If mourning is a proof of value, how could it be appropriate to move on when one has truly loved and valued someone? Assuming that it is appropriate to value others extremely highly – perhaps even infinitely – how could it ever make sense for one’s grief to abate? Do loss and proper mourning thus present us with a choice between living well and loving well? This paper aims to vindicate the pressing nature of these questions while arguing (...) that we do not need to choose between living well and loving well. It discusses how these questions become pressing, some empirical research seeming to imply that humans do not tend to love well at all, and finally, offers an explanation of why ceasing to mourn need not be a failure of love. In particular, we offer an account of how ceasing to mourn can be a fitting response to the object of love, as well as compatible with living well. (shrink)

In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose takes us beyond the impasse of post-modernism or 'despairing rationalism withour reason'. Arguing that the post-modern search for a 'new ethics' and ironic philosophy are incoherent, she breathes new life into the debates concerning power and domination, transcendence and eternity. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Gillian Rose's highly acclaimed memoir Love's Work. She extends similar clarity and insight to discussions of architecture, cinema, painting and poetry, through which (...) relations between the formation of the individual and the theory of justice are connected. At the heart of this reconnection lies a reflection on the significance of the Holocaust and Judaism. Mourning Becomes the Law reinvents the classical analogy of the soul, the city and the sacred. It returns philosophy, Nietzsche's 'bestowing virtue', to the pulse of our intellectual and political culture. (shrink)

This conversation between a feminist and a critical whiteness scholar addresses the politics of vulnerability to COVID-19 and the questions of what it means to mobilize and learn from private grief and mass mourning and the role of academia and intellectuals in the current crisis.

This paper explores mourning and forgiveness not simply as sources of existential, political, or emotional meaning, but primarily as possible sites of reconciliation pedagogies . Reconciliation pedagogies are public and school pedagogical practices that examine how certain ideas can enrich our thinking and action toward reconciliation—not through a moralistic agenda but through an approach that views such ideas both constructively and critically. Mourning and forgiveness may constitute valuable points of departure for reconciliation pedagogies, if common pain is acknowledged (...) as an important aspect of rehumanizing the “enemy-other.” This work is difficult and the wider society may be skeptical; however, such work is about assisting a “never again” mentality develop in schools and civil society. (shrink)

Our current climate crisis is marked by ongoing ecological losses—species extinctions, land dispossession, biodiversity decline, and climate-related deaths—that rarely receive collective recognition or mourning. These losses unfold gradually and unevenly, making them difficult to name, remember, or grieve. Building on the idea of mourning as ‘relearning our world,’ I argue that mourning is educational insofar as it reorients our habits, identities, relationships, and responsibilities. In pedagogical contexts, it can unsettle students, calling them to witness what has been (...) lost and to link feeling with inquiry. Drawing on a ‘pedagogy of discomfort,’ I show how this work is affectively and ethically demanding, and how discomfort can help sustain our attention (under supportive conditions). By creating spaces for collective witnessing and remembrance, education can resist avoidance and erasure, remain with loss, and support practices that help us learn to live responsibility within damaged yet ongoing worlds. (shrink)

This chapter shows that taboos erected around crimes inhibit individuals and nations' work of mourning for the victims of crimes. The work of mourning is the precondition that individuals and nations take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims and their descendants, and make sure that such crimes are not repeated. I bring Theodor W. Adorno and Sigmund Freud in conversation to explain the connection between taboos and the failure to mourn. I further detail this connection (...) with Antigone as an example of taboo and denied mourning. I also explain that the taboos erected around the National Socialist genocide on Roma and Sinti ("gypsies") do not allow Austrians to mourn the loss of this population. As a result, their taking responsibility for this crime remains stifled, and they fail to show solidarity with the Roma and Sinti genocide victims. (shrink)

Cryonics is the preservation of legally dead human bodies at the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the hope that future technologies will be able to revive them. In philosophical debates surrounding this practice, arguments often focus on prudential implications of cryopreservation, or moral arguments on a societal level. In this paper, we claim that this debate is incomplete, since it does not take into account a significant relational concern about cryonics. Specifically, we argue that attention should be paid to the (...) potential implications of cryopreservation for the mourning processes of surviving loved ones. Cryopreservation increases the likelihood of disruption of the practical and mental tasks involved in a successful mourning process, which can negatively impact survivors of the cryopreserved patient. To illustrate my argument, we will draw on a case study from the 2019 documentaryHope Frozen. We aim to introduce this concern, in order to gain a more complete view on the potential implications of cryopreservation. (shrink)

This thought piece dealing with the Covid-19 ‘crisis’ was written – in the form of a diary that runs from February to July 2020 – for a special issue of Derrida Today entitled ‘Fire, Flood, Pestilence and Protest’, edited by Nicole Anderson, and published in November 2020. The piece deals with matters of biopolitics, telecommunication, death and mourning through Derrida and Agamben, and interrogates the eventness of what is called an ‘event’.

Drawing on a range of philosophical, anthropological and political theories, Athena Athanasiou offers a new way of thinking about agonistic performativity with its critical connections to national and gender politics and alongside the political intricacies of affectivity, courage and justice. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, she shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign (...) accounts of subjectivity and agency. (shrink)

Derrida’s thought is a dynamic dimension, a movement beyond any attempt of conclusive definition. However, is there any possibility to grasp this task of endless destabilization? This paper brings up the proposal of reading Derrida’s work from the close but at the same time aporetical relation between place and space. In this sense, we question the common understanding of space as uniform and empty continuum where place would be just a ‘limit’, a perimeter. In order to do so, we will (...) pay attention to the particular Topology that ‘translation’ illustrates in Derrida’s work, just as the reality of the spectre and mourning, stating these two dimensions as examples of Derrida’s strategy. In this sense, through translation and mourning, we manage to make out that Derrida’s work, even though cannot be summarized in a single object or idea, it might be understood as the endless question about the place of and for deconstruction, that is, about place as deconstruction of space. Thus, Derrida’s Topology may constitute a new and radical way to read not only his own work, but to question ourselves. (shrink)

This article investigates the work of mourning following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Combining discussions of mourning, kitsch and sentimentality, I examine the perverse transformation of grief into patriotic nationalism. Linking Freud’s description of mourning as work with Derrida’s articulation of grief as ‘a work working at its own unproductivity’, I explore how grief has been paired with icons of American nostalgia, such as Norman Rockwell, as well as kitschy souvenirs (...) from Ground Zero vendors, and, through this pairing, been transformed into a motive force for war. A central part of this operation, I argue, is the process of identification with the traumatic event. Identification, what Freud describes as a ‘binding force’, takes place across diverse fields - from White House speeches, to kitsch memorabilia made available immediately following the attacks. Identification with the event enables identification with the nation - an operation immediately reifying the official rhetoric of ‘Us against Them’ propounded by President Bush and his advisers. As grief over 9/11 is transformed into a perpetual rationale for war, that day becomes a new origin conveniently obliterating all that came before regarding the history of US nation-building and its own brand of terrorism. (shrink)

This article sets out a phenomenological account of mourning as a ground attunement and proposes that an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon is central to understanding the complex nature of all grief experiences. To support this claim, we begin by highlighting the inherent twofold structure of grief, which encompasses both an ontological and an ontic sense of loss. The ontic sense of loss refers to what is typically associated with grief—the particular loss of a significant relation within a person’s (...) lifeworld. The ontological sense of loss, by contrast, designates a more generalized sense of loss, reflecting the negative grounds of human existence as marked by loss through the existential conditions of vulnerability, transience, and finitude. Building on this distinction, we explore how mourning functions as a ground attunement reflecting the ontological sense of loss. Finally, we illustrate the significance of recognizing mourning as a ground attunement for the analysis of experiences of loss. First, we demonstrate its role as a background attunement in all experiences of loss. Second, we focus on two cases in which mourning becomes foregrounded in experience: (a) mourning one’s own death and (b) ecological mourning. In the concluding remarks, we further reflect on the fundamental role of mourning as not only constitutive of mattering and caring, but maybe even as, as several authors have suggested, a driver for culture itself. (shrink)

This paper links the notion of melancholia as endless mourning with the political actions of the Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo, a human rights group in Argentina. These mothers, grandmothers and other protestors refused to accept the death of their children and family members who were taken by the government and disappeared without a trace. The victims were known as “the missing” or “desaparecidos” (“the disappeared”). The Mothers refused to accept that they were dead, thus entering a state (...) of melancholia and endless mourning. This refusal of death is a powerful notion and one that was used politically to protest against the state sponsored violence of the Junta regime in Argentina. This paper first explores the history of Argentina, looking at how that state and military turned on its own citizens in an act of violence and state sponsored terrorism. Second, this paper looks at how mourning functions in a society and what melancholia is by looking at Freudian interpretations. The paper concludes with a discussion of Jean Améry and how important it is not to forget what someone has endured or to be forced to forgive against their will. This leads into a discussion of the signifi-cance of mourning in our society, and how important it is to honour victims of state sponsored violence, whose lives were unjustly taken by the state that was meant to protect them. (shrink)

In Agonistic Mourning, Athena Athanasiou embeds an ethnography of the Belgrade Women in Black (Ž ene u Crnom) in a dense framework of social and political theory, not only to understand the work undertaken by the collective, but also to think about how that work can help pose broader questions regarding sovereignty, memorialization, and the possibilities of dissidence. Founded in 1991, at the beginning of the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia, Women in Black is an antimilitarist, antinationalist, (...) feminist group, whose distinctive mode of protest, shared with other Women in Black groups, involves silent public vigils, the participants clad in black. For seven years, Athanasiou did field work with the group, spending extended time in Belgrade, participating in street actions, gatherings, and workshops; conducting extensive interviews with both long-term members who remember the wars, and younger ones who don’t; and learning from, and reflecting upon, their history and their ways of framing their praxis. This book draws from those observations and reflections to unsettle and broaden some central threads of contemporary political theory: questions of sovereign power, the modern biopolitical state, mourning and justice, and perhaps most importantly, the question of an agonistic politics. (shrink)

The tension in the public response to the death of a morally flawed celebrity raises ethical questions about mourning such figures. We examine three explanations for why this might be morally problematic. The first explanation emphasizes the morally flawed character of the person being mourned, suggesting that publicly mourning someone with significant moral flaws might be ethically problematic. The second explanation highlights their celebrity status, arguing that mourning celebrities might be inappropriate. We advocate for a third explanation, (...) which considers both the person’s moral flaws and their celebrity status. We argue that publicly mourning morally flawed celebrities might be morally problematic, as it risks contributing to testimonial and affective injustice against those wronged by the celebrity (and the victims of similar wrongs) and normalizing or endorsing the wrongdoing. We conclude by considering how to respond to these situations. (shrink)

This article investigates the online information practices of persons grieving and mourning via Facebook. It examines how, or whether, these practices and Facebook’s terms of use policies have implications for the bereaved and/or the memory of the deceased. To explore these questions, we compared traditional publicly recorded asynchronous modes of grieving (i.e., obituaries) with Facebook’s asynchronous features (i.e., pages, photos, messages, profiles, comments). Additionally, by applying observational techniques to Facebook memorial pages and Facebook profiles, conducting a survey, and interviewing (...) respondents as a follow-up to the survey, we examined the benefits of and issues surrounding online information sharing via Facebook when coping with the loss of another. We found that the immediacy of publishing comments, messages, wall posts, and photos provides Facebook mourners with a quick outlet for their emotions and a means of timely group support; however, these actions directly affect the online curation of the deceased’s self and memory and also create an environment of competition among mourners. The aforementioned benefits and complications of using Facebook during bereavement are shaped by the policies outlined by the social media platform. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mourning or MelancholiaJ. Melvin Woody (bio)Keywords“objective correlative”, depression, grief, cognitive-affective dissonanceIn a celebrated and controversial critical essay, T.S. Eliot faults Shakespeare's Hamlet on the grounds that the playwright has not provided sufficient “objective correlative” for the moods of his melancholy Dane. For lack of the “complete adequacy of the external to the emotion” that he finds in Shakespeare's other tragedies, Eliot judges that “the play is almost certainly (...) an artistic failure” (Eliot 1921, 101, 98). Dr. Bailey's explanation of Colin's melancholy provokes parallel critical reflections. When his initial expectation that he will discover the cause of depression in traumatic battle experiences in Iraq proves groundless, he finds that cause, instead, in the very absence of traumatic experiences. I cannot but wonder whether the lack of opportunity to prove heroic provides an adequate objective correlative for Colin's mood.To be sure, persistent sadness cannot be regarded as pathological if adequate reasons for sadness also persist. There lies the difference between mourning and melancholia. As Freud remarks at the outset of his comparison of the two, “although grief involves grave departures from the normal attitudes to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a morbid condition and hand the mourner over to medical treatment.” Even though the mourner displays almost all the same symptoms as melancholia, where there is a recognizable objective correlative, we look upon any interference “as inadvisable or even harmful... because we know so well how to explain it... this attitude does not seem to us pathological” (Freud 1963, 165). Neither the absence of battlefield trauma nor the lack of heroic opportunities seems sufficient occasion for Colin's sadness. But (perhaps) that very explanatory insufficiency justifies regarding his plight as pathological, as a case of melancholia rather than mourning and therefore as warranting psychiatric interference. Insofar as that is true, the self-criticisms engendered by his trauma-free stint in Iraq might best be regarded as an effect rather than cause of his depression. Freud found this sort of “fall in self esteem” that “finds utterance in self reproaches and self revilings” to be the singular feature that distinguishes melancholia from mourning.” In the clinical picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the self on moral grounds is far the most outstanding feature” (Freud 1963, 167, 169).Anyone who has dealt with depression will recognize such feelings as standard symptoms. The DSM- IV cites “feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt” as one of the defining criteria of a major depressive episode and “low self esteem” as a diagnostic criterion of dysthymic disorder.Freud speculated that the melancholic's attacks upon himself actually aim at an abandoned but internalized love object. But he acknowledged [End Page 245] that his speculation was based on “a small number of cases the psychogenic nature of which was indisputable,” and that some cases of melancholia suggest more somatic causes. Recent psychiatry has veered sharply toward somatic causes and cures, although the psychogenic nature of depression associated with traumatic stress is generally acknowledged. But in the absence of trauma and stress, as in Colin's case, a somatic account seems more plausible than supposing that the depression is triggered by that very absence.The contrast between somatic and psychological sources of depression threatens to prove distracting, however. We are not faced with a simple either/or here, and however we sort out the genetic, environmental, somatic, and psychological sources of depression in any given case, the depression itself is always a profoundly incarnate experience. Moreover, what seems of especial pertinence to this case, the loss of self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and guilt seem to prevail regardless of the particular balance of causes of the depression and can, therefore, be regarded as characteristic symptoms rather than explanatory causes of the mood. And the blackness of melancholy typically extends well beyond such negative self-judgments to cast a shadow on the depressive's whole world and future.Epistemology and pathology converge in the clinical diagnosis of depression. Depression seems pathological insofar as it seems unreasonable in light of the circumstances as we apprehend them. Of course, the person who is depressed... (shrink)

Mourning in Late Imperial China. Filial Piety and the State. Norman Kutcher. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999. xiv, 210 pp. £40.00, US $64.95. ISBN 0-521-62439-8.

This address explores themes of temporality, crisis, and mourning through the film Wakanda Forever. It emphasizes the importance of ordinary life and restorative presentism in navigating crises, drawing on cultural theory, phenomenology, and the political implications of the Black Panther films.

Adorning the cover of Mourning Becomes the Law is a replica of Gathering the Ashes of Phocion, a painting by Nicholas Poussin. An Athenian beyond reproach, Phocion had been put to death by tyrants who had taken control of the city, his ashes left on the pyre. In the darkened foreground, Phocion’s wife gathers her husband’s ashes on her hands and knees while her female attendant shields her from the view of the city, which rises up behind them. With (...) its glittering architecture and recreating citizens, the city seems impervious to this scene of mourning. Yet, Rose warns, there is not an unmediated opposition of individual love and worldly injustice here; rather, this act by Phocion’s wife is a finite act of justice that will have its bearing on the political life of the city. Mourning, “which draws on transcendent but representable justice”, becomes the law. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Love’s Work, a memoir in which Rose reflects on the deaths of loved ones and, ultimately, her own impending death from cancer. Yet, while death haunts Love’s Work, she does not succumb to melancholia, but, rather, reaffirms her commitment to “staying in the fray.” In Mourning Becomes the Law, her final work, Rose again grapples with the meaning of death, but this time only as part of a broader theme that has preoccupied her for many years, namely, the nihilistic implications of postmodernism. Rose seeks to reveal the incoherence of postmodernism’s search for a “new ethics” that is divorced from the metaphysical inquiries of the tradition. By tearing ethics from metaphysics to give “the other” its absolute due, she argues, postmodernism has deprived itself of the resources necessary for an ethical project, and has thus “condemned itself to impotence and failure.” These resources, which are only to be found “in the politics which has been disowned, and in the theology which has been more thoroughly suppressed,” are drawn upon by Rose herself, who would “renew and reinvent” classical reflection “on the analogies between the soul, the city and the sacred”. (shrink)

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror in relation to contemporary theories of trauma.

Solon's cryptic injunction : "Call no man happy until dead" -- A mourning happiness : the Athenian funeral oration -- Difficult happiness : the case of tragedy -- Aristotle's hermeneutic of happiness : the first forgetting -- The trial narrative in Richardson's Pamela : suspending the hermeneutic of happiness -- Effects of the trial narrative on the concept of happiness -- Marriage plot -- The tragedies of sentimentalism -- Kantian ethics and the discourses of modernity -- Happiness in revolution (...) : erasing the political concept of happiness. (shrink)

This article questions why we behave the way we do on Facebook when it comes to mourning and associated memorialization. It addresses the everyday use of photography that takes place specifically on Facebook around the cultural and familial mourning practices that have been greatly expanded as a result of the reach across time and space that the platform provides, and the blurring of private and public that follows. This expansion of contemporary visualities is not necessarily derived directly from (...) new technologies of imaging but rather in how we use and re-create the images that we are able to have and share, and the platform that spurs us to do it. If both humans and nations can be driven by unconscious motives, what is happening with Facebook? And what do we get for our performance (our content creation) within it? Solace? Or something more sinister? How can this kind of content, with its many built-in, algorithm mandated twists and turns, be interpreted? And what does it mean – this way of being human experienced through screens in a simultaneous present? (shrink)

Xunzi's 荀子 essay, "A Discussion of Rituals" is the earliest attempt in early China to theorize at length about the nature and importance of rituals. This essay is crucial to understanding the importance of ritual in Xunzi's philosophy of self-cultivation, of which there is no shortage of analysis.1 Most of this analysis centers on the notion of ritual in general, but Xunzi's essay also reveals his reaction to several criticisms to specific ritual practices, especially mourning rituals and ancestral sacrifices, (...) that can be found in the Mozi 墨子 and the Zhuangzi 莊子.2 In response to these challenges, Xunzi not only develops a theory of ritual, but also begins to sketch a method of ritual performance that... (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come (...) whose logic is the gift. Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mourning and SubjectivityFrom Bersani to Proust, Klein, and FreudL. Scott Lerner (bio)Near the end of his recent essay “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Leo Bersani makes an unexpected conceptual turn, briefly adopting a vocabulary of “human destiny” [174]. Jacques Derrida made a similar move in 2003 when he dropped his guard, abandoning the language of critical exposition to point out, with uncharacteristic bluntness (“de façon plus crue” [18]), (...) the relevance of autobiography—his experience as a Jewish boy in Algeria—to the development of deconstruction.1 In both instances, one senses a desire for intellectual self-exposure,2 to discover the relation of real-world experience and intellectual—critical, aesthetic, psychic—practices. For Bersani, not only the phrase but the essay as a whole signals the culmination of a decades-long inquiry into the relation of human subjectivity and a “solidarity of being” both among subjects and with the world [“Psychoanalysis” 161].If there is an affirmation of a universal human condition in Bersani’s work—and his reference to human destiny indicates that there is—then it is perhaps best defined as the inclination of human subjects to seek the annihilation of others as a prerequisite for subjectivity. In this state of affairs, where subjectivity encounters the external realm of human and nonhuman objects, Bersani has long been concerned with two chief protagonists: psychoanalysis and art. He has repeatedly shown, ever by new means, that both can be complicitous with the worst inclinations of human subjectivity, just as both can also uniquely provide the means by which human subjects may exceed their own subjectivity [161]. Psychoanalysis, in Bersani’s view, provides the language and conceptual framework to describe how and why subjects go about appropriating and annihilating objects. Psychoanalysis has been misdirected, however, toward two areas of relatively limited value: depth psychology and object relations [“Psychoanalysis” 161, 163; “Sociality” 647], while the main contribution of psychoanalysis, the discovery of the unconscious, has not been adequately exploited as a means of reconceptualizing subjects in solidarity, rather than antagonism, with objects [“Psychoanalysis” 161–64].By the same token, much of great art, literature especially, has served what Bersani calls the “culture of redemption,” promoting the misconception that experience is damaged or worthless and must be repaired via the work of art [Culture of Redemption 1]. [End Page 41] In psychoanalysis, the counterpart of the culture of redemption is located not, in fact, in the areas that Bersani devalorizes (depth psychology, object relations), but rather with the core exploration of unconscious subjectivity. The literary achievement that is paradigmatic of the culture of redemption is Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), whose theorizing narrator depicts experience, history, the real, as lost to us, damaged, fallen, and in need of repair—redemption—through art.3 The best illustration of the counterpart in psychoanalysis is the work of Melanie Klein. By portraying our relations with others as repetitions of dynamics already played out in unconscious fantasy, Kleinian theory, in Bersani’s view, similarly casts real relations as subordinate to and determined by the (unconscious) imagination. No sooner has Bersani exposed these dominant tendencies in Proust and Klein, however, than he redeems both from the sins of redemptiveness. At the periphery of each writer’s work he uncovers a radically alternative—and, implicitly, ethically superior—representation of the subject in the world. Bersani devoted a seminal essay to these two writers: “The Culture of Redemption: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein,” reprinted as the first chapter of The Culture of Redemption (1990). In subsequent essays in this volume, he applied this same bifocal approach—consisting in condemnation of a dominant tendency and affirmation of a seemingly marginal one—to Freud, Flaubert, Melville, and others.If The Culture of Redemption thus aimed not only to expose the distortions created by the culture of redemption but also to promote an alternative vision, then the title assigned to the collection told only half the story. Three years later, Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit set out, as it were, to tell the other half. They brought together the work of three artists—a novelist and playwright, a painter, and a filmmaker... (shrink)

My analysis Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go aims to explore how the work of mourning relates to the artificiality of art as well as reality, and how this, in turn, relates to and affects education. In doing so, I engage with philosophical and theoretical works, such as Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’, Martin Heidegger’s important text ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, and Derrida’s exposition of the human, the animal, and the (...) work of mourning in such works as Memoires: For Paul de Man, and ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’. (shrink)

Grief is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We can also experience (...) grief for people we have never met. Indeed, it is not just persons that we may grieve for. People report feeling grief over the death of their pets, or about the destruction the natural environment. In all these cases one factor that seems to stand out is loss. Despite being about very different things, these various forms of grief all involve a loss of some sort. Yet there is a further aspect of grief, which, on the face of it, does not quite follow this pattern. Grief can also be experienced before a loss has occurred. Grief can be experienced while the person that one is grieving for is still living and before one has (fully) suffered the loss. This phenomenon is known as anticipatory grief. The experience of anticipatory grief is a complex phenomenon, which resists easy classification. Nonetheless, we suggest that mental time travel, our ability to mentally project ourselves into the personal past (episodic memory) and personal future (episodic prospection), is a key mechanism that underpins experiences of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief can still be understood in terms of loss, but it is a loss that is brought to mind through memory and imagination. (shrink)

Drucilla Cornell's Legacies of Dignity: Between Women and Generations proposes a feminist ethics of self-representation that asks what exclusions are necessary to autobiography's constructions of identity. Focusing on the ways in which alterity, particularly linked with figures of the mother, are silenced, it advances a mourning that is transformational. I question Cornell's use of a Kantian concept of dignity and suggest that Irigaray's engagement with Levinas offers another way of conceptualizing the problematic.

When practitioners in helping professions lose a client to suicide, it has a profound impact on them, as professionalism does not guarantee the expertise of coping with death, especially unexpected death. Loss and grief in a lifetime are inevitable, but generally no-one envisages that death by suicide would occur on their patch. When it does, practitioners are often overlooked as part of the survivors of suicide deaths in need of care. This chapter critically examines the reality of professional mourning (...) through the author’s response to a client’s death by suicide and the absence of professional care. Grief has a distinct emotional element that could leave unsupported professionals feeling vulnerable and alone; the chapter discusses potential implications for the broader professional community. (shrink)

This article intends to run through the appropriation made by Judith Butler about the theme of mourning, and how this concept is modified and mixed in her work, when she works it initially in a debate as an inceptive political category and more radically in its clinical meaning in Psychic Life of Power, until her transition work and the theoretical construction of her ethics and/or political philosophy in Precarious Life, a book in which she will explicitly develop mourning (...) as an ethical-political category and one of the fundamental vectors of her theory. Furthermore, the text intends to present an attempt, still latent, to understand or hypothesize the way Butler makes a dialogue between Psychoanalysis and Politics, in a much less simple way than may appear in the externality of her texts. (shrink)

This essay explores the role of mourning in Euripides’ Alcestis in relation to the thematics of identification in the play and in tragedy in general. Drawing on comparative texts, including Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” it considers two topoi in the drama: first, that of a man mourning his first wife, and especially its peculiarity here, that the man firmly believes that she is dying in his place—that somehow she is he; second, that of a man anxiously taking (...) a second wife, and especially its peculiarity, that the second wife turns out to be identical to the first wife—that somehow she is she. The essay engages both topoi for what they illuminate about identification and illusion in the play, but also metatheatrically about the role of identification and illusion for the audience of the play. (shrink)

In the current context of pervasive loss and the absence of publicly commemorative rituals, this essay proposes a reading of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that questions the presupposition that mourning must come to an end as the completed work of memories recalled only to be sent off. While melancholia may be presented as the invention of an imaginary loss, would not the real pathology of mourning be the summary or precipitous declaration of its end? Whether we understand (...) mourning as completable in itself or as impossibly seeking an asymptote it can never reach, whether the work of mourning is terminal or interminable, the name of the deceased stands as what is left, not only as what is inscribed on a gravestone and outlasting any living memory, but also as the very bounds of memory as sense. Not so much the end of mourning, then, as its reiterative reaffirmation, commemoration comes down to a practice of active mourning, not an ‘end’ but its retreat, its appearing/disappearing as the incessant redrawing of its withdrawal. Not a self-deprecating melancholia, nor the indulgent luxury of nostalgia, but the endless inscription of a name whose loss we can never stop mourning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 423-452 [Access article in PDF] The Mourning After: Statius Thebaid 12 Victoria E. Pagán Wie er auf dem letzten Hügel, der ihm ganz sein Tal noch einmal zeigt, sich wendet, anhält, weilt--, so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied. As he, on the last hill, which shows him his valley one last time, turns back, stops, lingers--, so we live and ever (...) take our leave. --Rilke, Eighth ElegyRecent, fruitful readings of the end of the Thebaid have come a long way toward identifying the political import of the arrival of Theseus and the laments of the Theban women, although consensus remains in the distance. 1 Some scholars have tried to resolve the difficulties posed by the oft-disparaged "superfluous" book 12 by examining Statius' resolution of the Theban epic against the backdrop of the endings of the Iliad or the Aeneid, for instance, thus bringing us closer to understanding the dilemma encountered when a poet does (or does not) reach the end of an epic. 2 Both the political and the literary-historical approaches to the problem, however, still fail to convince opponents that the poem does or does not end conclusively. Valid arguments accrue on both sides, and the mosaic of interpretations itself recreates the stunning effect produced in book 12.For present purposes I accept Braund's argument that the Thebaid ends, and that it ends several times over, and that the repeated gestures toward closure do not undermine but reinforce its ultimate termination. The last ten lines of book 12 (especially 816-17) display an [End Page 423] unease with the poem's status vis-à-vis the Aeneid and an apprehension at simply letting go, despite the need. But the sphragis, when considered in the context of what I call an "aftermath narrative," or the description which follows a battle, reveals more. The aftermath of a battle affects a community, and this highly emotional reaction is captured in narrative. Because aftermath narratives are present in different works of Latin literature, comparison allows a pattern to emerge. Once we identify the elements of this rhetorical commonplace, 3 we can observe the way Statius uses it and adapts it to his needs in book 12. With a better understanding of the phenomenon of aftermath, it is possible to appreciate the apprehension, as well as the finality, that accompanies the end of the epic.More specifically, the term "aftermath narrative" refers to the picture of a battlefield strewn with decaying corpses, weapons, horses, helmets, and debris. The field is inspected in broad daylight, usually on the morning after the battle, by the living, either the victorious generals or, less specifically, the survivors whose concern it is to bury the dead. 4 Thus the reader sees the aftermath through the eyes of those who return to the battlefield. This inspection is an intermediate step between the destruction of war and the funeral rites. Paradoxically, war gives the soldier an opportunity to earn laus and gloria and so to reaffirm the fame of his ancestors and enhance the fame of his progeny. 5 But in his death he also becomes a burden of responsibility to his kin. 6 His corpse is a polluted thing which must be purified by the act of burial. Thus aftermath is part of the transition from the violent disruption of war to the settlement of the dispute and a return to a state of equilibrium. A scene of aftermath necessarily looks backward and recreates the battle in the mind's eye, but it also looks forward to the more permanent results for the winners and the losers of the battle, and ultimately, of the [End Page 424] war. Thus when represented in literature, an aftermath narrative affords an author the opportunity to explore the intertwining nexus of past, present, and future. The survey of aftermath is the means by which those who have experienced the trauma of war come to terms with devastating loss and brutal destruction in their very midst.An author also experiences a sort of aftermath. For... (shrink)

If C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed can be considered an account of a lost human relationship, then Cunsolo and Landman's Mourning Nature forms a posthuman, but nonetheless personal, examination of the losses of relationships with plants, animals, and even entire ecosystems—an ecological grief observed. In this regard, one of the motivations for this book was Cunsolo's interviews with Inuit residents who experienced profound sadness and despair at the changes in the landscape brought by climate change. Beyond this, each of (...) the contributors to Mourning Nature brought a variety of written, auditory, visual, and meaning-making experiences to their acts of mourning wild nature. The parallels to Lewis' book end here... (shrink)

The characters Apollodorus and Alcibiades represent the melancholic and manic poles of what Freud calls the "cyclic disease" in "Mourning and Melancholia." Plato conceives of erôs as entrapped within cycles of pleasure and pain, filling and emptying, until the self recognizes its overfullness — that is, its pregnancy. Socrates embodies the "out-of-placeness" (atopia) that overfullness signifies in a world characterized by emptying and filling, the "whole tragedy and comedy of life" as the Philebus puts it. As a lure for (...) erôs, Socrates points beyond himself; for Apollodorus and Alicibiades, however, he catalyzes their melancholic and manic positions. The reader of the dialogue is thereby cautioned not to relate to the text as containing the fullness of Socratic speech, but to see it as the occasion for the recognition of his or her own out-of-placeness in the "tragedy and comedy of life.". (shrink)

This article discusses the representation of AIDS in Guibert's posthumously published novel Le Paradis. The novel is situated in relation to Guibert's better known previous AIDS writings. The article proposes that Guibert's AIDS works fall in to three related categories: writings about other peoples' AIDS; autobiographical writings about AIDS, and, in the third, terminal stage in which Le Paradis fits, writing AIDS. As such the article suggests that Le Paradis manages to reflect and communicate some of the trauma of living (...) with AIDS by specifically trying not to write about it. The article raises issues related to constructions of sexualized and AIDS identities in fiction, and presents the novel as a form which represents a loss of self. The novel, it is argued, becomes a self-mourning for a healthy past which is memorialized in a fictional present, itself always-already haunted by the nostalgia for a lost future. (shrink)

Political theorists have increasingly adopted the psychoanalytic language of ‘mourning’ to characterize experiences of loss and injury, and to legitimate these as claims about a past political or cultural order. Mourning would seek to work through these experiences while opening persons to their shared vulnerabilities. With this article, I return to Freud’s original distinction between mourning and melancholia, along with its development through the work of Donald Winnicott and the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalytic mourning (...) balances a coming-to-terms with loss against investment in new social relations, when it is extrapolated to a broader community it risks over-determining the social field. The cost is a foreclosure of other modalities for articulating claims about injury and political order, and in particular those that might draw on anger as a resource for political action and solidarity. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between mourning and writing by tracing the various uses and connotations of the term ‘intermittence’ in the writings of Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes, with particular reference to the middle volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, Sodome et Gomorrhe, and to Barthes's posthumously published Journal de deuil. Against the backdrop of the Proustian ‘Intermittences of the Heart’, I demonstrate that intermittence is a useful interpretive framework for Barthes's Journal de deuil in terms (...) of the sporadic rhythm of the author's experience of grief, and suggest that this rhythm is audible in and performed by the Journal's fragmented, discontinuous form. Finally, intermittence in its etymological meaning of ‘sending between’ is brought to bear on broader, fundamental questions concerning the purpose of mournful writing, including to whom it is addressed and of what it speaks. (shrink)

In this paper we shall study the subject of mourning and the death of the other in Derrida’s works. First, we will gather the points of view about my death presented in Speech and Phenomena. Secondly, we will track the origin of the Derridian problem of my-death to the works of Heidegger and Hegel. Third, we will study the death of the other from the point of view of the crypt, as it appears in Fors. Finally, an analysis of (...) Aporias will show us Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger and the being for death; death will appear as an improper possibility and always, going forward, as the death of the other. (shrink)

This Dissertation provides a multilayered diagnosis of the psychosocial and psychopolitical landscape of contemporary capitalism, exploring the persisting obstacles to emancipatory change despite mounting dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the order. The Dissertation comprises three parts: -/- The first part reconstructs the structural, institutional, and cultural paths leading to the persistence of neoliberal hubris amid widespread precarity and insecurity. I describe the psychopolitical impacts of neoliberal socialization, highlighting both the soft charm of competitive entrepreneurial ideals and the hard disciplinary effects of (...) social insecurity. This system causes individuals to experience both internal psychoneurotic anxieties and external objective ones simultaneously, which people negotiate differently depending on their subject/abject positions, most with individualizing and depoliticizing effects. -/- The second part aims to discuss the main psychosocial symptoms of contemporary capitalism in the literature under three headings: (i) manic cultures of accelerated work and consumption, (ii) medicalized and individualized regimes of psychiatry and psycho-culture, and (iii) paranoid, populist political mobilizations. On the one hand, I demonstrate that these symptoms are not merely psychological but are also sustained by institutional norms, cultural expectations, and material infrastructures. On the other hand, drawing from object-relations psychoanalytic theories of ‘pathological organizations,’ I suggest that these formations solidify in ‘wounding attachments’ that variously leverage our attachments to partial libidinal gains to perpetuate the havoc such formations wreak in our societies, psyches, and emancipatory imaginations. -/- In the concluding chapters, I show that our addictions and attachments to such wounds must be mourned and weaned if emancipation is to be imaginable. This involves experimenting with how freely-associative and containing spaces can be reopened, both in our everyday lives and in potential counterpublics, so that stalled emancipatory visions can reemerge. (shrink)

A philosophical exploration of aesthetic experience during bereavement. In Aesthetics of Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins reflects on the ways that aesthetics aids people experiencing loss. Some practices related to bereavement, such as funerals, are scripted, but many others are recursive, improvisational, mundane—telling stories, listening to music, and reflecting on art or literature. Higgins shows how these grounding, aesthetic practices can ease the disorienting effects of loss, shedding new light on the importance of aesthetics for personal and (...) communal flourishing. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, (...) that which assumes that suffering the death of a loved one means accommodating oneself to an absence where there was previously a presence. On the contrary, says Lacan, part of what is most deeply to be mourned is the lack in the Other around which the love relation was constructed. The paper concludes by asking to what extent Lacan’s account of mourning should be distinguished from those of both Hegel and Freud. (shrink)

In this essay I first articulate what I take to be an influential and for the most part persuasive model in the western psychoanalytic tradition that is a response to tragic loss, namely, the one that we find in Freud’s little essay entitled ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). I then use a well-known Buddhist folk tale about the plight of a young woman named Kisagotami to underscore central elements from Buddhist psychology on the subject of suffering that is a consequence (...) of the loss of a young mother’s only child. Fortified by both traditions, I gather together the ingredients for a cross-cultural mental model that serves to explain and to justify as healthy a specific kind of response to a specific form of suffering, namely, the loss of ones’ loved one. I arrive at this model by asking a number of specific questions of both traditions. For instance, what constitutes a non-pathological response to this kind of suffering? What state of mind represents the cessation of such suffering? Is preoccupation with the dead beloved a way of escaping the fact that the person is dead? Is this a form of ignorance that needs to be removed? Is it a form of moral deficiency? Might certain forms and contexts of ignorance, in effect, put one on a path to enlightenment? (shrink)

Gedulas dažnai įrėminamas kaip emocijų seka, kurią galima aprašyti, išgyventi, „užbaigti“ ir grįžti į ankstesnę „normalią“ būklę. Straipsnyje siekiu atskleisti, kad gedulas yra kur kas gilesnė egzistencinė patirtis. Laikausi požiūrio, kad artimojo mirtis – tai egzistencinis lūžis, o gedulas – tai transformacija: subjekto struktūros ir ontologinės savimonės. Straipsnio tikslas – atskleisti, kaip gedulas veikia laiko suvokimą, kūno ir sąmonės jungtį. Gedulas – tai ne procesas, kurį reikia įveikti ar išgydyti, o plastinė transformacija be garantijos į kokybiškesnį ar blogesnį subjektą. Santykis (...) su mirusiuoju taip pat neišnyksta – jis pakinta kartu keisdamas ir gedinčiojo ontologinę savivoką. Tyrimo metodas – fenomenologinė rekonstrukcija, analizuojant gedulo patirties liudijimą (publikuotus menininko Nicko Caveʼo užrašus ir kūrybą po sūnaus mirties), interpretuojant jį pagal fenomenologinius tekstus bei Catherine Malabou plastiškumo teoriją. Pagrindiniai fenomenologinių teorijų autoriai: Alfredas Schutzas, Mauriceʼas Merleau-Ponty, Saulius Geniušas, Janas Patočka, J. Toddas DuBose. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the_ New York Times_, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher—if not the only famous philosopher." He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes from an illustrious career, and, among many who were his colleagues and peers, he inspired friendship. _The Work of Mourning_ is a collection that honors those friendships in the wake of passing. Gathered here are texts—letters of condolence, memorial essays, (...) eulogies, funeral orations—written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière. With his words, Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship. In each case, he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead—the risks of using the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculation, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt. More than a collection of memorial addresses, this volume sheds light not only on Derrida's relation to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the past quarter century but also on some of the most important themes of Derrida's entire oeuvre-mourning, the "gift of death," time, memory, and friendship itself. "In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes—how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work."—Steven Poole, _Guardian_ "Strikingly _simpa_ meditations on friendship, on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history."—_Publishers Weekly _. (shrink)

이 글은 우리의 삶에서 불가피하게 직면할 수밖에 없는 고인의 죽음을 기억하는 애도와 용서하는 과정에 대해 고찰해 보기로 한다. 애도란 고인이 된 그를 기억해야만 한다는 기 억의 의무 속에서 작동 한다. 사랑하는 사람에 대한 애도는 인간의 사멸성의 깨달음과 동 시에 사랑하는 사람을 온전한 타자로 받아들어 새로운 연민의 주체로 태어나게 할 수 있 다. 그러나 진정한 애도란 고인과의 상처받은 기억을 치유하는 용서의 과정을 통해서이다. 애도하는 자는 고인에게 상처를 준 과거의 행위에 대해 책임을 묻고 이를 인정하며 이와는 다른 행위를 할 수 있는 주체가 (...) 될 수 있다는 다짐을 해야 한다. 용서란 오로지 이러한 죄 책을 받아들이고 새로운 다짐을 약속하는 자에게만 베푸는 고인의 선물인 것이다. 또한 고 인으로부터 상처 받은 기억은 인간 사멸성 과 너는 너의 행위보다 낫다 는 인간 행위의 취 약성에 대한 공감을 통해서 고인에 대한 조건 없는 용서로 향하게 할 수 있다. 따라서 용 서를 구하는 자와 베푸는 자 모두 인간의 사멸성과 인간행위의 취약성에 대한 자각을 전제 로 한다. 그때 비로소 애도하는 자는 고인에 대한 기억의 상처에서 벗어나 미래의 삶의 지 평위에서 다시 시작할 수 있는 행위능력을 부여받을 수 있다. 용서란 애도의 끝이 아니라 매번 새롭게 왔다가 사라지는 사건이며, 애도하는 자에게 매번 삶을 시작할 수 있게 하는 힘을 지니게 한다. 이러한 애도는 결국 고인의 기억을 나의 삶속에 지속적으로 살게 함으 로써 미래를 향해 새로운 삶을 약속하는 과정이라고 할 수 있다. (shrink)

This article critically evaluates S. Freud's Mourning and Melancholia and challenges both the celebratory and reactionary views that treat this essay as an ahistorical and decontextualized "foundation-stone" of depression. Although many biographies have been written on Freud, the possible influences on his thinking in the area grief and depression have not been examined. Moreover, no reviews have investigated Freud's understanding of mourning and melancholia from the perspective of his own experiences with these difficulties. Following a brief overview of (...) Freud's seminal paper, the historical psychiatric views on depression and the influences on Freud's conceptualization of mourning and melancholia are briefly discussed. Finally, an exegesis of the contextual validity of this model is presented. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this paper, I look at three different perspectives on mourning in recent European thought. First, I consider Freud's discussion in “Mourning and Melancholia” and other writings. Next, I look at Roland Barthes, whose book on photography, Camera Lucida, is itself a work of mourning for his late mother; and Jacques Derrida, who in Memoires for Paul de Man and The Work of Mourning memorializes departed friends and describes the ambiguities of mourning that constrain us. (...) I argue that Freud was mistaken: mourning is not structured in terms of investment and loss. Barthes and Derrida clarify the complexities of mourning, but mourning is intractable and resists all sublimation: It is for the self, but it is also for the departed, who is neither “present” nor “absent” in the ordinary sense of these terms. Hanging on and letting go are both inappropriate responses to bereavement – how then should we mourn? (shrink)