Things You Only Notice When They're Gone

mourning

Ancient Egyptian

trivia

crow

funeral

elephant

ritual

is a capacity which, maintained, gives us a keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence.

it is not that mourning is the goal of politics, but that without the capacity to mourn, we lose that keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence' (Butler precarious life)

is a challenge placed before us to respond to the radical and ultimate enigma that questions that are asked of the dead such as 'what would he say' must now, all of a sudden, go unanswered.

As Jean Laplanche has remarked, every occasion of mourning challenges us to respond to the radical and ultimate enigma of the dead Other and thereby raises questions that are destined to remain unanswered: There is certainly no mourning without the question, what would he say', what would he have said', without the regret or remorse of not having been able to hold a sufficient dialogue, to understand what the other had to say.'

is a condition in which the world has become poor and empty... melancholia is a condition in which it is the ego itself that has become poor and empty.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty... in melancholia it is the ego itself. Sigmund Freud, On Freud's Mourning and Melancholia

is a dimension of melancholy captured by the ironic situation of being happy when it rains because after the rain there will be sunshine and being sad during sunshine because after sunshine will come rain.

the tragic procedure of mourning at work in melancholy, as in the old racist joke about Gypsies: when it rains, they are happy because they know that after rain there is always sunshine, and when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that after sunshine it will at some point rain. (Zizek 2000 : 661-662)

is a form of psychic incorporation whereby the mourner devours, or takes into himself, the body, voice, the face, and ultimately the person of the other.

Mourning for Derrida almost always involves an implicit reference to Freud's essay 'Mourning and Melancholia.' An example is a sentence in Memoires for Paul de Man: 'Memory and interiorization: since Freud, this is how the 'normal' 'work of mourning' [travail du deuil] is often described. It entails a movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other's visage and person, ideality and quasi-literally [quasi littrelement] devouring them'

is about remaining in a state open to the other, to let the dead speak.

. Anyhoo, while for Butler the task is to mourn in a state open to the Other, to let the dead speak, I've been hung-up on the Derridian language of hospitality/hauntology (in which the task is not to mourn, but to dwell in a state of melancholia... it would seem Butler's mourning is Derrida's melancholia . . . same posture, different spin on concepts). In either case, the goal is an ethical posture of openness to the Other understood as simple (or radical, if you prefer) alterity (not the Lacanian Symbolic).

is an act which requires attention. It is the act of dealing with grief, which is passive. Grief happens.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Joan Didion

is at root, the impression of a loss and the subsequent weakening of the group when it loses one of its members. Public healing is therefore crucial for the unity and security of the group.

Mourning is not the spontaneous expression of individual emotions . . . It is a duty imposed by the group.' It is an imposed obligation because 'the foundation of mourning is the impression of a loss which the group feels when it loses one of its members.' Durkheim asserts that the feeling of loss weakens group membership, and public healing is therefore crucial for the unity and security of the group.'

mourning, n.Definitions

mourning