Violence, mourning, politics

This essay argues that mourning can provide resources for rethinking community and international relations, and that "preventive war" and derealization of loss work to undermine fundamental human bonds. Mourning can expose the ways in which the constitution of the self relies upon internalized relations, so that when we lose others, we lose and alter some portion of ourselves. Non-violence is an option that follows from the practice of mourning, insofar as staying with the unbearability of loss can make us more attuned to the losses others feel and, specifically, those losses we violently produce for others. The distinction between "grievable lives" and "ungrievable lives" exposes how melancholia is geopolitically distributed in differential ways, and how ethnic and racial frames produce and deproduce the grievably human. This suggests one way to connect a psychoanalytically informed concept of subject formation to a politics mindful of the unacceptability of violent death by military means. Feminist theory is crucial to this conception insofar as it insists on an embodied subject, vulnerable to violence, who necessarily emerges in the context of fundamental physical dependency.