IMPOSSIBLE EMOTIONS: THE ETHICS OF MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA

In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as an ongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us and continue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility and transformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus from psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok), gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2022

In this article, I present Jacques Derrida’s reflections on melancholy in the context of his thought of mourning and juxtapose them with ethical dilemmas regarding the image of the (dead) other by focusing on the mournsome character of photography. By adopting Derrida’s conclusion that the work of mourning cannot be successful and melancholy always marks both its teleological failure and structural impossibility, I demonstrate why melancholy as an abnormal yet necessary condition of egoic life should presuppose origi- nary non-presence of the (dead) other. Furthermore, I argue why melancholy, rather than being treated solely as a pathological condition, must be thought of in terms of survival, ethical revolt, and a militant challenge to memory.

Družboslovne razprave/, 2018

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of melancholy and its discourse through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and “violence of writing”. In part one of the article, the ambivalent and contradictory conceptions of melancholy in the West are outlined in order to show the working of the logic of difference that makes any unified and universal definition impossible. Sigmund Freud first introduced a universal theory of melancholy in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), while part two of the article analyses the inherent enigmas and contradictions in Freud’s psychoanalytical distinction between mourning and melancholy in the specific socio-historical context. The binary oppositions in support of Freud’s dichotomy are also exposed. In the conclusion, the author shows how Freud’s paradoxes are deconstructed in contemporary theories in the humanities and social sciences that address various social and political discourses. KEY WORDS: deconstruction, violence of writing, Mourning and Melancholia, loss, psychoanalysis

Mortality, 2001

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Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 2023

This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms.

2018

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of melancholy and its discourse through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and “violence of writing”. In part one of the article, the ambivalent and contradictory conceptions of melancholy in the West are outlined in order to show the working of the logic of Différance that makes any unified and universal definition impossible. Sigmund Freud first introduced a universal theory of melancholy in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), while part two of the article analyses the inherent enigmas and contradictions in Freud’s psychoanalytical distinction between mourning and melancholy in the specific socio-historical context. The binary oppositions in support of Freud’s dichotomy are also exposed. In the conclusion, the author shows how Freud’s paradoxes are deconstructed in contemporary theories in the humanities and social sciences that address various social and political discourses.

Masters of Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Studies, 2006