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

Judith Butler on Mourning

Things You Only Notice When They're Gone

mourning

Ancient Egyptian

trivia

crow

funeral

elephant

ritual

is not to be kept separate from melancholy.

is love continuing after the guest has gone

is best invoked in one's children by leaving them nothing.

If you want him to mourn, you had best leave him nothing.

is difficult --- Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

is the process of taking into oneself the idealized features of the dead person.

For Freud, then, mourning goes with introjection, the taking into oneself the idealized features of the dead person as part of the work of mourning, as Derrida explains. That process is finished when one outlives, thorugh a working through, the pain of the other's death. It is healthy for that to happen.

is not always in order --- when the vulture dies the hen does not weep.

When the vulture dies the hen does not weep.

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 best done by taking taking care of the living who belong to the dead.

The true way to mourn the dead is to take care of the living who belong to them.

impossible mourning

mourning and melancholy

pre-originary mourning

public mourning

Baubo

butsudan

death space

despondency

dying well

forget-me-not

good death

gravedigger

green willow

Guido Cavalcanti

guilt-context of the living

headstone

memorial service

misery

obituary page

One World Trade Center

red poppy

sentimentalist

slow death

Specters of Marx

USS Arizona Memorial

willow tree

anthropology of religion

anguish

despair

loneliness

melancholy

sadness

weeping

assassination of J.F.K.

death

death of a child

epitaph

Good Friday

half-mast

John F. Kennedy

lost time

mass grave

mass killing

Memorial Day

natural death

necro-utopia

Precarious Life

prothesis

Queen Elizabeth II

ringdove

Robert F. Kennedy

Sandy Hook

Tupac

unknown soldier

William McKinley

lamentation

merriment

partying

war-dance

Alfred Lord Tennyson

black armband

black clothing

Camera Lucida

Electra

Motherwell

postcolonial melancholia

crying

atomic bombing of Hiroshima

Ashura

beatitude

Beitzah | the roasted egg

black ribbon

chrysanthemum

crematorium

death of a friend

death of a loved one

death of a mother

death of a parent

death of the father

depressive position

elegy

grievability

heterosexual melancholia

historical trauma

Husayn ibn Ali

Irish wake

Karbala

kommos

melancholy object

Muharram

practices of memory

psychoanalysis

Queen Victoria

reassurance of fratricide

sad things

Shia Islam

solace

Tisha B'Av

tomb-fire

turtledove

unmastered past

victorian

widow

widower

widowhood

working through

bereavement

grief

grieving

condolences

mourner

sitting shiva

pall

plaintiveness

morgue

loss

black

hearse-plume

burial

cremation

funeral procession

heartbreak

Shiva

Taps

wake (funeral)

guilt

remorse

covered mirror

eulogy

obituary

tombstone

abandonment

absence

disappearance

distance

emptiness

farewell

forgetting

longing

nostalgia

separation

silence

vacancy

dead

Sigmund Freud

sorrow

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 concerned with the process of accepting that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever, in ways which one cannot know in advance.

[w]hen one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed,possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing toundergo a transformation the full result of which one cannot know inadvance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also thetransformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted orplanned. (Precarious 21)

is defined by the loss of something or someone bound to our identity. Its success is determined based on a metamorphosis of the self, and movement or transition from one state to another, through grief.

Mourning is defined by the loss of something or someone bound to our identity.'Successful' mourning, then, involves a metamorphosis of the self, and movement ortransition from one state to another, through grief.

is tied up inextricably with one's own identity and one's narration of self such that 'if I lose you [ ] then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you''.

Butler's theory of mourning refers to the narrative nature of grief: 'If I loseyou [ ] then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who'am' I, without you'' (22)... and 'I tell a story about the relations I choose, only toexpose [ ] the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrativefalters, as it must' (23). For Butler, mourning is tied inextricably to identity andmemory, which are also necessarily narrative they are stories we tell. Mourning, then, is a narrative of relation and identification, and of tension, conflict, and destruction along with resolution.

Definitions HQ