Loss: The Politics of Mourning

by David L. Eng (Editor), David Kazanjian (Editor), Judith Butler (Afterword)

Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss--of warfare, disease, and political strife--this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, and AIDS activists--expose the humane and productive possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy.

Among the sites of loss the authors revisit are slavery, apartheid, genocide, war, diaspora, migration, suicide, and disease. Their subjects range from the Irish Famine and the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians to the aftermath of the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, problems of partial immigration and assimilation, AIDS, and the re-envisioning of leftist movements. In particular, Loss reveals how melancholia can lend meaning and force to notions of activism, ethics, and identity.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Grief, Research, Academic, Queer

498 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

David L. Eng is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and also a member of the Asian American Studies Program.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whilst dense, and at times more than overwhelming, I cannot hold this against the book itself, nor its contributors. I can only hold it against myself, and my somewhat lacking capacity for scholarly writing of this sophistication.

However, this book was like the holy grail in my pursuit for a different way of thinking through linear notions of mourning and melancholia's supposed pathology. It further opened ideas surrounding the place of ill-feeling in a politics of affect, and the importance of looking at 'the domain of remains'. Finally, I found Judith Butlers 'afterword' one of the most interesting and beautiful summations of the affect of losing loss itself that I have read, and believe me, in my research I think that I have almost read them all! A wonderful book, serving an important function.

[Shane Ha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was assigned this collection of essays in college, didn't understand it then, but recognized that they were important so now so many years later tried again. While they were still high way high academic headie writing (alot of adding parenthesis words like (un)poststructural type thing) from what I was able to understand I found the ideas and ways of writing to have very interesting and important perspectives.
The essays takes major political times or moments of great loss (South Africa apartheid, Vietnam war, HIV/AIDS, Jim Crow South, the failure of Communism, and many others) and then uses the psychology, art therapy, and psychoanalytic ideas about grief and mourning to understand them
think about loss as constituting social, political, and aesthetic relations. The thereby overcame the conventional understanding that “loss” belongs to a purely psychological or psychoanalytic discourse.
Many of the essays I preferred tried find ways in which Loss can create new opportunities and modes of expression rather than remaining a source of unresolved melancholy. What emerges from the ashes and how it is different/marked by them. It is not always positive or what is expected but it becomes a condition, the writers show, through which life after catastrophic events are shaped by.
Some of the essays I particularly liked were:
-Black Mo'nin by Fred Moten
-Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Mark Sanders
- Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Villashini Coopan
-Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP’s Lesbians by Ann Cvetkovich
-Resisting Left Melancholia by Wendy Brown

[Aris Setyawan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Loss: The Politics of Mourning" is a profound multidisciplinary work that combines history, literature, art, and critical theory to understand twentieth-century loss. It rejects the notion of loss as a passive or pathological condition, but instead sees it as a productive force that shapes bodies, spaces, and ideals. By exploring “what remains,” the book analyzes the past and opens the way to thinking about a potentially militant and creative future. In this approach, loss becomes a starting point for an active and progressive politics of mourning, offering rich insights into how we might respond to tragedy in a broader social and political context.

To write the research plan for my thesis, I only focused on reading three works related to left melancholia. The first is “Left Melancholy” by Charity Scribner. The second is “Resisting Left Melancholia” by Wendy Brown. And the third is an afterword entitled “After Loss, What Then?” by renowned theorist Judith Butler.

In my research design, I chose left-melancholia as the theoretical basis. From this book, combined with Enzo Traverso's ideas in the book "Left-Wing Melancholy: Marx, History, and Memory" (2016), I can understand that the concept of left-melancholia can be a relevant theoretical concept to analyze my research subjects. Left-melancholia—which sees political defeat and historical trauma as productive resources for creating emancipatory imagination—can help understand how my research subjects process past trauma into a force for the struggle for truth and reconciliation.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wide ranging collection of essays on loss and mourning.

[aerialxav]

Intro

[LB Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads could really use a "re-reading"/revisiting category :)

I dusted this one off for one particular article by Fred Moten, "Black Mo'Nin'", in the service of a piece I'm writing. But I will also be revisiting the contributions by Wendy Brown ("Resisting Left Melancholia") and of course one of the book's anchor articles, Kazanjian/Nichanian's "Between Genocide and Catastrophe".

Good stuff, especially for those who understand their own grief experiences not as 5 simple, teleological stages, but an endless return to that uncreated playground of the never-born, trapped in the WTF of "how could s/he have left me like that", reminding us all the while of the inevitability of our own graves. If we must think of loss and mourning as "a process", it's quantum, not linear.

Mourning certain kinds of losses can be and all too often is viewed as an overtly political act, whether done in public, private, in defiance, via the arts, or through nonprofits, NGOs or state-acting channels staking claim on the mourner's collective vote. The essays in _Loss_ remind us of that very emotional fact.

[Zohra Star · Rating 5 out of 5]

He was on my committee when I took my exam. An incredible turn in Trauma theory from victim victim victim to using a moment of trauma to construct a new identity and a new community.

[Efaf Gh · Rating 3 out of 5]

just brilliant!