The Politics of Mourning and Melancholia

This article points to the limits of a politics of mourning and melancholia while engaging with the works of Gillian Rose and Judith Butler via the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. The aim of the article is to argue that the way to overcome the current impasse in a critical theory is by reinsisting on the importance of the psychoanalytic concepts of life and death against vitalist politics of affirmation. Critical theory cannot deny negative values by repositing them as ideals (noumenal power, grief and celebrations of death, expounding a ritual in the absence of myth). In a moment of collapse of the universal concepts of justice and freedom, critical theory cannot be limited to developing different mechanisms for the disavowal of universality, whether through nonviolent pacifism and self-fashioning, or a neo-Kantian neo-Idealist resort to a self-reflexive law