Freud has been observing a small child, he tells us (in ac-
tuality his grandson Ernst, one and a half years old). “This
good little boy,” Freud writes, “had an occasional disturbing
habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and
throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed,
and so on.... As he did he gave vent to a long, drawn-out
‘o-o-o-o,’ accompanied by an expression of interest and satis-
faction” (Beyond 13 ). Freud soon realizes that the baby’s
“o-o-o-o” stands for the German word fort(gone), and that
“the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with
them” ( 14 ). (Parents will recognize in Freud’s description the
energetic interest on the part of small children in making
things, including themselves, disappear.)
The game then acquires another stage. “The child,” Freud
writes, “had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round
it....What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very
skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot.” This
disappearance is accompanied by the baby’s customary “fort.”
But when he pulls the reel back out of the cot, making it re-
appear, he utters a new word:da(there). Freud notes that
the reappearance of the reel causes more satisfaction than its
disappearance ( 14 ).
Freud’s fort-da game has occasioned much commentary.
Often, it is taken as the core scene of Freud’s Beyond the Plea-
sure Principle,its last word. Derrida takes it as such, and spends
most of his time reading the fort-da episode, at the expense of
the rest of Freud’s book. But Freud in fact has some ambiva-
lence toward the fort-da game: he doubts its capacity to ex-
plain human symbol making.
In The Post Card’s discussion of Freud’s fort-da scena-
rio, Derrida remarks, “The child identifies himself with the
mother since he disappears as she does, and makes her return
176 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud