L’enjeu de cet article est de s’intéresser à la question de la transformation de soi que l’expérience de deuil engage, et ce, à partir de l’initiative littéraire. À partir de l’étonnement que produisent certains récits de deuil – Une mort très douce de Simone de Beauvoirou Le malheur indifférent de Peter Handke notamment –, nous interrogerons le besoin d’écrire comme initiative tendant à approcher l’expérience du deuil, à la comprendre. Sous cet angle, l’écriture de deuil, singulière, tout à fait spécifique, (...) s’envisage sous le registre de l’action, possédant ses modalités, ses dynamiques propres et entraînant ses effets biographiques : quelles sont les ressources propres à la littérature permettant de rendre compte de la dynamique à l’œuvre dans l’entreprise de « reconstruction » du sujet? Mais sous l’angle de l’action, nous montrerons également que l’écriture du deuil répond à une forme d’engagement public et d’interpellation dont les enjeux normatifs sont larges. Loin de considérer la démarche d’écriture de deuil comme réservée à la sphère intime, nous tenterons de montrer en quoi l’expérience du deuil, par la médiation de l’écriture, est d’emblée collective, publique, voire politique. (shrink)

In this essay, Soyoung Lee explores the theme of mourning as a way of attending to a fundamental aspect of human experience that is bound to negativity. The essay helps readers to see that experience in a different light by drawing on what is shown to be an internal connection between mourning and having language. The dominant culture of contemporary education is preoccupied with management and control, and this renders hollow the understanding of the negative (...) class='Hi'>experience children go through. Such experience, if it is acknowledged at all, is regarded as requiring intervention and perhaps correction. Yet negative experience, as Lee tries to show, is the very source of personal growth. This is to take human experience as wounded, and the wound as the very place for the creation of our own words. A hasty approach toward an individual's suffering, whether in the name of “healing” or “knowledge,” becomes a suppression of voice. In its denial of the otherness within the self, it neglects the possibilities of self-transformation. The essay pursues these ideas through a reading of contrasting works of art: some poetry by Paul Celan (in conjunction with Jacques Derrida's response to it) and Still Walking, a film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Both artworks deal with their own wounds and words in ways that are instructive. (shrink)

The Meaning of Mourning brings perspectives from leading philosophers, psychologists, theologians, writers, and artists exploring different dimensions of death, loss, and grief. They together form a wide-ranging study of some of the most difficult and formative experiences in human life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 58-83 [Access article in PDF] Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning Marc Redfield Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that "'the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight" [IC 3], and the intervening (...) years have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as "globalization" operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital--forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations--is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, "the particularism of [nationalism's] contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general" ["Nationalisms" 178]. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative--halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace--accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge "the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity" ["Nationalisms" 177]. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. 2Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of "nationalism" for an emphasis [End Page 58] on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. 3 This valuable body of work has sought to recover the particularity of cultural and socioeconomic circumstance, stressed the fundamental role of racism in colonialist contexts, and noted ways in which nationalist movements draw on or unleash forms of resistance that challenge representationalist politics. The pages that follow, however, remain focused on the nationalist fantasy proper to the discourse of modernity. Cultural critique can only profit from knowing as much as possible about the favored turns of the universal-historicist model, particularly since, as Lloyd and others have emphasized, this model is an aesthetic one that grants a world-historical role to "culture." The state, in a tradition that in its main lines runs from Schiller through Hegel and Matthew Arnold and is still very much alive today, represents the community to itself, thereby giving the community form and in a certain sense giving it an ethical imperative and a future: the state represents "our best self" [Arnold 99, passim], "the archetype of a human being" [Schiller 17], because it signifies the formal unification both of the citizen with the community and of the community with universal humanity. Because this unification is ideal rather than actual, it can be projected as the ethical terminus of history (that is, as the ideal of an accomplished modernity). The state's core mission thus becomes pedagogical: its job is to acculturate its subjects into citizens. The production of a docile citizenry thereby obtains an ethical aura and an aesthetic character, insofar as the artwork and the domain of aesthetic or "cultural" experience generally become... (shrink)

Sigmund Freud’s reflections on transience left him surprised that someone could revolt against the process of mourning. In Jonathan Lear’s interpretation of transience, the revolt is not simply a passing struggle of the mind, but a response to a difficulty of reality, that is, an existential struggle. Central to the experience of transience, according to Lear, is the disbelief in the existence of an afterlife. How might we understand the idea of an afterlife philosophically? I first consider three (...) different philosophical conceptions of the afterlife that—in different ways—underline the relation between collective memory and the process of mourning. These reflections make it clearer which aspects of the afterlife play a role in the existential struggle that Lear describes. However, a further analysis of the temporality at stake in the denial of an afterlife is needed. I therefore look at two psychoanalytic interpretations of the refusal to mourn. The first considers the refusal to mourn as a way to deny change. The second interpretation sees the refusal as a realisation of meaninglessness that prevents the flow of time. I end the paper by arguing that the afterlife can be understood as a practice of articulation, which allows a shared time to flow. Such a practice will commit us anew to a shared world in which we survive with the wounding difficulties of reality. (shrink)

In this paper, I will consider a unique case where changing one’s character is part of a process of moral betterment when facing oppression. By engaging with the Dutch-Jewish intellectual and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, I will highlight the situated dimension of moral betterment as a practice that is driven by the pressure of concurrent events. I will claim that moral betterment does not just come out of an internal will to change for the better. Instead, I will argue that (...) “bearing real suffering” (Hillesum 1996: 220) is what makes compassion a potential source of moral betterment. This is possible because in compassion, one experiences emotional friction between weakness and strength in facing the suffering caused by oppression. (shrink)

abstract: The possibility of authentic Buddhist-Christian belonging and practice has largely been affirmed or dismissed on the basis of the individual participant's different understandings of their respective faith traditions. Here, I suggest that the philosopher Gillian Rose's speculative thought offers a complimentary lens through which to engage in the conversation, particularly those themes imbricated in her speculative thinking around the broken middle, inaugurated mourning, or "working through," recognition, and appropriation. A different kind of dialogue emerges from her thinking that (...) refocuses engagement from merely being a presentation of different views to a humanizing and deeper regard for dialogue partners across their differences, with implications for wider interreligious encounters and peacebuilding. (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)

The politics of shame makes part of the politics of affects. It is becoming a prominent form of politics in the age of social media. Social media, insofar as it presents a plurality of perspectives, can be a milieu for public deliberation. Acknowledging that politics of shame can be of different types, this essay considers two different experiences of politics of shame in social media. It compares public shaming as an activist strategy of moral reform in contemporary feminist politics with (...) politics of shame under authoritarianism by concentrating on two cases from Turkey. At first the structure of shame will be articulated by recourse to the phenomenological and psychological theories of shame. In public shaming for feminist moral reform, the publically shamed agent, who is a feminist, is accused by a group for performing an injurious speech act or a deed with mediate pernicious, harmful consequences. It is my contention that a theory of gender or sexual difference can be false, but is not morally equivalent to an attack on somebody’s existence, racism, and acts of genocide denial. Practices of public shaming in feminism are not self-defense; they are repressive and unfair attacks that destroy public deliberation. It is also problematic to attack feminists, on the grounds of arguments that are based on analogies, which do not apply to non-Western geo-political contexts. All politics of shame is not wrong. For example, the practices of politics of shame that concern non-elaborate mourning have moral and political value insofar as they can play a role in challenging an authoritarian political rule. In this case, the public shame results from attesting to injustice done to the other in the public sphere, a public sphere, which is already closed, and highly manipulated by the authoritarian state. (shrink)

This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman (2008), the latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema. Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the dis- appeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman ‘countersigns’ the genre, proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship (1976—83). By presenting the existentialist (...) drama of an upper-class woman involved in a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engagement with Judith Butler’s account of mourning, this article argues that the film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel’s film may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are in a sense ‘ungrievable’. By proposing an entanglement of temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel’s film each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an ethical key to future possibilities. (shrink)

_Art and Mourning_ explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning. In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with (...) their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life. Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss._Art and Mourning _will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain. Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians. (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)

This paper considers Cora Diamond's conception of the difficulty of reality. It asks how one might think of this experience of difficulty in relation to Aristotle's conception of happiness (and unhappiness). It then takes up the phenomena of mourning and our conceptions of how to live more or less well with death and loss. It investigates whether a “revolt against mourning” might be understood in terms of the difficulty of reality.

Peter Homans offers a new understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis and relates the psychoanalytic project as a whole to the sweep of Western culture, past and present. He argues that Freud's fundamental goal was the interpretation of culture and that, therefore, psychoanalysis is fundamentally a humanistic social science. To establish this claim, Homans looks back at Freud's self-analysis in light of the crucial years from 1906 to 1914 when the psychoanalytic movement was formed and shows how these experiences culminated (...) in Freud's cultural texts. By exploring the "culture of psychoanalysis," Homans seeks a better understanding of what a "psychoanalysis of culture" might be. Psychoanalysis, Homans shows, originated as a creative response to the withering away of traditional communities and their symbols in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The loss of these attachments played a crucial role in the lives of the founders of psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud but also Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Ernest Jones. The personal, political, and religious losses that these figures experienced, the introspection that followed, and the psychological discovery that resulted are what Homans calls "the ability to mourn." Homans expands this historical analysis to construct a general model of psychological discovery: the loss of shared ideals and symbols can produce a deeper sense of self (psychological structure-building, or individuation) and can then lead to the creation of new forms of meaning and self-understanding. He shows how Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts began to extend their introspection outward, reinterpreting the meanings of Western art, history, and religion. In conclusion, Homans evaluates Freud's theory of culture and discusses the role that psychoanalysis might play in social and cultural criticism. Throughout the book, Homans makes use of the many histories, biographies, and psychobiographies that have been written about the origins of psychoanalysis, drawing them into a comprehensive sociocultural model. Rich in insights and highly original in approach, this work will interest psychoanalysts and students of Freud, sociologists concerned with modernity and psychoanalysis, and cultural critics in the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and social history. (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)

ABSTRACT In this comment, I argue that transformative experiences such as experiences of grief often imply a break in one's coherent, non-fictional and biographical narratives and practical identities. The nature of these breaks is of a certain kind, as they interrupt even the process of narration. To insist that the process of narration as well as the narratives themselves belong to one and the same process of adjustment in transformative experiences such as grief might overlook the importance of such breaks, (...) namely that the contain a moment of refusal and revolting against mourning. The tension involved in such breaks might not allow to be circumscribed into narratives nor do they fit into the process of narration as a destabilizing moment; the breaks insist on the incomprehensibility of each loss and they remain part of what it means to survive and to undergo transformative experiences. (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)

To be Black means to have ancestors whose humanity has been de-nied by slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and segregation, as well as by many theories elaborated in order to justify and intensify these modes of domination. To be Black also means having to face the enduring legacies of these systems and theories, which predomi-nantly manifest through overexposure to violence and death. Today, premature death and habituation to loss remain constitutive fea-tures of Black experience. Dignity, often de????ined as the inherent value (...) of every single human being, has been a core concept in ethics since Kant, at least. But in both philosophy and modern politics, the claim of respect for the dignity of people has coexisted with deep antiblack-ness. However, apart from the Western understanding of dignity stands another tradition. The concept of dignity is pervasive in Black radicalism, Caribbean philosophy, and African thought since the 18th century. This article draws inspiration from the legacy of these thinkers to elaborate an ethics centred on the speci????icities of racial-ized life. (shrink)

Should the remains of aborted fetuses be treated as human corpses or medical waste? How can feminists defend abortion rights without erasing the experiences of women who mourn fetal death or lending support to pro-life constructions of fetal personhood? To answer these questions, I trace the role of abjection and mourning in debates over fetal remains disposal regulations. Critiquing pro-life views of fetal personhood while challenging feminists to develop richer and more compelling accounts of fetal remains, I argue that (...) embracing the ambiguity and diversity of pregnant bodies can strengthen rather than undermine reproductive autonomy. I conceptualize reproductive autonomy relationally, contending that it entails the pregnant subject’s authority to construct as well as to interpret her lived body, including the fetus. Additionally, because the embodied self is inextricable from social context, reproductive autonomy also requires community support. To support these claims, I develop an account of pregnant bodies as ontologically multiple and advocate embracing abjection rather than suppressing it. Finally, I object to fetal remains regulations because they inscribe fetal grievability into the law. (shrink)

It is often assumed that an eternalist and a presentist will have the same emotional response to life's events because, regardless of one's metaphysical beliefs, we all have the same phenomenological experience of time passing and it is this experience that is relevant to emotional response. I question the assumption that beliefs about the metaphysics of time can have little impact on one's emotional responses and establish the position that scientific and metaphysical beliefs can offer succour.

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 aim in this paper is to offer some critical remarks about the possibility of honestly confronting finitude through the experience of tbe value of the other. I suggest that there is reason to think that an honest confrontation with finitude cannot be so accomplished, and that, moreover, there can be no ‘compensation’ for the fact of finitude. Finally, I suggest that the rhetoric of ‘authenticity’ might not be the most fruitful way of talking about confronting our death.

Being diagnosed with a disease is like being thrust onto a new path, a biographical bifurcation akin to a mourning process, bringing in its wake a shattering of the social self. The passage from an ideal of perfect health to a state of illness introduces various fractures into the individual's life course, leading to a process of biographization. To illustrate this, the life story of a diabetic person is used to analyze various biographical turning points. The analysis of the (...) subjectivation process highlights different reconstructions of the self through the experience of therapeutic education, seen as a relational space of in-between identities. (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)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of (...) nature to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

The present paper investigates and provides an account of the feeling of grief evidenced in certain sectors of the Chilean population after the electoral defeat following the constitutional plebiscite of September 2022 in Chile. How can one experience grief at the rejection of a political referendum? We suggest that the experience of grief is importantly related to a loss of life possibilities and disruptions in one’s practical identity. The outpouring of grief experienced by many Chileans at this political (...) loss can be traced to the importance of the constitutional plebiscite for their identities. The grieving process involves a renegotiation, through memory and future oriented imagination, of past, present, and future aspects of one’s practical identity. (shrink)

This article gives brief results of a Norwegian empirical project where the main purpose has been to study the burial rite versus bereavement and the role of religiousness in relation to the disposing of the dead. The theoretical perspective is that loss of a significant close, as well as religiousness are primary life experiences which flow together in the bereaved person's grieving conduct during the burial rite. 70 bereaved persons who had lost a close relative during a certain time period (...) have filled in questionnaires with information about the death, the funeral, religiousness and bereavement. The sample is treated statistically by means of indexes for grieving conduct during the burial week, religiousness, and grief. The sample is coherent and unambiguous, and shows that those who let the burial rite be a time to mourn experienced more benefit from the funeral service and had less anxiety, depression and intrusive experiences during the first year of bereavement. But sadness was independent of the grieving conduct during the burial rite, a result which makes sadness an aspect of mourning which qualitatively differs from the other aspects described. External conditions as urbanity and institutionalizing, as well as internal matters as the dramatical character of the loss, and personal religiousness affected the bereaved person's grieving conduct during the burial rite. (shrink)

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the (...) engagements with death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (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)

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)

In this paper I take up (what I call) the pregnancy loss objection to defenses of abortion that deny fetal moral status. Though versions of this objection have been put forth by others—particularly Lindsey Porter’s in a 2015 paper—I argue that the existing versions of the objection are unsuccessful in various ways: failing to explain the ground of moral considerability that would apply to embryos/fetuses in very early pregnancy, lack of clarity about what it means to take grief after miscarriage (...) seriously, and implausible implications regarding pre-embryo and infertility cases. I go on to offer a more plausible version of the objection, which I apply only to mid-pregnancy and fetuses, by drawing on personal narratives of later pregnancy loss and abortion and emphasizing practices that indicate the relevant kind of mourning. I then take up the question of how experience of the sort I have in mind can function as evidence, by situating my version of the objection in a pragmatist ethical view. Finally I consider and respond to some worries about the very idea of taking experience of pregnancy loss to be evidence regarding fetal moral status. (shrink)

Abstract:In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to "eternalize" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in (...) class='Hi'>mourning in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity. (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)

Because mourning and memorializing a miscarriage seems to imply acceptance of foetal personhood, feminists have been reluctant to address the often traumatic but common experience of pregnancy loss. Feminist anthropologists of reproduction have argued that adopting a view of personhood as constructed and negotiated, rather than inherent, solves this dilemma and enables the development of a feminist discourse of pregnancy loss. This article aims to make a critical contribution to such a discourse by analysing representations of lost babies (...) and children in online pregnancy loss memorials. It focuses on two genres of representation, idealized angels and medical ultrasound images. It argues that the dominance of a biological model of personhood limits the ability of both forms of representation to secure the status of memorialized children as real. However, pregnancy loss memorials do communicate the anguish of grieving parents, in part through the very unrepresentability of their loss. They also provoke a questioning of the taken for granted subject of `the child', whether imagined or real, absent or present. (shrink)

Colombia has been structured by war, and this situation has permeated the country’s art, with variations that go hand in hand with the transformations of violence. In this chapter, I delve into the work of filmmaker Nicolás Rincón-Gille. What I explore as remarkable in his films is how violence does not “monopolize everything else” but makes life count in the face of the brutal effects of devastation. What persists in these films is the capacity of those who have lived through (...) and been traversed by destruction to reposition themselves in what remains and their ability to give an account of what happened to them by finding everyday resources to deal with it. Thus, these films can break away from the identifications that bind victims to a place of impotence by exploring their capacities, perceptions of the conflict, and experiences of mourning and creating, through this exploration, dissensual works of memory. (shrink)

This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-20th century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt School, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of (...) psychosocial narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich’s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ‘missing’ historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication does not hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s–90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines. (shrink)

The male and female, upper-class and lower-class, adult and child characters in Asghar Farhadi’s films remodel variants of the subject’s relationship to the Other. The intertwining of lies and truths into the subject’s fantasy or into the characters’ fictions sometimes (mis)leads the characters into violence, or brings them to face their subjective suffering, or, alternately, makes it possible for them to pass through their experience of mourning and to possible advance. The continuous shifting of the positions, value, perspectives (...) and emotions has an unsettling effect upon the spectator’s subjective relation to the characters’ responsibility and actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 91-97 [Access article in PDF] The Ambiguities of "Meaning":A Commentary Hans S. Reinders "Death, Disability, and Dogma" by Jennifer Clegg and Richard Lansdall Welfare (2003) is a rich paper that presents an unexpected but interesting mixture of observations and perspectives on mourning, grief and bereavement in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities.In a number of ways, the notion of meaning is (...) prominent in the paper. The authors observe that recent literature on grief and bereavement because of loss of loved ones does not confirm the "stage theory of loss." Instead there is a "multiplicity of possible responses to bereavement," which is partly explained by the role of cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is particularly involved in the development of "meanings" about loss (2003, 69). However, looking into the literature on grief and bereavement among persons with intellectual disabilities, the authors found that literature "dogmatic" in that it sticks to the traditional theoretical framework of "grief work" (2003, 74). The authors offer an explanation for this "stuck discourse": The approach to grief and bereavement among people with intellectual disabilities is framed within the philosophy of normalization. This leads professionals to downplay limitations to the potential of their clients in ways that encourage the denial of disability. The meaning assigned to intellectual disabilities, this is to say, is primarily positive. This positive outlook promotes the "belief in the apparently limitless potential of the client group to develop skills and autonomy if only they are given the right help" (2003, 71). The authors read this promoting of positive meaning as a counter strategy: our culture in general does not seem to be convinced of a valued meaning of life for persons with intellectual disabilities. Therefore, the professional world of service systems adopts a strategy of "separitism" (2003, 77), which explains why approaches to phenomena like grief and bereavement are "stuck" with ideas that are inadequate. The professional community attending those with intellectual disabilities is too much a world on its own. There should be more interaction between generalists and specialists on the subject of grief and bereavement.So far the general argument of the paper. Because my own area of research is not in the fields of clinical psychology or psychiatry, it cannot be my task to comment on Clegg and Lansdall-Welfare's presentation of the research on grief and bereavement in these fields. Nonetheless, there are a few points in their review of the literature that I will briefly address, but only to prepare the way for the major topic of this commentary, which is the issue of meaning as it relates to intellectual disability.Intuitively, my sympathy would lie with social critics arguing for caution with regard to the [End Page 91] medicalization of mourning and grief (Clegg and Lansdall-Welfare 2003, 67-79). The loss of loved ones will oftentimes be a traumatic experience, but when it is, I tend to see the symptoms of distress following that experience as a sign of mental health, more than anything else. Losing a parent, sibling, or someone else who has been part of one's life, is not only missing the other person, it is missing a part of oneself. That being the case, it is only to be expected that, in some sense, life will never be again what it was. Replacing notions of recovery from a traumatic experience by notions of "adaptation and accommodation" (2003, 68) appears to me the more sensible approach.Therefore, I tend to be suspicious about notions such as "pathological grief." From a philosophical point of view, such a notion seems to betray a modernist conception of the human subject in control of its own action. Following that conception, human beings need to transform that which happens to them by means of their own action so that they have made it part of themselves. Being overcome with grief one is in an emotional state that as such is "pathological"—as Immanuel Kant had it—the main characteristic of which is its heteronomy. A person overcome by grief is controlled by passion instead... (shrink)

Awareness of mortality is one of the key aspects of human existence. Death goes beyond the boundary of knowledge, mortality. However, it is actually experienced by man as something inevitable. Death is a fact – the end of life, and the experience of mortality is one of the borderline situations. In the essay, the author puts forward the thesis that the experience of mortality has a significant impact on the human understanding of values. Attitudes towards death be it (...) fear, resignation, indifference, fascination, mourning, sadness, despair after the loss of a loved one, or the desire for death, indicate the wealth of the world of value of axiological experience. The attitude of the person towards death, in some sense, is a test of our humanity, the principal value to which we refer most often. The author of the essay adopts the position of axiological relationalism, it implies that values are independent of the subject, they form a network of relational connections, but they are in a significant way connected with culture. The study of these connections: 1) with the world of people, 2) world of things, 3) internal relations that take place between values, allows us to get to know the complex structure of the world of values. In the article, the author analyzes in what sense mortality influences human understanding of values. (shrink)

Of all the memorable, and influential, passages of the Phänomenologie des Geistes none are more famous or enjoyed greater attention than those sections devoted to the master-slave dialectic. It would seem almost inconceivable then that anything would be left to say concerning Hegel's martial struggle, the sheer number of illustrious scholars who have commented on this text bearing ample testimony to the probable redundancy of further comment. However, in actual fact, this is not the case. Indeed, it is probable that (...) Hegel is addressing and utilising not a theory of recognition but rather two quite distinct concepts of recognition. The appropriate passages are of course the master-slave section itself and the rather oblique references to the »confession« of one consciousness to another at the end of chapter six. Commentators have generally been in agreement that the master-slave section marks the beginning of Hegel's theory of recognition; that is, that the continuation of the treatment of recognition in chapter six marks a further development of the concept formulated in chapter four - a further development seemingly promised by Hegel himself - »With this, we already have before us the notion of spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what spirit is«. However the preceding is interpreted, the reader is surely right to recognize that something has been »won«, the triumphalist language being repeated in the following »[it is] in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present«. However, this triumph may have been misunderstood. The theory of recognition referred to in the master-slave dialectic may have been a »turning-point«, a new beginning, but it was a new beginning that was soon realised to be a dead-end. The following will attempt to demonstrate that there is a quite radical discontinuity at the heart of the concept of recognition itself, a discontinuity that can be traced to its origins in the Fichtean system itself. For the master-slave dialectic is »Fichte's wake« - it is at once a celebration and a mourning for the first concept of recognition, the unworkability of which heralded a truly new beginning. That is, the concept of recognition outlined in the Einige Vorlesungen uber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. The second concept of recognition, that of the Grundlage des Naturrechts cannot be reckoned a further development or emendation of the first concept, its quite peculiar status, and philosophical importance as a »spiritual concept«, precluding any such treatment. The latter concept may mark the birth of Hegelian or speculative idealism itself. It is the contention of the following that understanding this quite radical discontinuity will fashion a better understanding of the connection between transcendental and speculative philosophy, the point of transition or sublation. (shrink)

After we die, our persona may live on in the minds of the people we know well. Two essential elements of this process are mourning and acts of commemoration. These behaviors extend well beyond grief and must be cultivated deliberately by the survivors of the deceased individual. Those who are left behind have many ways of maintaining connections with their deceased, such as burials in places where the living are likely to return and visit. In this way, culturally defined (...) places often serve as metaphors of social association and shared experience. Humans are the only kind of animal that buries their dead, and this gesture is preserved in Paleolithic sites as early as 120,000 years ago. Though not the only method of honoring the dead in human cultures, the emergence of burial traditions in the Middle Paleolithic implies that both Neandertals and early anatomically modern humans had already begun to conceive of the individual as unique and irreplaceable. Claims of primitive mortuary behavior in earlier periods than the Middle Paleolithic fall short in that they lack any signs of positive social-spatial associations between the deceased and survivors. The archaeological evidence for burial behavior in the Middle Paleolithic provides the first clear translation of mourning into a stereotypical action. These burials therefore may represent the first ritualized bridge between the living and the deceased in human evolutionary history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Judith Butler’s “New Humanism”A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What?Sina KramerA few thinkers in the last few years, such as Stefan Dolgert and Miriam Leonard, but especially political theorist Bonnie Honig, have argued that Judith Butler’s most recent work (Antigone’s Claim, 2000; Undoing Gender, 2004; Precarious Life, 2005; Frames of War, 2009) institutes a new form of humanism, based on the universality of grief, mourning, vulnerability, (...) and precariousness that Butler describes in these texts. These critiques call into question an incipient foundationalism in the feminist political theory Butler produces in these texts, one seemingly at odds with her previous antifoundationalist commitments. In this article I will argue that, while these critiques oversimplify the relationship between politics and ethics or politics and ontology in their critique of Butler’s new mortalist humanism, the problem of the relation of politics to ethics or ontology—or, more exactly, the problem of the relation of politics to its outside, or to its conditions—remains nevertheless a real problem in Butler’s work. This is because, without a clear account of a method of rendering foundations contingent, or of rendering ontologies provisional, we tend to repeat the political move to establish an apolitical ground on which we can found a politic. This foundationalist move thus shields that ground from political critique and transformation—a move that Butler herself has done so much work to expose and displace.In this article, I ask whether feminist theory must repeat a recourse to foundations by examining the charge that Butler does so her in most recent work. The article will proceed as follows: in the first section, I examine the [End Page 25] charge that Butler is instituting a new humanism. In the second section, I look at some of Butler’s discussion of humanism, and look more closely at the relation between ethics and politics the question of humanism opens up in her work. In the third, I explore whether or not the charge that Butler is instituting a new humanism is correct. And in the fourth, I question what is at stake in this charge. Essentially, the article asks of this new humanist charge: Is this a thing or not a thing, and so what? I argue that, while the charge is somewhat overdetermined, it does point to a larger problem in Butler’s work, and that is the recourse to foundations, or to gesturing to an outside of or beyond of politics as the condition for altering political conditions. I will conclude by arguing that a greater attention to method can help to avoid the reification of the distinction between politics and its conditions that leads to the recourse of foundations.Butler’s New Mortalist HumanismIn her 2010 article “Antigone’s Two Laws: Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism”—as well as in her 2013 book Antigone, Interrupted—Bonnie Honig argues that Butler’s ethical turn institutes a new mortalist humanism, predicated on the “ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but the vulnerability to suffering” (Honig 2010, 1). She differentiates this new mortalist humanism, which she also diagnoses in the work of Nicole Loraux and Stephen White, from earlier rationalist forms of humanism that are based on the universal principle of human rationality, and from forms of antihumanism based on the “signs of a monstrous, dehumanizing animality” (Honig 2010, 3). Either form is problematic, Honig argues, insofar as they both seek to settle essentially political questions by recourse to a position beyond politics: through a stable and recognizably human figure who either secures its belonging to the polity by means of its rationality, or an exclusion rendered through the dehumanization of otherwise ostensibly human figures.This new mortalist humanism Honig diagnoses in Butler’s recent work falls into the same problem: in this version, Butler settles political questions by recourse to a principle of mortality, or the universal experience of mourning. This would seem to be contrary to Butler’s earlier commitments to a radical critique of foundationalism, especially in her famous critique of the naturalization of sex as the grounds for a political understanding of gender. This is... (shrink)

_Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice_ isthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality (...) and our character. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, _emons in the Consulting Room_, reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture. In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. _emons in the Consulting Room _ill appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis. (shrink)

The experience of losing a child to cancer represents an emotional burden for the parents with extreme individual, family and social effects that do not end with death. This integrative review is intended to identify key aspects in the experience of losing a child to cancer. The results show a pattern surrounding six moments in the mourning process These can serve as elements of intervention to accompany parents as they try to cope. It is concluded this pattern (...) is an important phenomenon for the development of palliative care at the end of life and afterwards. (shrink)

According to Didier Eribon, melancholy is where it all starts and where it also ends: the lifelong process of mourning that each homosexual experiences, and through which they construct their own identity. In this beguiling book, an introverted, anxious, ambitious, artistically gifted queer Filipino-Canadian boy finds solace, inspiration, and a "syllabus for living" in art--works of literature and music, from the children's literary classic Anne of Green Gables to the music of Maria Callas. But their contribution to his intellectual, (...) emotional, and spiritual edification belies the fact that they were largely heteronormative and white, which had the effect of invisibilizing him as a queer person of colour. Part memoir, part cultural commentary, and a hybrid of besotted aesthetic appreciation and unsparing critique, Double Melancholy is by turns a passionate love letter to art and an embattled examination of its oppressive complicity with the society that produces it, and the depths to which art both enriches and colonizes us. (shrink)

The ordeal of mourning, being so much harder than any thought its experience may deliver, bears out the impression developed in Julia Kristeva’s opening to The Severed Head —that thought is swift. She has recognized as well as anyone the interplay of blindness and insight. Nothing brings all this into starker evidence than the premature death of a loved other, a friend, or a true assistant in life and thought. There is a reminder in this that the new (...) narratives of subjectivity on which Kristeva places a high value, and certainly the long life of meaning in the world, come at the price of the loss and mourning of our loved others. Pleshette DeArmitt’s book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love, has given the condition of narcissism an intricate place in this difficult if promising work. (shrink)

_The Decision Between Us _combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation. John Paul Ricco shows that this tension informs our efforts to coexist ethically and politically, an experience of sharing and separation that informs any decision. Using this incongruous relation of intimate separation, Ricco goes on to propose that “decision” is as much an aesthetic as it is an (...) ethical construct, and one that is always defined in terms of our relations to loss, absence, departure, and death. Laying out this theory of “unbecoming community” in modern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and calling our attention to such things as blank sheets of paper, images of unmade beds, and the spaces around bodies, _The Decision Between Us _opens in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and Roland Barthes published _Writing Degree Zero_, then moves to 1980 and the “neutral mourning” of Barthes’ _Camera Lucida_, and ends in the early 1990s with installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Offering surprising new considerations of these and other seminal works of art and theory by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Breillat, _The Decision Between Us_ is a highly original and unusually imaginative exploration of the spaces between us, arousing and evoking an infinite and profound sense of sharing in scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning. (shrink)

Postmodern critical assessments of Freud’s theory of mourning disavow the idea of grief’s conclusiveness, insisting that mourning is an interminable process or even a transcendental structure of experience. However, such assessments presuppose an ontological orientation toward finitude that avoids the profound speculative implications of the non-finite status of death in the unconscious. In consequence, mourning comes to assume an indefinite, generic status as a condition of experience instead of a resolutely speculative confrontation with the impossible (...) real of infinitude. Freud’s writings evidence his difficulties with this unconscious disjunction of mourning from finitude, but can be elucidated by turning to Hegel’s critical discussion of “infinite grief,” the melancholy apprehension of finitude as a spurious infinity. Hegel’s analysis in turn anticipates Lacan’s elaboration of the death drive as a concept of unconscious transmission. Here, what begins to emerge is a theory of mourning that concerns the speculative inheritance of an immortal object. (shrink)