Abstract
This essay is an attempt to reconstruct the relationship between creative forms of self-realisation and the suicidal 'Pure Culture of Death Instinct' (Freud 1960, 54-55). In this sense, tragic autopoiesis figures as a lethal, sometimes fatal, vicious circle of self-construction and self-destruction, the kind of tragic symmetry of fates that unites Péter Szondi and Paul Celan.
Péter Szondi (1929-1971) was the son of Hungarian physician and psychiatrist Léopold Szondi, whose work in depth psychology led him to develop the theory and method of 'fate analysis' (Schicksalsanalyse). A comparativist and theorist of literary hermeneutics and interpreter of 'dark poetry', Péter Szondi committed suicide in October 1971 in a manner identical to that of his friend, the poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), with whose work Szondi was closely engaged.
The links between Szondi and Celan that make up this 'symmetry of fates' are numerous and unsettling: both were of Central European-Jewish descent; both experienced persecution during the war; both worked in a poetics characterised by aesthetic 'passion'; both suffered from crippling depression; both died by drowning-a mirror-identical death.