The Image of Mourning: on Melancholic Militancy and Remembrance (original) (raw)
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" Remembrance of the Future " : Derrida on Mourning
In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as an ongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us and continue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility and transformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus from psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok), gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).
IMPOSSIBLE EMOTIONS: THE ETHICS OF MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA
Zoon Politikon, 2021
This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida's auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2011
During Argentina's 'Dirty War' , the military regime attempted to erase an entire population; today the photographs of the dead ⁄ missing stand in defiance, contradicting that attempted erasure of the desaparecidos. In this essay, I explain the connection between photography and loss, and how photography fits within Lacan's understanding of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real, and the 'gaze'. I discuss complicated mourning (circumstances which inhibit ⁄ delay mourning) and the difficulties created by political disappearances: as long as the family members maintain the belief that their loved one(s) might still be alive, they cannot begin the process of mourning the permanently lost object. Beginning with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and, using the web-based art exhibits of Marcelo Brodsky and InØs Ulanovsky, I analyze the role of the photograph in Argentina, how it serves as a linking object, how it is used to symbolize the dead ⁄ missing, and how it can function to facilitate mourning, or to serve as proof of pathological melancholia. I argue that such artistic representations of loss function to reinscribe healthy mourning rituals within the Argentine society.
Ekphrasis, 2019
This article is concerned with art's exploration through melancholia of a world in disaster. We will investigate how art as a form of melancholia-akin to Derrida's concept of destinerrance-is not only testifying to its limits, but employing its limits, denouncing and performing its border (as in parages). In relation and in dialogue with Adorno's negative dialectics, we investigate the possibility of non-dialectical art as a non resolving discourse speaking through its melancholia. We will question whether Godard's famous announcement of the end of cinema, Wagner's Tristan chord or Parsifal's much debated ending are a monument to what Adorno would call impossible openness, if they are subjected to closure or, on the contrary, they are rather a melancholic assignable nonplace, both necessary and impossible to find, which enables art to speak of its own impossible closure. How does the end of Wagner's Ring cycle announce and contain the end of the world in Lars von Trier's Melancholia? Does The Turin Horse end the world in a melancholia of waiting in vain? Is the continuous flow of water in Marguerite Duras's film Aurelia Steiner speaking of an impossible arrival? The letter the narrator is reading to us opens up and remains hanging in this liquid and seemingly calm environment. How does filming the waters of the river Seine relate to Bill Viola's statement that true art cannot separate life from death? Why is Auschwitz a border stone for how we understand and make art today? And how is Penderecki putting the pieces together in deconstructing both silence and sound? By raising all these questions this article reprises Badiou's interrogation of the ethical possibility of art in a context of reparations prescribed by Adorno to a post-Auschwitz world, through exploring a fundamental non-violence on the part of identity towards what is different from it in order to cause a difference to begin. Can art be a locus of making reparations? Our thesis is that through exploring discontinuity, dissonance or silence a place is being constructed for an art that is possible after Auschwitz.
J. Derrida, La vie la mort (A Critical Review - M. Senatore)
Phenomenological Reviews, 2019
trace, and différance-that allow for a differential account of all living beings, of all sorts of relationships between the living and the dead. It is to this story, Derrida goes on, that one should retrace his early project of grammatology-the project of replacing the notions of word (parole), sign, and signifier, with the aforementioned figures (see Of Grammatology, 1967). Since then, he had re-elaborated the oppositional account of life, based on the humanist conception of language, into the differential account made possible by the analogical code of grammē. For Derrida, the humanist and oppositional account of life hinges on an axiomatic demarcation. On the one hand, we have animal autorelation (the animal ability to move, feel and affect itself with traces of itself, which is traditionally opposed to inorganic inertia); on the other hand, we have human selfreference or autodeicticity (one's power to refer to oneself in a deictic way, that is, by saying "this is me," 131-2). The logical matrix of Derrida's argument for a critical re-elaboration of the humanist account of life consists in calling into question this axiomatic demarcation of animal autoaffection and human self-reference. Building on his early work (above all, Voice and Phenomenon, 1967), Derrida rethinks autorelation as the minimal condition of life, including human life, and thus self-reference as an effect of autorelation, with all that this implies-to begin with, the departure from phenomenology as a thinking of the self-referent living present.
The Deconstruction of Freud's Theory of Melancholy_Mlacnik
Družboslovne razprave/, 2018
In the article, the author presents an interpretation of melancholy and its discourse through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and “violence of writing”. In part one of the article, the ambivalent and contradictory conceptions of melancholy in the West are outlined in order to show the working of the logic of difference that makes any unified and universal definition impossible. Sigmund Freud first introduced a universal theory of melancholy in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), while part two of the article analyses the inherent enigmas and contradictions in Freud’s psychoanalytical distinction between mourning and melancholy in the specific socio-historical context. The binary oppositions in support of Freud’s dichotomy are also exposed. In the conclusion, the author shows how Freud’s paradoxes are deconstructed in contemporary theories in the humanities and social sciences that address various social and political discourses. KEY WORDS: deconstruction, violence of writing, Mourning and Melancholia, loss, psychoanalysis
The Poetics and Politics of Mourning
eSocial Sciences, 2020
In the age of publicized mourning and the appropriation of death for grand and often seedy spectacles, the interest in ways of dying has found repeated sparking points. Yet we see how some deaths find no resonance, almost as though there is no need to mourn them, being disposable lives and ungrievable deaths.