Encounters Possible and Impossible: Derrida and Butler On Mourning

Summary

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Evoking Walter Benjamin's recovery of allegorical fragments against romantic organicism, Derrida's discussion of allegory explicitly refers to Paul de Man's mobilization of allegorical disjunction against the closure and the synthesizing power of the Hegelian system.6' In Aesthetics, Hegel denigrates allegory as an inferior trope of disconnection between the particular and the universal, the inside and the outside, subject and the predicate-indeed as a "hollow," "cold," and "frosty" figure of vanished individuality, and thus particularly unsuitable for poetry.62 Not surprisingly, his main examples of allegory, such as the allegorical statues on memorials and sarcophagi, ultimately associate it with the mute places of the burial for dead.

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Encounters Possible and Impossible: Derrida and Butler On Mourning

In this essay I want to reflect on the issue of mourning and melancholia in Derrida's and Butler's work. I am interested in the question of mourning because it is one of those dense spots where an in-depth encounter between Derrida and feminist philosophers could have happened and yet did not occur. Why then should we revisit this missed encounter? I would like to do this for two reasons: First, not merely a common concern of feminism and deconstruction, mourning raises the very question of the encounter with the other, problematizes the ethics and the politics of such an encounter, and foregrounds its relation to language and thought. second, the juxtaposition of Butler's and Derrida's work will allow us to trace an intersection between the ethics, sexuality, and the politics of mourning. What is at stake in this intersection is the question of how gender politics renders an ethics of mourning impossible and what kind interventions are required to affirm the ethics of impossible mourning. Consequently, the encounter between Butler and Derrida shifts the refection on ethics and politics from the register of the possible to that of the "impossible."

Impossible: Ethical Injunctions and Psychic Disavowals of Mourning

Both Butler and Derrida foreground the impossibility of mourning but from two very different perspectives. Derrida affirms the impossibility of mourning as the aporia of the ethical injunction to preserve both the memory and the alterity of the dead friends. It is thus an ethical impossibility that opens the ethical relation to the other. As he puts it, "this singular... affirmation [of mourning] must affirm the impossible. ... The impossible here is the other."1 By contrast, Butler exposes a very different impossibility, which is intertwined with psychic and social operations of power in the spheres of sexuality, kinship, and subject formation. The impossibility of mourning in her texts is an effect of the disavowal of loss and the unconscious prohibition of grief. Hardly the affirmation of the other, the impossible manifests instead the force of psychic conflicts and prohibitions which "demand the loss of certain sexual attachments, and demand as well that those losses not be avowed, and not be grieved."2 Such disavowal of loss, according to Butler, produ...

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