ABSTRACT
Repetition-the wooden reel and the piece of string: “fort-da!” a mother has left, she is made to return; “fort-da!” a father has gone to the front, he must not return. Repetition? What is repeated, a gesture? No. We are told that a reenactment of a traumatic event is being carried out-the separation from the mother.1 But for separation of such a kind to occur there must already have been two distinct systems or organisms. Organisms: independent systems in which the parts interact in such a manner as to sustain the whole-“the whole being for the sake of every part…. This system will, as I hope, maintain, throughout the future, this unchangeableness” (Kant 1990:33). As in Kant, the whole function of a Critical account, that is to say of the processes by means of which a functional system is produced, is to retain the balance/equilibrium of such a system, hence the “principle of constancy” as a guide to the proper functioning of an organism. What trauma of loss can operate under a system in which loss/absence is originary? How can repetition function as an explanation of the phylogenesis of the organism if it presupposes that organism? Freud begins with what he wants to explain and therefore reads the whole history of production out of a completed, totalizable structure: labor in terms of wages, commodities in terms of money.
