Abstract: This essay offers a lyrical meditation on death, memory, and historical trauma, weaving personal grief—especially the loss of her father—into the broader context of African diasporic experiences. Africa becomes a symbol of ongoing loss and spectral presence, where the dead live on through memory, language, and silence. Through philosophical inquiry, autobiographical fragments, and literary references, she explores the impossibility of fully articulating death, the emotional weight of mourning, and the power of writing as both a form of testimony and survival.

Abstract: This article points to the limits of a politics of mourning and melancholia while engaging with the works of Gillian Rose and Judith Butler via the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. The aim of the article is to argue that the way to overcome the current impasse in a critical theory is by reinsisting on the importance of the psychoanalytic concepts of life and death against vitalist politics of affirmation. Critical theory cannot deny negative values by repositing them as ideals (noumenal power, grief and celebrations of death, expounding a ritual in the absence of myth). In a moment of collapse of the universal concepts of justice and freedom, critical theory cannot be limited to developing different mechanisms for the disavowal of universality, whether through nonviolent pacifism and self-fashioning, or a neo-Kantian neo-Idealist resort to a self-reflexive law.

Abstract: Sawhney’s essay, “Broken Men: Reading Ambedkar with Freud,” pursues some unexpected resonances in the work of these two thinkers. Paying particular attention to the way both thinkers turn to ancient history in order to address the political concerns of the present, the essay notes a kind of repetitive impasse that appears in their writings. Sawhney suggests that the impasse signals, among other things, the impossibility of detaching oneself from the terrain of mourning, as well as of assuming an identity that would not be riven, “broken” or misplaced in some primordial sense.

Abstract: “Mourning Sickness” is a reverie on the work of mourning in the practice of editing an academic journal. Manifesting itself initially in the experiences of “ghosting” during the COVID pandemic, mourning, through its treatment by Jonathan Lear, unfolds here to pose the problem of the status of journaling within the precarious humanities—where will the traces of readers and writers survive?—and, through Theodor Adorno’s speculations on ghosts, mourning also becomes a provocation to “exaggerate” the role of psychoanalysis in the “self-analysis” of the humanities. Editing thus as a queasy gestation of what might be endlessly mourned.

Abstract: This article explores how poetry, an ancient technique of remembering the dead, may facilitate the work of mourning today. Focusing less on the elegiac mode than on a specific category of language use known in linguistics as “deixis,” Dean argues that deictic utterances, by virtue of their capacity to bring persons, times, and places closer to the speaker, can serve in poems as part of the labor-intensive process of mourning. Dean shows how the contemporary poet Danez Smith’s distinctive use of deixis helps to mourn a barely recognizable loss—that of seroconversion. Since Black gay men becoming HIV-positive is not generally viewed as a prime occasion for grief, Dean develops the notion of “disenfranchised grief” to convey the originality of Smith’s project.

Abstract: Starting from the COVID-19 pandemic—and engaging with works by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Douglas Crimp, Judith Butler, and others—this essay speculates on the psychic situation of having to work through loss in the absence of the loved one’s corpse. This article also puts forth a concept of “absolute ambivalence” understood as the beyond of the mourning-melancholia dialectic and ultimately relates this concept to the ties that bind the emergence and development of modernity to genocide.

Abstract: This essay argues that much of humanity is in a state of interminable mourning in relationship to the climate emergency. The endlessness of this mourning suggests that what we are experiencing is not merely mourning but its more troublesome sibling, melancholia. Freud theorizes melancholia as a form of interminable mourning that involves an unconscious, internalized lost love object or ideal. The melancholic incorporates this lost object into the psyche, where it simultaneously berates and remains attached to it. The melancholic object, in this case, is Enlightenment man, a gendered and Eurocentric fantasy figure whose time has passed, even as the legacy of the Enlightenment remains both crucial and ambiguous. Paired with this figure is another fantasy object: the earth itself imagined as a living world ecology. On a conscious level, the earth has been rendered dead, so much inert materiality that can be appropriated and exploited and that is thoroughly quantified by what Beverley Best theorizes as the automatic fetish of Marx’s law of value. This conscious apprehension of the earth as so much inert matter is subtended by what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok describe as encrypted (i.e., secret and buried) identification with the earth as a living system. The paper argues that those of us transfixed by melancholia and encryption must work through our relationship to both dynamics. Only by such a working through can we move past inaction and build a just and flourishing political economic and ecological response to the climate emergency.

Abstract: This essay on mourning without end discusses how the author’s entire immediate family died over a period of six years, making him the sole surviving family member. His sister died in 2018 at age forty-three from brain cancer, and both his parents died in 2022 at age seventy-six, about six months apart. How does a person articulate these experiences of grieving when language doesn’t seem to work? By looking at Judith Butler’s work on mourning, this essay examines the author’s personal experiences of death and grief alongside the concept of continuing bonds with each deceased family member.

Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between the crisis of politics (both institutional and insurgent) and the work of mourning in our time, in which pandemics and wars accumulate victims, but institutional politics seems only capable of saturating losses with violence—while politics from below struggles to transform mourning into consciousness and rebellion. In dialogue with Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, the author connects this contradiction to the spectral status of modern politics, the state’s practices of censorship and hierarchization of mourning, and the changes in the social ritualization of mourning that have been produced by the COVID pandemic. Finally, the author asks how the generative valence of loss can be relaunched against the neoliberal rationality, which is constitutively based on the repression of loss and on its substitution with the imperatives of production, consumerism, and enjoyment.