The War on Mourning

This essay explores the relationship between the crisis of politics (both institutional and insurgent) and the work of mourning in our time, in which pandemics and wars accumulate victims, but institutional politics seems only capable of saturating losses with violence—while politics from below struggles to transform mourning into consciousness and rebellion. In dialogue with Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, the author connects this contradiction to the spectral status of modern politics, the state’s practices of censorship and hierarchization of mourning, and the changes in the social ritualization of mourning that have been produced by the COVID pandemic. Finally, the author asks how the generative valence of loss can be relaunched against the neoliberal rationality, which is constitutively based on the repression of loss and on its substitution with the imperatives of production, consumerism, and enjoyment