The event of writing The enunciation of Sigmund Freud

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Sigmund Freud’s ‘Thoughts for the Time of War and Death’. Such essay places the focus on the Freudian enunciation from a series of questions: What is it that Freud does when presenting this article? What does he do with what he writes? Unlike the reading hypotheses from a realist view which propose an interpretation of the mentioned essay as a stance of psychoanalysis towards World War I, that is to say, as an interpretation of the facts from that moment and, therefore as a ‘current text’ connected to its moment of production, what is proposed here is an alternative approach which acknowledges an operation of knotting between the event that opens the 20th century and the discovery of the unconscious, in which both (in different and even opposite ways) bring to light similar problems. In order to put forward this reading hypothesis, the article is organized in a series of argumentative fragmentations, namely: Atmosphere / Crisis / Suspicion, Supergo /Body, Style / Father.