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I'm going to end by going very quickly here: I think one writes also for the dead. Obviously, these are difficult terms to think in, and perhaps we will be able to come back to them. Yet they are not so difficult if one takes into acount what was said yesterday about the proper name which, as you recall, is not to be confused with the bearer and which, by its structure, exists and is meant to exist without the bearer of the name, Thus, every name is the name of someone dead, or of a living someone whom it can do without.

70 Roundtable on Autobiography his bobbin, he brings it back in order to say this or that to his mother, and so forth. I won't attempt to reconstitute here this whole very complicated scene. To be sure, the theme of play is there. However, if one understands the fort/da beyond what it seems Freud intends to say, then one may exceed the limits of the game toward the play of the world where the fort/da is no longer simply the relation of subject to object. It is, instead, that which has absolute command over all experience in general.

Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess like the Valkyrie in German mythology who carries away the dead hero from the battlefield.... We might argue that what is represented here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him: or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life—the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more.