Aberrations of Mourning: Writings on German Crypts

by Laurence A. Rickels

In Aberrations of Mourning, Laurence A. Rickels explores a phantasmic Geistesgeschichte not addressed within the traditional framework of theories and histories that tend to emphasize Oedipal structures. As such, this study involves a reconsideration of certain basic tenets which inform the reading of literature, philosophy, and, indeed, psychoanalysis itself. Its main focus, however, is to suggest an interpretation of both reading and writing that goes beyond notions of patricidal writing that have received so much currency in the past few years.

In nine chapters, Rickels investigates literary texts and their aesthetic and semiotic theories to determine the breakdown of mourning throughout each name-bearing corpus. Since psychoanalytic hermeneutics, which remains inseparable from Freud's works, is the only context available for consideration of the place of aberrant mourning in a corpus, Rickels invokes this critical perspective at crucial junctures in his study. He is thereby able to delineate the precise contours, implications, and exclusions that the concept of mourning seeks to attain in Freudian psychoanalysis and in more recent psychoanalytic theory.

The problem of aberrant mourning, which has only begun to assert itself, demands further explication and illustration, and it is to this end that Aberrations of Mourning is offered. The authors Rickels analyzes were either part of Nietzsche's own select reading list or were themselves readers and, in a sense, writers of "Nietzsche." Rickels thus recasts a particular tradition in German letters, and poses the problem of aberrant mourning as a Nietzschean challenge to and within the Freudian system.

409 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988