Mourning Sickness

Mourning Sickness” is a reverie on the work of mourning in the practice of editing an academic journal. Manifesting itself initially in the experiences of “ghosting” during the COVID pandemic, mourning, through its treatment by Jonathan Lear, unfolds here to pose the problem of the status of journaling within the precarious humanities—where will the traces of readers and writers survive?—and, through Theodor Adorno’s speculations on ghosts, mourning also becomes a provocation to “exaggerate” the role of psychoanalysis in the “self-analysis” of the humanities. Editing thus as a queasy gestation of what might be endlessly mourned