Essay on Different Modalities of Loss

Abstract

This article, starting with the experience of the other's death, thinks about the questions and problems revealed by different modalities of loss. Mourning and Melancholia, the text written by Freud during the First World War and the critical rereading of this text by Derrida and Butler constitute the main axis of this article. Initially, the Freudian definition of mourning and melancholy, their distinctive features, their points of convergence and divergence, the relationship between so-called normal mourning and so-called pathological melancholy will be presented to show the ambiguity of their limits and their opposition. Secondly, one of the distinctive features of Freudian melancholy that is the transformation of the loss of the other into the loss of the self will be taken up and problematized in dialogue with Butler to bring out the place of the other as well as of its loss in the constitution of the self. This discussion makes it possible to expose how the loss of the other, which moves us from the question of detachment to that of attachment, reveals the non-identity of the self, altered by the other. The third part of this article, problematizing the finality of mourning, which is the substitution of the other, focuses on Derrida's thought that renew the approach to mourning and melancholy by introducing the concepts of “introjection” and “incorporation”. Derrida's ethic of mourning, which aims to avoid the assimilation of the other to the same, is based on a double bind between the possibility and the impossibility of mourning. The article concludes with a brief review of the relationship between identity and alterity revealed by different modalities of loss to respond differently to the question: How to return to life after the experience of the other's death?