itsrelation to the work of mourning, Eric Toubiana, in commentingon the French Code Civil, isolates behind the legitimateheir’s active seizure, in the modern sense, of his inher-itance, an archaic moment of "seisin" (OF. la saisine) in which,as precondition for his entering into possession, he is"seized of’ his property. The passive grammatical form and thearchaic legal usage testifies to an earlier feudal propertyform in which property comes from the other, whether feudalsuzerain or deceased benefactor. In the case of inheritance,as distinct from investiture, agency is located in the dead.This is summed up in the legal maxim "le mort saisit le vif." Toubianacomments:

The law substitutes here a passive and paradoxical form:the living is seized by the dead. It is the dead who is inthe active position and in order to insist on this paradox,the jurist specifies that the dead seizes the livingwithout the latter doing anything or without his knowledge.Seisin [la saisine] places the successor in the possessivesituation of the deceased ... we are faced with aperpetuation of the person of the deceased by thesuccessor.14 (My translation)

This legal decentring of the modern possessive individual andthe attribution of agency to the dead testator-as-other isrelated by Toubiana to the metapsychology of mourning. Inparallel to the legal maxim - the dead seizes the living - heplaces Freud’s famous formulation from "Mourning andMelancholia" (1917) - "the shadow of the object fell upon theego"15 - where the bereaved subject internalises and identifieswith his lost object, the deceased. Despite the suggestivenessof much of Toubiana’s argument, the homology fails because theimplicit attribution of agency to the deceased in Freud’sfamous metaphor is purely rhetorical, i.e., his argumentactually attributes the psychical processes of identificationto the mourning subject, the "shadow" of the dead is the effectof the survivor’s psychical activity. It is in Laplanche’s terms"autocentric" or Ptolemaic. More suitable as a structuralrhyme, at the level of the psychical, to the legal structureof inheritance described by Toubiana, is Laplanche’s conceptof the psychotic enclave and especially the superego aspsychotic enclave.

Laplanche’s generalised theory of primal seductionattributes a special mode of agency to the other in theformation of subjectivity. The ordinary activities ofchildcare and nurturing that target the child’s bodily andemotional needs transmit or implant seductive becauseenigmatic signifiers or messages to the infant that are deriv-atives of the parental unconscious - "seduction" in this senseis ordinary - and allow a process of translation andassimilation by which the child substitutes its own signifyingsequences: fantasies and "infantile sexual theories."16 Theuntranslatable remainder of this process provokes the first"primal" repression, laying down the core of the unconsciousand the site of the drives. There exists also what Laplanchecalls "a violent variant"17 of implantation which paralyses thechild’s capacity to translate and metabolise the parentaldiscourse, to produce its own substitutions, variations andrefusals. This failure of translation-repression impedes theformation of the ego and the unconscious as separate agenciesor systems, and the violent intromission of parental fantasiesprovokes the desperate measures of expulsion of intolerableand invasive material. Where repression (Freud’s Verdrangung) isthe mechanism specific to neurosis/normality, Freud posited amechanism specific to psychosis, repudiation

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(Verwerfung, which Lacan reformulated as foreclosure, forclusion).Like Klein’s projection, this involves the violent expulsionfrom the ego of traumatic and unmetabolisable elements,leading to hallucinations: "what was abolished internally,returns from without";18 "whatever has been refused in thesymbolic order in the sense of Verwerfung returns in the real."19

Where in Lacan’s formulation "the unconscious is the discourseof the other," for Laplanche this is more like a formula forpsychosis, the failure of translation-repression to instituteboundaries between ego and the unconscious system, thepersecutory return in unmetabolisable and hallucinatory formof a violent and invasive parental discourse.In his discussion of the superego (New Foundations 136-39),

Laplanche returns to Freud’s relation of the superego’sinjunctions to the Kantian categorical imperative, inparticular to the distinction between the hypotheticalimperative with its calculation of consequences ("Do this, ifyou wish to please God ... if you wish to be happy ... if youwish to be saved!") and the categorical imperative ("Do this,full stop!") which contains no if clause. Where Freud sees thesuperego’s commands as tyrannical and unjustified, being moredemanding the more submissive the ego becomes, Laplanchesuggests that in being imposed without justification - no if-clause, just "0’Grady says" - they are non-metabolisable:

This means that they cannot be diluted, and cannot bereplaced by anything else. They exist and they areimmutable ... they resist the schema for thesubstitution of signifiers ... should we not see them aspsychotic enclaves inside the human personality as such?20

Inscribed in the psyche-soma of the subject but untranslatableinto anything other than themselves, what is to distinguishthe imperatives of the superego from the violently intromittedmessages that persecute the psychotic subject? Laplanche posesthe question: is the superego a psychotic enclave in thenormal/neurotic subject? The analogy here would be with thepower of the taboo in tribal cultures, which Freud associateswith the categorical imperative, but whose compulsion and

transgenerational reproduction cannot be explained as forms ofpragmatic or practical reason.21

The Sandman as paternal legacy and psychotic enclave (thedead seizes the living), with his relish in contaminating andspoiling the oral pleasures - the cakes and sweetmeats - ofNathaniel’s childhood and his sadistic anticipation ofNathaniel’s suicide in the final scene, certainly seems inLacan’s words, "that obscene, ferocious figure in which wemust see the true signification of the superego"22 whichpresides over the paranoid transactions between the Oedipalmale subject and a patriarchal culture. He is the emanation ofthe symbolic order of a whole culture and its system offormative myths and fantasies, the patriarchal unconscious andits collective symbolic reality. For while Coppelius is noaristocrat, and the narrative is located in a distinctivelybourgeois milieu, he is nevertheless presented as both anadvocate and representative of the law and as an aged andcuriously outdated figure, dressed in old-fashioned courtdress with black stockings, shoes with jewelled buckles, awig, hairbag and cravat. He seems a figure of the ancien régime,who marks the historically archaic quality of the punitivelegacy he represents. In his persecutory extremity he hasaffinities with Freud’s equally classic formulation that inmelancholia "what holds way in the superego is, as it were, apure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it oftenenough succeeds in driving the ego into death."23 While Freud’sGerman term Reinkultar has the artificially purified laboratoryculture of organisms in mind rather than the culture of MathewArnold or Raymond Williams, it is precisely a cultural work ofthe death drive, the investment of the repetition-compulsionin cultural apparatuses (rather than the fundamental germ-cells of living matter) that Hoffmann’s narratives dramatise.

a social ecology of the death-workIn Hoffmann’s other long novella Mademoiselle de Scudery (1818),which is also a narrative of the death drive, the repetition-compulsion is situated in the story of the obsessed mastergoldsmith Rene Cardillac, who is condemned to live out the

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repetitious replaying of an originary moment that functions asboth the primal scene of the narrative and of his ownbiography, as he tells it as a narrative within the narrative.However, this inner autobiographical narrative of Cardillacthe goldsmith is framed and contextualised by Hoffman’spanoptic vision of the city of Paris in 1680 as "a scene ofhorrific atrocities,"24 and one that constitutes a virtualsocial ecology of the death drive. A series of socialnetworks, both opposed yet parallel to each other, are laidout by the narrative, around which circulates, first, anepidemic of poisoning, and then a moral panic of accusationand execution that prolongs the fatalities of the first, whileseeking to extirpate them.

The epidemic of poisoning is presented by Hoffmann in theform of a genealogy of transmission of the chemical knowledgeof poisons obtained through a kind of pupillage or appren-ticeship. It begins with "Herr Glaser, a German apothecary andthe finest chemist of his time" (22), then his Italianapprentice Exili who under a pretext of learning alchemysought after his real objective, "the mixing, boiling andsublimation of poisons" (22), thus perfecting "a fine potion,odourless and tasteless, quickly fatal or killing slowly, andleaving behind no trace in the human body" (22). So de-materialised a process might seem like a malevolent wish-fulfilment that works simply through the omnipotence ofthoughts. Despite these discreet proceedings, Exili fallsunder suspicion and ends up in the Bastille, where he shares acell with and transmits his knowledge to Captain Godin deSainte Croix, who becomes his pupil, surpasses his master andgoes on to work independently on his release. Sainte Croix inturn transmits his knowledge to his mistress, the Marquise deBrinvilliers, a notorious female libertine. In the figure ofthe Marquise, who poisons her father for revenge and her twobrothers and her sister for their inheritance, the motif ofinheritance passes from the transmission of poisonousknowledge itself over to the familial scene, where theactivity of poisoning itself seems to become virtually a formof family relation, following the pathways of consanguinityand inheritance in its victims. "[D]eath stole into even theclosest circles of family, love, friendship .., mistrustinfected the most sacred relationships: husband feared hiswife, father his son, sister her brother; meals remained

untouched, wine undrunk" (24). The sobriquet bestowed on thepoison by the Parisians - poudre de succession - sums up thisparallel distribution of lineages between poisoners andpoisoned.

It is also with the Marquise that the activity of poisoningtakes the form of a repetition-compulsion:

... this kind of crime can become an irresistiblepassion: such poisoners have then killed people whoselife or death must have been a matter of completeindifference to them ... the sudden death of severalpaupers at the Hotel Dieu ... the pigeon pies which sheset before her guests ... the Chevalier de Guet andseveral others. (23)

This proliferation of poisonings, over and above the gains tobe got from inheritance or other material benefits, is partlyexplained as a regime of generalised envy - "[r]iches, alucrative office, a beautiful, perhaps too youthful wife:these sufficed for a man to be pursued to his death" (24). Itscontagious or epidemic-like quality soon infects a thirdsocial network or apparatus, that of the law, whose activitiesof prosecution and punishment are described in terms that arecuriously parallel to the murderous circulation of thepoisons. Hoffmann introduces the law into the successivetransmissions of the powder through the motif of inheritancethat has regulated its previous circulation. Sainte Croix,through a slipping of his glass mask as he prepares the almostimmaterially fine powder, breathes it in and drops instantlydead, in effect self-poisoned. Being without heirs, SainteCroix’s estate is seized by the court which comes intopossession of the poudre de succession: "there, locked in a case,they found his whole fiendish arsenal of poisons" (23). Theevidence incriminates both his assistant La Chaussée and theMarquise, who are both beheaded; but, instead of closure and abringing of the poisoning compulsion to rest, the executionends with an image of dispersal: "after the execution her bodywas burnt and the ashes thrown to the winds" (24). It is nottoo surprising to learn that the execution leads but to afurther round of poisonings and suspected

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poisoners, as if the dispersal of the Marquise’s ashes - another fine powder - had but spread the deathly compulsion even more widely.

Close on the heels of the second wave of poisonings followsthe judicial and police activities instigated by the court’spossession (or inheritance by default) of the poudre de succession.The special judicial institution or tribunal appointed by theking "to control the mounting disorder" (24) is given its ownpunning or metaphorically resonant sobriquet, that of theChambre ardente. So two further name sequences are set in parallelwith each other, that of the members or officers of theChambre ardente, Argenson the Minister for Public Order, LaRegnie the president of the Chambre, and "the cunning Desgrais,"a law officer and one of the earliest literary detectives(pre-dating Poe’s Inspector Dupin by 23 years), ranged againstthe new poisoner La Voisin, who with her accomplices Le Sageand Le Vigoureux is positioned within the genealogy ofprevious poisoners: "[l]ike Sainte Croix a pupil of Exili’s,she knew how to prepare Exili’s untraceable poison and so helpsons to early inheritances and wives to younger husbands"(25). Discovered by Desgrais, she is burnt in the Place deGrève, but not before a list among her papers initiates yet afurther sequence of names "of all those who had availedthemselves of her assistance, and after that executionfollowed upon execution" (25). A new sequence of namingfurther proliferates a network of either suspected poisonersor judicial victims: Cardinal Bonzy, the Archbishop ofNarbonne, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Countess de Soissonsand even the Duke of Luxembourg, the Marshall of the Realm, isimprisoned in the Bastille before his innocent consultation ofLe Sage for a horoscope is established. These successivelistings and "genealogies" of names concentrated into fourpages give the reader a bewildering sense of social densityand the networks, either private and secretive or public andinstitutional, that traverse the social body and open it up tothe epidemics and compulsions of the death-work.

The coincidence of social and psychic economies that framesthe novella’s central story of Cardillac the murderousgoldsmith is strikingly figured in the title I have remarkedon above of the judicial institution that seeks to track downand punish the poisoners. This is explicated by its presidentLa Regnie, who tells Mademoiselle de Scudery, "Evil-doers

shall tremble before the Chambre ardente, which knows of nopunishment other than blood and fire" (46). This referencesthe Chambre in terms of the exhibition of exemplary bodilypunishment, the spectacle of the scaffold in Foucault’sphrase,25 characteristic of the judicial regimes of late feudalabsolutism in which Hoffmann’s narrative is set (the court ofLouis XIV). However, the Chambre ardente also reads like atraditional emblematic figure for the heart as seat or organof passion, in this context precisely that "irresistiblepassion" for which the Marquise de Brinvilliers was publiclybeheaded and burnt. We are told that La Regnie in "theblindness of his enthusiasm ... soon inspired the hatred ofthose whose avenger or protector he was supposed to be ...[t]he blood of the guilty and the innocent flowed at the Placede Grève" (25), thus enacting a reversal of the instruments oflaw and punishment into an expression of the very murderouscompulsion they were meant to eradicate. The Chambre ardente,with its double reference to both the institutional seat ofjudgement and punishment and the traditional bodily seat ofthe passions, fitly designates the investment of the culturalapparatus of the law by the "irresistible passion" of thedeath drive and its elaboration through the succession ofepidemics and moral panics that Hoffmann invokes as hisnarrative frame.

the goldsmith’s primal sceneThere are, however, no direct causal links between this framenarrative and the events of the story of Cardillac thegoldsmith. His enactment of a murderous repetition-compulsionon the streets of Paris by night is presented as merely thelatest in the series of "outrages" by which the social spaceof the city is marked by the work of the death drive. LikeNathaniel’s opening letters in The Sandman, the goldsmith’sinner narrative traces to an earlier infantile scene hismurderous adult compulsion to stalk his

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clients at night and stab them through the heart, in order to retrieve the jewellery he has just completed and supplied to them. This originary scene involves his mother, then pregnant with him, and a male seducer sporting a chain of sparkling

diamonds that were, we are told, the object of "her longing, fiery glances"; "[h]er whole being lusted after the sparkling stones" (64). As the cavalier embraces Cardillac’s mother, herseizure in turn of the cavalier’s diamond chain provokes in him a heart-attack and immediate death:

My mother’s efforts to free herself from the stiffenedarms of the corpse were in vain. His hollow eyes, theirsight extinguished, fixed upon her, the dead man rolledon the ground with her. Her cries for help at lastreached some distant passers-by, who hurried to her andrescued her from the arms of her gruesome lover. (64)

This grotesque primal scene brings together the desire of themother and the death of the male object in a complex scenariothat is transmitted to the son: "The fear of that terriblemoment had got into me. My evil star had risen and sent downfires which kindled in me one of the strangest and mostpernicious of passions" (64). The "pernicious passion" inquestion entails the compulsion to steal back the jewellery hehas fashioned for his clients. The satisfaction afforded bythe thefts is only temporary, for increasingly this isaccompanied by a sinister inner voice that urges him: "It isyours really, it is yours really; take it, then - what dodiamonds mean to a dead man? ... Ha, ha, a dead man is wearingyour jewels!" (65). Cardillac’s resultant compulsion entailsboth the stealing of the jewels and the desire to murder theirbearer with a blow to the heart (a kind of cardiac arrest, topun on the protagonist’s name). What is being subject to suchdeadly arrest is the circulation of the jewels in thenarrative as a signifier of desire, which had given themsomething of a phallic signification in the classic Lacaniansense, as the contextualisation of the murderous theftssuggests:

In the voluptuous court of Louis XIV there were manywho, entangled in some amorous intrigue, crept to theirmistress in the night,often bearing a rich gift; but often, too, the loverfailed to reach the house where he anticipatedenjoyment; sometimes he fell on the threshold, sometimeseven before his mistress’s door, who, horror-stricken,found his body in the morning. (26)

The "rich gift" of the jewels is a signifier of male desireand so a potential object of female desire and thus a bearerof the phallic function as Lacan defines it.26 Cardillac’sprimal scene involves the transmission of the desire for thejewels-as-phallus from the mother to the son who is born intothat desire of the mother:

Even when I was very young, sparkling diamonds, goldenjewellery, meant more to me than anything else ... as aboy I stole gold and jewels wherever I could lay handson them. ... This inborn urge had to be suppressed inthe face of the cruellest punishments by my father. (65)

If this positions him by identification with the mother as thebearer of her desire, it must be noted that hostility to themale figure is explicitly not attributed to the mother, eventhough a previous attempt at seduction without the desirableaccoutrements had been rebuffed: "My mother recognised him,but this time he seemed to her, in the gleam of the sparklingdiamonds, a being of a higher kind, the embodiment of every-thing beautiful" (64). If the inheritance of the desire of themother explains Cardillac’s adult vocation as a mastergoldsmith and jeweller, it leaves enigmatic the question as tothe origin of the murderous compulsion aimed at the malebearer of the jewels as signifier of desire. The alignment ofthe dead cavalier, from the primal scene with the mother, withthe subsequent clients who commission the jewellery fromCardillac, is clear; the commissioned jewels are repeatedlyspoken of as male love-gifts to the woman, and the process ofcommissioning them, and in particular of delivering them oncefinished, is invested with a hysterical drama in which,agitated, Cardillac feels "robbed ... of my sleep, my health -of all my vital energies" (65). However, the compulsion is notjust to retrieve the jewels, to regain their possession, sorepeating the desire of the mother, but to repeat the

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death of the male subjects of desire, as if the whole scenarioof the primal scene must be repeated, not just one of its component elements.

In the light of the father’s cruel punishments for hischildhood thefts, this might be glossed as a classic Oedipal

desire to appropriate the phallus, eliminate the father asrival and succeed to his place as the bearer of the object ofthe mother’s desire. It is striking, however, that Cardillacdoes not enter into any sexual exchanges through arecirculation of the jewels as love-gifts to a wife ormistress; instead, he withdraws them from circulation,hoarding them in his jewel cabinet in a secret vault: "Onevery piece of jewellery was hung a ticket marked with thename of the person for whom it was made and when it had beentaken by theft or robbery or murder" (67). This compulsionseems not about the wish to perpetuate or to participate inthe circulation of desire, but rather to eliminate desire andits male bearer and to memorialise that elimination.Cardillac’s revelation of his hoard to his prospective son-in-law, Olivier Brusson, is made in terms of the thematics ofinheritance that mark the narrative’s frame. Cardillac makes acurious double or contradictory gesture:

"On your wedding day Olivier," said Cardillac gloomy andsolemn, "you shall swear to me a sacred oath, with yourhand on the image of Christ on the cross, that as soonas I am dead you will reduce all these riches to dust bya means which I will make known to you.I do not want any human being, least of all Madelon andyou, to come into possession of a hoard which has beenpurchased with blood." (67)

Cardillac has already agreed to the marriage of hisapprentice, Olivier, to his daughter, Madelon, in return forOlivier’s silence about his secret crimes. As a result,Olivier feels that his love for Madelon is "a passion thatbinds him to the crime" (67). The invocation of the weddingday and the oath seems like an attempt on Cardillac’s part toreverse the logic of transmission and inheritance that hasregulated the circulation of the repetition-compulsion in itsvarious forms. Instead of his silence, Olivier must pledge, inreturn for Madelon, to destroy Cardillac’s inheritance whichwould normally pass on to him on Cardillac’s death. This isone of Cardillac’s two attempts to reverse or abort thetransmission of the original primal scene. Liquidating the"hoard which had been purchased with blood" is an attempt to

prevent the repetition of the "irresistible passion" in thenext generation.

old maids and virgin-mothers: is there a sublimation of the death drive?Cardillac’s other attempt to reverse the operation of his compulsion occurs in relation to Mademoiselle de Scudery, the famous précieuse and writer who is both virginal and elderly, "an old maid who sometimes went to court," in her own words. She is drawn into the circuit of Cardillac’s compulsion by a witty pair of verses she produces at court in opposition to another poem importuning the king "on behalf of all the imperilled lovers," and which presented a picture of "the lover, creeping on his secret way to his beloved, ... filled with such fear and distress that his anxiety killed all joy inlove" (29). Speaking against the creation of another court with even wider powers than the Chambre ardente, she replies: "Unamant qui craint les voleurs/n’est point digne d’amour."27 The jewel-bearing lovers under threat are clearly aligned with theSpanish cavalier in the primal scene, and Mademoiselle de Scudery appears to be speaking enigmatically here in defence of the necessary risks attached to desire. A further ironic complication is added by the location of the scene in questionin the apartments of Madame de Maintenon, the king’s mistress.Cardillac praises her virtue to Olivier, his apprentice, and as the latter reports to her, declared that "gifted as you were with such virtue ... his evil star faded and was powerless before it, even if you were wearing the most beau-tiful jewellery ever made by him it would never raise any evilspirit or murderous thought within him" (68). He consequently decides to send a set of jewellery to her as "a humble sacrifice to virtue and piety itself," and claims that "a deepinward voice - quite different from the one which demands bloody acts like a ravenous beast of prey - has commanded me to do this" (69). However, neither the promised destruction of

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the secret hoard of jewels nor their de-cathexis or libidinal disinvestment as a gift to the virginal mother (she turns out to have adopted Olivier as a child and acted the role of a

substitute mother to him) are sufficient to lay the compulsionto rest. Indeed, the jewellery reasserts its role as signifierof desire even in relation to Mademoiselle de Scudery and despite her refusal of the gift and her presentation of herself as desexualised and outside the circuit of desire: "what will such splendour do for these wrinkled arms, what will this sparkling finery do for this scrawny neck?" Cardillac’s response is that of a traditional tongue-tied lover, overwhelmed with an excess of feeling, he "dropped to his knees, kissed the hem of Mademoiselle’s skirt, kissed her hands, moaned, sighed, wept, sobbed, and ran out upsetting thearmchair and table" (39). Although offered as a tribute to her"virtue," the gift of jewels positions her within the circuitsof desire and its deadly nemesis; so much so that she becomes the butt of court raillery, with Madame de Maintenon prophesying "the unexampled spectacle of a seventy-three yearsold lady of irreproachable aristocracy becoming the bride of agoldsmith" (39). Unsurprisingly, Cardillac’s old compulsions resurface, regretting his gift and brooding ill-humouredly over it, in preparation, so Olivier fears, for a possible murderous reclaiming of the jewels.Cardillac’s sudden death by stabbing in an attempt on the

life of another client pre-empts the danger to Mademoiselle deScudery, but it leads to Olivier’s arrest for his master’smurder, and he is seized by La Regnie as the chief suspect forthe wave of murderous jewel thefts. The narrative interest ofthe novella’s final section turns largely on the intrigues andmanipulations at court on the part of Mademoiselle de Scudery,necessary to free Olivier, her long-lost fosterchild, from theclutches of the Chambre ardente. The question of the possible de-cathexis of the jewels and the quelling of the repetition-compul-sion appears to be displaced as Cardillac’s plans to outflankhis "evil star" are forestalled by his own death.

However, the question of the after-effects of the narrative’sprimal scene reappears in a strange moment that is in excessof its function in the intrigue-plot and outside any case-study narrative centred on Cardillac and his murderouspsychopathology. Seeking to approach the king to persuade himto initiate an investigation of Cardillac’s crimes independentof La Regnie and the Chambre ardente, Mademoiselle de Scudery isfaced with the king’s horror of the crimes and his refusal todiscuss them. Her stratagem to catch the king’s attention and

divert it onto the forbidden topic involves the staging of ascene at court that turns on the wearing of the jewels givento her by Cardillac. "She clad herself in a black dress ofheavy silk, adorned herself with Cardillac’s jewels, draped along black veil over her shoulders" and appears before theastonished king:

The diamonds of the necklace and bracelets flashedbefore his eyes, and he cried: "By Heaven, that isCardillac’s jewellery!"Then, turning to Madame de Maintenon with a smile, he added:"Look, Madame Marquise, how our beautiful bride grievesfor her bridegroom." (78)

She seems here to be acting out the previous jest of theMarquise in which she was portrayed as the goldsmith’s brideand object of desire. Dressed in what appears to be bothbridal and mourning dress and wearing the jewellery assignifier of Cardillac’s desire, she appears both to acceptand to mourn the meanings they carry. The moment resonateswith the original primal scene itself, aligning her withCardillac’s lustful and entranced mother and the goldsmithwith the long-dead Spanish cavalier (not to mention the hostof murdered male bearers of the jewellery). However, it alsorewrites that scene in a moment of renunciation and mourning.Her reply to the king, while we are told that she speaks "asif continuing the joke," is enigmatic. She repudiates the roleof "grief-stricken bride" desiring her lost husband:

No, I have severed all connection with that goldsmithand would think no more of him, did not the horriblesight of his body borne past me appear from time to timebefore my eyes. (78)

While this allows her to segue cunningly into a narrative of her involvement in the affair (she

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enacts perfectly Freud’s description of the jokework,bypassing the king’s resistance to take him by surprise), italso positions her not as moved by desire but as haunted bythe dead. The effect of the scene is not accountable formerely in terms of Cardillac’s personal psychopathology. Thesignificance of the jewels in terms of their role in theprimal scene seems to persist or repeat outside of hispersonal associations. Mademoiselle de Scudery herself hadcommented on Cardillac’s giving them to her: "I shudder at theblood that seems to cling to these gems. And now evenCardillac’s behaviour has, I must confess, for me somethingpeculiarly unnerving and uncanny about it ... I shall neverdare to wear these jewels." To which Madame de Maintenonreplies, "Sooner throw the jewels into the Seine than everwear them" (40). In fact, the particular jewels in questionhave not involved the death of anyone, but especially in thelight of Cardillac’s excessive investment of them, they carrythe phallic signification of all the jewels in the narrative,which Hoffmann persistently connects with the compulsion toappropriate and to kill their bearer.Mademoiselle de Scudery’s assumption of Cardillac’s jewels in

this tableau of the mourning virginal bride seems not so muchan unwitting repetition of the lost scene that gives themtheir uncanny power, as a resignification or sublimation inrelation to her withdrawal from the circuits of desire. It isas if she acts out a mourning for both Cardillac and all thedead men who have borne the jewels and even for the death ofdesire itself. In this she is associated with religious subli-mation. Cardillac had previously attempted to withdraw thejewellery from libidinal circulation: "I resolved to make adiamond crown for the Holy Virgin in the Church of St.Eustace. But then that incomprehensible fear overcame mewhenever I wanted to start the work, so that I left italtogether" (69). His gift to Mademoiselle de Scudery isanother such attempt. Neither the Holy Virgin of St. Eustacenor Mademoiselle de Scudery herself are able to function bythemselves as sublimatory substitute objects for the desiressignified by the jewels. It is only the death of Cardillac,and the mediating role of Mademoiselle de Scudery in bringingthe young lovers together (rather than Cardillac "giving away"his daughter in exchange either for Olivier’s complicity - "a

passion that binds him to the crime" (67) - or his inheritanceof the hoard of stolen jewels) that lays to rest therepetitions of the death-work and ends its transmission. Thenarrative concludes with the disposal of Cardillac’s secretjewel hoard. A discreet advertisement appeals to the rightfulowners of jewels stolen before the end of the year 1680. Thosewho survived reclaim them. Of the jewels whose owners perishedand are unable to reclaim them (i.e., the jewels that playedtheir role in the murderous repetition of the primal scene),the novella’s final sentence tells us: "what was left fell tothe treasury of the church of St. Eustace." They remainoutside of libidinal circulation and are assigned byimplication to the mortmain of the virginal mother withoutdesire.

notes1 Strachey’s translation in the Standard Edition notoriously elides thedistinction between the psychical Trieb (drive) and the biologicalInstinkt (instinct) by translating them both as "instinct" With theTodestrieb, however, for which he ultimately evokes a biologicalexplanation, Freud continues to use the term Trieb. This article willuse the phrase "death instinct" when citing Strachey’s translation,but otherwise will use the phrase "death drive." See the entriesunder "Instinct," "Death Instincts" and "Anaclisis" in JeanLaplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: TheHogarth Press, 1973).2 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919) in Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vols.I-24 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74) vol. 17, 238, henceforthreferenced as SE.3 Neil Hertz makes this point forcefully in "Freud and the Sandman"in Textual Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979);reprinted in Neil Hertz, The End of the Line (New York: Columbia UP,1985).4 Ernst Jentsch, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" (1906), trans.Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2.1 (1995): 11.5 E.T.A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman" Tales of Hoffmann, trans. and ed. R.J.Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) 117.

6 Thomas Gould, the Classics scholar and translator of Sophocles’Oedipus Tyrannus, argues at length in his commentary on the play thatblinding is "a kind of voyeur’s castration" for transgressivelooking at a forbidden sexual sight. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans.and ed. Thomas Gould (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970) 50,145.7 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE 19, 53.8 Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandman," op. cit.9 J: B. Pontalis, "On Deathwork in Freud, in the Self, in Culture"in Psychoanalysis, Creativity and Literature, ed. Alan Roland (New York:Columbia UP, 1978) 92.10 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 124.11 See Jean Laplanche, "Notes on Afterwardsness" in Essays on Otherness,ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999).12 John Fletcher, "The Sins of the Fathers: The Persistence ofGothic" in Romanticism and Postmodernism, ed. Edward Larrissy(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 129.13 The phrase comes from the narrator’s description of Nathaniel’scomposition of a poem, given only in paraphrase, which combines boththe Oedipal triangle Freud points to - Nathaniel and Clara standingbefore the marriage altar where the ceremony is disrupted by theappearance of Coppelius who touches Clara’s eyes "which sprang outlike blood-red sparks, singeing and burning, on to Nathaniel’sbreast" - and the unleashing of the death drive in the form of the"circle of fire": "While Nathaniel was composing this poem he wasvery quiet and self-possessed. ... Yet when he had finished the poemand read it aloud to himself, he was seized with horror andexclaimed: ‘Whose dreadful voice is this?’ " Hoffmann, op. cit. 105.14 Eric Toubiana, L’heritage et so psychopathologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988) 97.15 Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), SE 14, 249.

16 Sigmund Freud, "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908), SE 9.17 "Implantation, Intromission" in Jean Laplanche, Essays onOtherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999) 136.18 Sigmund Freud (1911 ), Psycho Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account ofa Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), SE 12, 71.19 Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses (1955-56), trans. RussellGrigg (London: Routledge, 1993) 13.20 Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 139.21 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1912), SE 13.

22 Jacques Lacan, "The Freudian Thing" in Écrits: A Selection, trans.Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) 243.23 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, SE 19, 53.24 "Mademoiselle de Scudery" in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. and ed. R.J.Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) 22.25 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. AlanSheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) 32.26 Jacques Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus" ( 1956) in FeminineSexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell andJacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982).27 A lover who fears thieves/is not worthy of love.

John Fletcher

Department of English and Comparative Literary StudiesHumanities Building University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL UKE-mail: a.j.fletcher@warwick.ac.uk