Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

Tirna Chatterjee

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

Publication date: 15.10.2021

Zoon Politikon, 2021, 12/2021, pp. 74 - 93

https://doi.org/10.4467/2543408XZOP.21.004.14427

Authors

Pobierz pełny tekst

PDF

Titles

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

Abstract

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

Keywords

mourning, melancholia, death, loss, ethic

References

Download references

Bennington, G. (2010). Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: Free Association Books.

Brault, P.A., & Naas, M. (2001). Editors Introduction – To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida‟s Politics of Mourning. [In:] Derrida, J. The Work of Mourning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Davis, C. (2007). Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Derrida, J. (1989). Memoires for Paul de Man (Translated by Cecile Lindsay et al). New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, J. (1994). Spectres of Marx. (Translated by Peggy Kamuf). New York and London: Routledge.

Derrida, J. (1995). Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. (Translated by Peggy Kamuf et al). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, J. (2001). The Work of Mourning (Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (2001a). I Have a Taste for the Secret (Translated by Giacomo Donis). [In:] A Taste for the Secret. (Eds.) Donis, G. & Webb, D. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Derrida, J. (2003). Following Theory: Jacques Derrida. [In:] Life. After. Theory. (Eds.) Payne, M. & Schad, J. London and New York: Continuum.

Derrida, J., & Roudinesco, E. (2004). For What Tomorrow... A Dialogue. (Translated by Jeff Fort). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, J. (2005). Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, The Poem (Translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski). [In:] Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. (Eds.) Dutoit, T. & Pasanen, O. New York: Fordham University Press.

Freud, S. ([1917] 2006). Mourning and Melancholia (Translated by Shaun Whiteside). [In:] The Penguin Freud Reader. (Ed.) Phillips A. London: Penguin.

Gaston, S. (2006). The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida. London and New York: Continuum.

Krell. D.F. (2000). The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. (translated anew by Donald A. Landes) London & New York: Routledge.

Miller, J.H. (2009). For Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press.

Ricciardi, A. (2003). The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Royle, N. (2009). In Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Information

Information: Zoon Politikon, 2021, 12/2021, pp. 74 - 93

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/2543408XZOP.21.004.14427

Article type: Original article

Titles:

Polish:

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

English:

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

Authors

Tirna Chatterjee

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0285-0100

School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Published at: 15.10.2021

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY-SA

Percentage share of authors:

Tirna Chatterjee (Author) - 100%

Article corrections:

Publication languages:

English

View count: 1048

Number of downloads: 1236

<p> Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia</p>

Download xml