Encounters Possible and Impossible

Abstract

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, produces melancholic culture in which homosexuality is "unlivable passion and ungrievable loss."1 The impossible in this case is intertwined with prohibition and ungrievable losses. Consequently, Butler examines the circumstances in which psychic and social antagonisms render impossible the ethical injunction of impossible mourning. We could say that in contrast to Derrida's ethical affirmation of impossible mourning, Butler explores the impossibility of the impossible, or to put it in a different way, the disavowal of an ethical affirmation. The juxtaposition of Butler's and Derrida's work on mourning presents us, therefore, with two mutually exclusive injunctions, with the clash of the political and ethical modalities of the impossible. And this in turn provides a new insight into the relation between ethics and power: one effect of the political regulation and prohibition of mourning would be a resolution of the aporia of an impossible ethical task. As we shall see, such "resolution" can take different forms of violence, ranging from the repudiation of loss through the identification with the dead to the exclusion of ungrievable lives beyond the boundaries of the polis. Let us first focus on the affirmation of the ethical impossibility of mourning. As is well known, Derrida's deconstruction of the psychoanalytic distinction between mourning and melancholia4 is motivated by the ethical relation to the other, in particular, the ethical relation to a dead friend. Consequently, the ethical aporia of mourning echoes and restages Levinas's dilemma of how the absolutely other can be inscribed in consciousness without being assimilated or constituted by the subject. …