More Strange Return: What Freud Owes Literature

Returning to the in/articulations of the death drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this paper speculates about a literary debt that appears and disappears in Freud's essay. It follows the various modes of play within the text: the playing of a child's game, the staging of a tragic play, the magical play of examples, and the animate, incessant play of language—particularly the play of a single letter, O.