This essay approaches Ingeborg Bachmann's Goes from a Lacanian perspective. The object of the study is three-fold: first, to demonstrate Bachmann's deconstruction of the ideal ego through the water-sprite Undine's criticism of the human Hans. Second, to transcend the limitations of dualistic interpretations (as noted by some feminist critics), by introducing the triple Lacanian registers—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—into this particular reading. Finally, to establish Bachmann's monologic text as a discourse of the real and Undine as the voice of the death instinct. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss2/8 Return to 0: A Lacanian Reading of Ingeborg Bachmann's Goes Veronica P. Scrol University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign None, nothing, nought ... zero-a basic concept in mathematics, yet it took the Hindus more than two hundred years after the establishment of a standardized system of cardinal numbers to conceive and include the notation 0. Its function: to denote a missing numerical point (Boyer 235). This note on the history of mathematics, albeit cursory, is instructive, for it underscores an interesting phenomenon: that the notion of absence arrives relatively late in human consciousness. Whereas the discovery of the mathematical 0 was delayed only by two centuries, recognition of fundamental absence is still met with much psychological resistance elsewhere, particularly on the subject of identity. As living creatures, we naturally apprehend ourselves and the world from the side of life-each of us as an individual (an I) living in the present. The designation of death as the undesirable other logically follows. It is precisely this universal corroboration of the precedence of presence over absence in our consciousness that Bachmann rejects by giving voice to the water-sprite Undine. As an object of study, Undine has enjoyed a long tradition in German letters and philosophy since, at least, the late eighteenth century. Works by the Schlegel brothers, Goethe and Schelling attest to this fact. Yet, Bachmann's appropriation of this water-sprite figure constitutes not an inheritance, but rather a break from tradition.' Instead of treating the encounter of the elemental spirit (Undine) and the human (Hans) in the traditional manner as a striving for the unification of the spiritual and the corporeal, she writes the entire short story as a monologue by Undine addressed to Hans and highlights the distance between them. The only 1 Scrol: Return to 0: A Lacanian Reading of Ingeborg Bachmann's Published by New Prairie Press 240 STCL, Volume 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1994) voice present in the text is not that of the human but of the other; the monologic discourse in Ingeborg Bachmann's Goes lends voice not to life but to the death instinct.