| Abstrakt: |
Against and beyond the atomistic and pathologizing representations of loss and modes of grieving which currently predominate in the United States, "What Could It Mean to Mourn? Notes on and towards a Radical Politics of Loss and Grieving" offers an understanding of loss as a polyvalent, eminently multiplicitous, prismatic refraction of a multitude of histories, both living and spectral. Drawing upon the work of "autobiographical" narrative, queer theory, critical race studies, and autonomist Marxism, among other theoretical traditions, I suggest that loss opens up the possibility of recognizing and embracing the inescapable entanglement of socio-ecological existence (the impetus and directive of radicality). Probing the vast (and vastly uneven) matrix of loss and dispossession which is constitutive of modernity, and bringing this haunted landscape into conversation with our present conjuncture of ecological catastrophe, temporal flattening, and the attenuation of radical imagination, I suggest that the appearance of generalizing melancholia must be understood in relation to the coming end of the world. Yet rather than treating melancholia and ontological implosion as cause for political despair, I suggest that a depathologized take on melancholia may point toward a radical politics of mourning, toward forms of survival which are always in excess of the dispossessions through which they are given, and which hold out the possibility of genuinely ethical and transformative coalition. I offer a vision or reading of survival in and through a generative dialectic of ritualistic and ruptural mourning, a radical politics of mourning which throws the multiplicitous violence of modernity into stark relief and which precipitates new forms of gathering in dispossession, fugitive socialities which prefigure and enact a world-in-becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
