Aberrations of Mourning

1. Avuncular Structures: Sigmund Freud/Friedrich Nietzsche

CHAPTER ONE AVUNCULAR STRUCTURES (Sigmund Freud / Friedrich Nietzsche) THE DEATH CULT OF THE CHILD Lessing's childhood portrait which, according to his own wish, depicted him reading a book is the £/r-portrait of the child. The idea of childhood was among the effects of the printing press; the new standard of literacy summoned the pupil who, until he became a differentiating reader of print, was not yet an adult. As became increasingly clear the more he could be observed in his new habitat, this pupil had to be considered as something separate, as child. With the advent of printing-press culture the child received a proper name and image which could be reflected even beyond death; not only was the child's portrait now painted but even his place of burial was, from this time onward, marked and preserved. Only since the eighteenth century have there been special clothes, games, and even books designed just for children. In West Africa, where the advent of childhood today counts a late arrival, the miniature model of a chair is tied around a child's neck to offer the spirit of some ancestor a place of rest which will in turn keep the ghost with the child. And, indeed, the double but sepa22 Avuncular Structures rate world of the child has always had only one available model and analogue: the temples and cities of the dead where even the accoutrements and utensils of everyday life were counterfeit replicas constructed out of utterlyflimsyand impractical materials. According to Philippe Aries, in the eighteenth century the new focus in the work of representation in mourning covered not some image of the living person but the moment or monument of his individual death. "Children were the first beneficiaries of this new desire for preservation," but not because they had benefited from any decrease in infant and child mortality, as Aries miscalculates in assigning the advent of childhood to the child's increased chances for survival. The decrease went into effect nearly a century after the invention of the child, who thus attained ontological status too soon, only in time to deliver a massive occasion for mourning . The gap between the invention of the child and the era of its expected survival thus frames the onset of a certain history of the unmournable death of the child.1 The apotheosis of the printing-press child shadowed by death is the beautiful soul, who is always also a niece. In Goethe's rendition , for example, the beautiful soul, who attains as her prime identifying mark the almost supernatural status of niece, is in turn reincarnated by her own niece who, all agree, is the true beautiful soul. The beautiful soul, eros in Kant, is, according to Friedrich Schlegel, a coquette and, according to Weininger, a woman who has introjected a man's soul—devoured a man's corpse. In Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, the discourse on the beautiful soul faces toward eros while pressing back annihilation: the beautiful soul ultimately attains and retains nonbeing, "an empty nothingness." The beautiful soul in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship occupies , as supreme leftover, the position of perennial mourning. In a culture where a high rate of infant mortality, including infanticide, is the norm, the beautiful soul would be the first to go. In the new culture of Bildung, however, she survives the various severe childhood illnesses which correspond to her basic inclement health. Kept artificially or supernaturally alive, she buries and mourns even her well-constituted siblings; she alone remains behind to argue with her uncle about the upbringing of her nephews and nieces. The avuncular structure which attends the death cult of the 23 Aberrations ofMourning child has not yet come into focus, though the specter of the niece has been sighted in certain cases. Flaubert's niece Caroline, for example, who covered over her namesake, the corpse of the sister Flaubert could not mourn, embodies a circuit of unmournable loss which becomes in many other cases the rule. In the corner of every secret transmission of the legacy or corpse, the niece was there. According to Freud, every scene of legacy transmission— such as the survival of Moses' religion through what Freud also calls tradition—remains an instance of transference. Freud first discovered the mechanism of transference in the course of analyzing Dora, whom Lacan calls a beautiful soul.2 However, when it turns out that Dora, following...