Poetics of Impossible Mourning: The Death of God in Carlos Velazco

This article examines a collection of poems entitled 'The Death of God' (2005) by the contemporary Argentine poet Carlos Velazco. Despite an unmistakable Nietzschean resonance, 'The Death of God' is actually less about God's death itself and more about what, in the prose introduction, Velazco calls 'the bitter struggle to rid myself of nostalgia for God'. Quite unlike Nietzsche's madman, for whom the 'tremendous event' of God's death 'has not yet reached the ears of men', the dramatic orientation of Velazco's poetry is decisively backward-looking and nostalgic: God is already dead, and the poet's brooding, agonized reflections are fired not so much by the desire to hasten his demise as the need to mourn it. In fact, it is just this sense of poetry as a specifically theological act of mourning that lends 'The Death of God' part of its significance. The other part owes to the manner in which that act of mourning is undertaken. For if Velazco sets out to reconcile himself to God's death, he ends by concluding that such reconciliation is impossible. That impossibility, moreover, owes less to philosophical doubt or psychological quirk than to something inherent in the process of poetic meaning-making itself. If mourning is impossible, it is because poetic language is itself inherently theological, and any attempt to take leave of God poetically is doomed to end in performative contradiction.