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Mourning, Melancholy, and the Politics of Class Transformation

2006; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08935690600578893

1475-8059

Ceren Özselçuk,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

Abstract In recent attempts to problematize the relation between radical social change and identity politics, social theorists have drawn attention to affective attachments to an injured identity that are said to foreclose political transformation. This essay, while taking these critiques of identity politics seriously, questions the political demand for a “death of identity” that is often implied by such critiques. Specifically, it raises the following issues for class-transformative politics as they apply to the contexts of economic dislocation and loss: given that there is no easy or ready-made way to move beyond an identity politics riveted to loss and injury, how can we rethink the relationship between identity politics and class transformation? What politically empowering modalities are capable of addressing loss, such that they assist rather than stunt classed resubjectivation? This essay mobilizes the concepts of melancholy and mourning from Freudian psychoanalysis in order to formulate a response to these questions. The objective is to expand upon current political strategies of transformation in order to move from capitalist exploitation toward communism while at the same time placing the issue of resubjectivation and the register of affects at the forefront of revolutionary politics. Keywords: MourningMelancholyPolitics of Class TransformationResubjectivation An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Marxism and the World Stage Conference, held 6–8 November 2003 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where it received valuable feedback from the discussant, George DeMartino; his perceptive comments made me rethink the distinction between melancholy and mourning. The ideas in this essay have been formulated and discussed in our seminar/research group, convened under the direction of Julie Graham and comprising Ken Byrne, Kenan Erçel, Julie Graham, Stephen Healy, Yahya M. Madra, Joseph Rebello, Maliha Safri, Chizu Sato, and Peter Tamas. I also thank Andrew Skomra for his intellectual camaraderie and Jack Amariglio for editing and commenting on this symposium and making it happen. Notes 1That the excluded remains in a “secret dependency” on the other (i.e., on the opposed symbolic system) in order to articulate its own identity is a problem also taken up by other critical theorists, such as Ernesto Laclau (Citation1996, 29–30). Nevertheless, Brown seems to shift the focus of the discussion to a contradiction that is not only historically specific, but also formatted in the register of desire and affects, and, therefore, that is of a different kind from an ontological paradox, which, according to Laclau, unavoidably conditions all politicized identity. 2It is “timeless” because, in its simultaneous and overdetermined recasting of the past, present, and future, “successful” mourning collapses the conventional notion of “linear time.” This traditional notion sees time as the progressive unfolding of discrete moments in which the past, conceived to be lived and fixed in its meaning for once and all, unidimensionally constrains the present and future. In contrast, the temporality of mourning explodes linear causality: mourning destructures historicized narratives into elements, which are then made available for a resignification in the “present.” Such a process has a reverberating effect on the new constructions of the past, present, and future. For two insightful interpretations of Freud's concept of “timelessness,” and the ternary structure of time implied in it, see Benjamin (Citation1992) and Laplanche (Citation1992). For a recent psychoanalytical treatment of the concepts of “timelessness” and the “infinite,” explored in the context of Nietzche's notion of the event and eternity, see Zupančič (Citation2003, especially 21–2). 3Given the constraints of space, it is impossible to do justice here to the complexities and variegated interpretations of the theory of the subject assumed by the psychoanalytically informed theories of mourning. Similarly, it is impossible to discuss satisfactorily the ways in which such a theory differs both from theories premised on the unified and centered subject of the conscious as well as from those of the decentered subject. For a beautiful exposition written from within Marxism that introduces the salient elements and theoretical significance of Freud's subject of the unconscious as well as of Lacan's reappraisal of it, see Althusser (Citation1996). 4For two other illuminating explorations of the functioning of melancholia within leftist and gender politics, see Brown (Citation1999) and Butler (Citation1997), respectively. 5For a nuanced and lucid article from a Lacanian perspective, on the theory of the subject that distinguishes the subject of desire from the subject of drive, see Dolar (Citation2001). 6For a recent article that proposes this strategy to the Left as a potent and radical Marxian political practice to unsettle the entrenched ideology of consumerism within the United States and, from there, to foment class transformation to communism, see Wolff (Citation2005, 233–4). 7For a more detailed discussion of how the concept of power was differentially and contradictorily deployed by the workers in ways that rendered them reluctant for self-governance, see Özselçuk (Citation2005). 8As part of his comments on this article, Jack Amariglio raised this possibility. 9For a Marxian conceptualization of a “destructured economy,” see Callari (Citation1988). For a more detailed discussion of the interdependent components of the public economy as acknowledged by the workers, see Özselçuk (Citation2005). 10The same process could also be perceived as the broadening and universalizing of “worker identity.” In fact, insofar as we agree on the poststructuralist premise that “all political identity is internally split, because no particularity could be constituted except by maintaining an internal reference to universality as that which is missing” (Laclau Citation1996, 31), can we ever speak of a strict notion of particularism and, for that matter, a pure notion of identity politics that is devoid of all universalizing aspirations? In this sense, a more appropriate way to approach the different forms of identity struggles could be in terms of understanding them as “competing universalities” (Butler Citation2000), each with different degrees and tendencies of particularization, rather than in terms of struggles among discrete and atomic particulars. 11I shall also add that the “expansive” effect of “wanting” that Brown talks about alludes not only to the transformation of a singular and particularized body. In deploying the language of “wanting” something—as opposed to “being” something—the identity literally extends to an object, proposes a project or an action to which other identities can also relate and attach or participate in. In other words, while “want” is without an object (in the sense of actually possessing it), it nonetheless always aims toward an object; in fact, “want” is this very aim. In contrast, does the language of “being” not conjure up an image of a static and self-contained body that claims objects as its own in order to set up its boundaries, to differentiate and close in on itself? 12I see the articles in this symposium by Yahya M. Madra (Citation2006) and Ken Byrne and Stephen Healy (Citation2006) as further attempts to connect the economic conception of communism with the political process of resubjectivation and to establish a new ethics of communism. Madra mobilizes the “axiom of communism,” or “the refusal of the exception,” to the appropriation of surplus as the “universal” moment of resubjectivation in each and every concrete situation. In his exposition, the question of ethics is integral to the very definition of communism. Byrne and Healy similarly raise the question of the enjoying subject of negativity and antagonism as a necessary precondition and entailment of communism. My discussion of mourning should be read alongside these articles, which try to open to debate the relationships between the subject, ethics, and communism.