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Abstract
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.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
This article has benefited from peer review. The author wishes to thank Salah el Moncef and Angelaki’s reviewer for their generous and helpful input in consideration of this article.
1 Baldwin 122. The phrase “thought of death” in the title is partly inspired by Crépon.
2 Breitwieser, for example, describes mourning as “dialectic’s purest case.” See Breitwieser, American Puritanism 42; Stern 386. Staten defines “dialectic of mourning” as “the field of movement of all affective phenomena determined by the mortality of a love object, as this field is articulated in certain influential texts of the Western tradition” (xi). Although she doesn’t explicitly define it as such, Comay in Mourning Sickness strongly implies a mode or method of Hegelian “dialectical mourning.” Also, there is the critical sense of “structural mourning” that Santner evokes against Paul de Man’s attempts to “displace and disperse the particular and historical tasks of mourning” with the “structural mourning [ … ] for those catastrophes that are inseparable from being-in-language” (29). See also White.
3 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 244.
4 For a discussion of pragmatic opportunism as the obverse of mourning, see Breitwieser, National Melancholy 33.
5 Clewell 47.
6 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 244–45. As Rickels situates the difference:
in Freud’s essay the catastrophe of another’s death summons mourner and melancholic alike while turning them apart: the loss that afflicts the former is conscious, whereas the occasion for the latter’s interminable grieving is kept in the unconscious. Which reception of loss is available depends upon the channel of the original object choice. Thus Freud agrees with Otto Rank that whereas the mourner disengages his ego from an object loved for its separateness and otherness, the melancholic discards a narcissistic choice by consummating the ego’s rapport with this cherished object through identification, internalization, and idealization. (4)
7 Clewell 48. Clewell’s solution, which is taken up indirectly in what follows, critically reconstructs Freud’s later ego theory, in order to propose a normative melancholia that would attempt to overcome itself by engaging in what she calls “endless mourning” – that is, keeping a constant channel open with the dead. My argument here is less concerned with her readings of Freud and more with the theoretical implications of endless mourning or infinite grief. My aim is to reconcile Clewell’s conclusion while rejecting her over-reliance on the subjectivist premises of the poststructuralist emphasis on finitude.
8 Freud, “Letter 239” 386.
9 Laplanche 6.
10 Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” 289.
11 For a vivid example of this fear of death, see Leclaire.
12 Freud, Totem and Taboo 93.
13 “Mourning and Melancholia” 243.
14 The terms and logic of the “lover” and the “beloved” are based on Lacan’s use of them in his analysis of the dialectic of intersubjectivity in Plato’s Symposium. See Lacan, Transference 50–54.
15 “Belief” and “believe” are based on “ylief,” coming from Old English gelíefan, derived from a mixture of Old Saxon (gilôbjan), Old High German (gilouben) and Gothic (galaubjan). From the latter comes the combined senses of lauƀ-dear, leuƀ-lief and luƀ-love. See OED Online, “believe, v.”
16 It has already been noticed that Freud’s definition of mourning is the reaction to the loss of a belief. See, for example, Peter Homans’s term “symbolic loss.” Homans 20.
17
Reality testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object [ … ] Normally respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless, its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged [ … ] Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 245)
18 The others, of course, are “Mourning and Melancholia” and “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” But just as significant is Freud’s prewar theory of funerary rituals in Totem and Taboo. See Freud, Totem and Taboo 51–74.
19 Prater 233 qtd in Ricciardi 213 n. 31.
20 Freud, “On Transience” 306.
21 Ibid. 305.
22 Ibid. 306; my emphasis.
23 Ibid. 306–07.
24 See, for example, Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” 226–30.
25 Hegel, Aesthetics 522.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 See Žižek 14, 126, 171.
29 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge 56. For an excellent and important study of the link between the death of God as a crisis of finitude and the ethics of tragedy in both Hegel and Nietzsche, see Williams 1–30, 161–67.
30 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge 189.
31 Kant 72.
32 Hegel, The Science of Logic 101, 102.
33 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge 190.
34 Ibid. 190–91; emphasis in original.
35 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 38.
36 Ibid. 37.
37 Fitzgerald 180.
38 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 212.
39
The full paradox of the death drive, then, is this: while the aim (Ziel) of the drive is death, the proper and positive activity of the drive is to inhibit the attainment of its aim; the drive, as such, is zielgehemnt, that is, it is inhibited as to its aim, or sublimated, “the satisfaction of the drive through the inhibition of its aim” being the very definition of sublimation. (Copjec 30)
40 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 213, 212.
41 Ibid. 212.
42 Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 2–3.
43 Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious 50.
44 Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life 3.
45 Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious 32.
46
The term Signor, Herr passes underneath – the absolute master, I once said, which is in fact death, has disappeared there. Furthermore, do we not see, behind this, the emergence of that which forced Freud to find in the myths of the death of the father the regulation of his desire? After all, it is to be found in Nietzsche, who declares, in his own myth, that God is dead. (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 27)
47 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis 207.
48 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 263. My reading draws from Copjec’s masterful study of the death drive in Lacan’s study of Antigone. See 25–47.
49 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 314.
50 Ibid. 263.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid. 262–63.
53 Ibid. 255, 273.
54 Ibid. 283.
55 Sophocles 375–76, 386.
56 Derrida 93, 109–10.
The two daughters lament but they do not bemoan only the fact of never more seeing their father [ … ] but on the other hand, hidden in the secret of a foreign land, that his corpse, their paternal corpse, should also be buried without a tomb. Not at all, perhaps, without a grave, but without a tomb, without a determinable place, without monument, without a localizable and circumscribed place of mourning, without a stopping point [arrêt]. Without a fixed [arrêté] place, without a determinable topos, mourning is not allowed. Or, what comes down to the same thing, it is promised without taking place, a determinable place, so thenceforth promised as an interminable mourning, an infinite mourning defying all work, beyond any possible work of mourning. The only possible mourning is the impossible mourning. (109–10)