Keywords

Freud’s concept of melancholia is formulated most fully in his essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” (1915, 1917). In that essay, and arguably in his writing more generally, it remains an unfinished concept in the sense that there are traits associated with it that are never fully developed by him that are nonetheless taken up by others. That essay, one of the metapsychological papers written in a time of war, has avenues that have been taken up more broadly in terms of loss caused by death, development as it happens in relation to something given up, and loss of ideals. While melancholia’s avatar today is understood generally as depression, the specific notions of loss and its corollaries of absence and presence are often neglected in that incarnation, as are social factors. But when Freud wrote “Mourning and Melancholia,” he was definitely considering social factors around loss and a response to loss, even when that loss entailed its apparent inverse – an insistent presence.

Death and Loss

Some of those ideas of loss were conceived in an essay by Freud that is an important precursor, one that illuminates its psychosocial dimension, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” from 1915, which includes two essays written months apart in the early stages of World War 1. Both unusual in their tone, scope, range, and direct communication, the first centers on political disappointment, disenchantment, or disillusionment in the face of violence enacted by the civilized nations of the world with the consequence of mass death – loss of life on a mass scale. The second maintains an interest in that language of the civilized to explore the different attitudes toward death among civilized and primitive peoples, and the changes in attitudes toward individual death brought about by the experience of mass death in conflict. These two essays published together constitute a model for understanding the relation between the individual and the social in psychoanalytic thought, and the care and anxiety involved in navigating the relationship between individual and group.

In addition to questions of scale (mass versus individual), there is a specific analysis of a sense of injustice articulated in terms of a loss of an ideal that he believes is shared by a collective. The use of the first-person plural in the first essay indeed marks an intersubjective collective disappointment, a loss that results in a depressed awareness and a political insight. Freud writes the essay to express his own disillusionment in a political system that had insisted that it was in place to protect its people, and that within the “civilized nations of the world,” the laws of peace would protect a collective – a civilized European “we” sometimes represented by the first-person plural, and at other times by the nontranslatable German pronoun Man rendered interchangeably as “we” or “one” in translation – against mass death (Freud, 1957). He writes that with the onset of war, with tens of thousands of citizens of civilized states dying each week, comes the realization that states did not want to bring their citizens from a state of nature to a state of culture as one might expect of the social contract, but rather wanted the monopoly on the bellicose state of nature that resides in everyone. They did not want simply to protect and did not have the means, even less the desire, to negotiate peace. And one of the ways in which this was made evident was through the criminalization of acts and practices at the individual level in order to claim those acts as the right of the state. This is evident, he suggests implicitly, in the state’s practices in the shift from trade to policies of mercantilism (and colonialism to imperialism), for example. Freud writes,

Peoples are more or less represented by the states which they form, and these states by the governments which rule them. The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time—that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy not only of the accepted ruses de guerre, but of deliberate lying and deception as well—and to a degree which seems to exceed the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens. (Freud, 1915, p. 279)

One might say that it is this privilege of the “occasional crossing of mind in peace-time” – upon the crudest realization of the state as an instrument of death in the time demarcated by war – that characterizes the difference between colonizer and colonized. The always already existence of a thwarted European ideal that was evident always to the colonized must give way to a different form of subjectivation for the European – a disappointment that is equally a form of impoverishment of ego and insight into the production of the ego and the ego-ideal of the leaders of the state.

“Thoughts for the Time on War and Death” therefore begs questions of “Mourning and Melancholia.” It highlights, of course, that idea of a loss of ideal announced in the title of the first essay – “Die Enttäuschung des Krieges” – the disappointment or disenchantment of wars – translated by Strachey as “The Disillusionment of the War.” In “Mourning and Melancholia,” the losses incurred that bring about both the “affect of grief” and its “outward manifestation,” as suggested by the term Trauer, are similarly presented as both the loss of a loved one or the loss of an abstraction – like the ideas of fatherland, liberty, or any ideal. It thus becomes clear, perhaps, why melancholia, which seems like such an individuated affect or condition, on the one hand, becomes, on the other, a useful tool in the analysis of the social.

While both melancholy and melancholia are old concepts, both their meaning and their prevalence have shifted dramatically over time as has been documented in various historical accounts addressing the history of emotions (Reddy, 2001; Lepenies, 1992; Pfau, 2005), as well as ones that more actively address psychoanalysis (Kristeva, 1989; Radden, 2009; Sanchez-Pardo, 2003). But it is the case that historically, whether understood as an emotion, an affect, or an affectation, melancholy and melancholia have not necessarily, before Freud, been associated with loss, but rather with an imbalance of bile or a sadness (often represented as vague and difficult to define) without cause, or homesickness and longing, which is suggestive of an absence or exile, but not specifically a loss of home. Mourning, on the other hand, is characterized by loss even as it manifests itself very differently across history and culture. With “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud, then, explores more fully a relationship he has mentioned in 1897 (in the context of the desire for parental death and the subsequent self-reproach when it occurs), considered more as early as 1910 (in the context of adolescent suicide and secondary schools), and had discussed with Karl Abraham, presenting a new association of the terms, and by doing so presenting a by now well-known argument – that mourning and melancholia are very similar in their early manifestations. However, whereas mourning entails a normal sadness associated with grief that allows a freedom to the ego after the work of mourning is completed, melancholia has a fluctuating definition even in “descriptive psychiatry” (Freud, 1915, 1917, p. 243) and seems to be characterized by an impoverishment of ego and a self-criticism or a self-hatred that makes the work of mourning impossible to end through a narcissistic reestablishment and sustaining of self. In melancholia, in addition, the lost object is unknown to the melancholic, and so the “similar internal work” cannot result in the freedom of the ego but rather manifests in the castigation of it. “The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego” (Freud, 1915, 1917, p. 247).

Diseased Critical Agency

As we have seen, one of the main distinctions between mourning and melancholia is that in melancholia the patient does not yet know what has been lost, and thus the work that is done in mourning in which the libidinal investment in the lost object might be transferred onto something else after time has passed has no such relief in the melancholic. Freud refers to the form of self-castigation as the manifestation of a “critical agency,” which he suggests might be called conscience. (He will later theorize this idea of critical agency and conscience as the superego, and the advent of the model of the self in terms of ego, id, and superego thus translates the weight of mourning and melancholia into a structural understanding of the role of absence in the constitution of the subject.) In the melancholic, this critical agency is diseased. “We see in him that one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object” (p. 247). The lost object, unbeknownst to the melancholic, becomes the source of this sometimes cruel self-beratement and an “impoverishment of ego.” On the one hand, says Freud, it seems as if the patient has never been more astute about their own failings. On the other hand, these failings may be the source of an insight into the unknown failings of an aspect of (or an affect in relation to) the ideal that is now lost, which is an encounter with a certain alterity. As an alterity, this unknown entity that is lost is inadequately assimilated into oneself and remains stuck in the throat, unable to be metabolized and therefore nourish the mourner.

Introjection and Incorporation

Introjection and incorporation are often described in the terms of orality that nourishment and metabolization suggest. Broadly, orality in psychoanalysis is understood as an early libidinal drive in which pleasure is experienced primarily in the mouth through sucking and the sensations of the lips and mouth that accompany it with and beyond the satisfaction of hunger through ingestion or introjection. This early satisfaction through the figure of the mother becomes the source of attachment to objects. Karl Abraham (1924/1953) will introduce the idea of ambivalence into this scene of oral satisfaction through the idea of the oral-sadistic stage at the point of teething, in which the potential destruction of the loved object (perhaps the biting of the nipple) comes into play. This sadism will be taken up by Melanie Klein later but without Karl Abraham’s stagism as she sees the ambivalence of the oral stage as always in existence.

I have dwelt on this stage of orality in order to extrapolate the importance of it to the concepts of introjection and incorporation – terms that shift meaning in the psychoanalytic corpus. In 1909, Sandor Ferenczi’s “Introjection and Transference” (Ferenczi, 1952) defined introjection (a taking within) in opposition to projection (an expulsion onto something exterior). Introjection was associated with neurotics, who absorb into themselves parts of the outside world such that it plays a part in fantasy life. He clarified the concept later in response to misinterpretation, in “On the Definition of Introjection” (1912) in which he describes taking a love object into the ego, “an extension to the external world of the original autoerotic interests, by including its objects in the ego” (Ferenczi, 1994, p. 316). Freud will recraft this idea in relation to the oral stage in terms of inside and outside. In “Negation,” he describes a process within which one makes the judgment to eat something and keep it within, or to spit it out or keep it out (Freud, 1925, p. 237). If this process of negation sounds like the anthropological notion of taboo, dirt, and the danger that is foreshadowed in the breaking of taboo, it will come as no surprise that this form of taking in of the other is powerfully rendered in Freud’s anthropological text, “Totem and Taboo,” in which he lays the groundwork for an understanding of the social. There, he describes the totemic feast in which “one day the brothers…came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde…. In the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength” (Freud, 1912–1913, pp. 141–142). In “Totem and Taboo,” Freud uses the term incorporation to describe this act of physical ingestion of the other that nourishes the body. At this time, then, incorporation seems to carry a bodily connotation, and introjection a psychological one. But there is already a slippage between the two noted on the physical ingestion resulting in an identification. The prestory of civilization is thus organized around the ritual celebration of the loss of the father that creates (at this stage in Freud’s thinking) the psychosocial bond and the law.

The prehistory of mourning and melancholia turns on the concept of introjection, and that in turn to whether introjection is a structural loss that is a part of development or another kind of loss that is individuated and inassimilable into any structural notion of a lacking subject. Melanie Klein’s use of the Ferenczian term of introjection to describe the normal maturation process, which includes giving up and redirecting certain drives, can certainly be understood as a development of Ferenczi’s introjection. For Klein (1975), objects are brought into the self, such that a response to them begins to constitute the ego. This process is linked to the “depressive position” in Klein’s theory, in which those objects taken in are both hated and loved. As Sanchez-Pardo clarifies, Klein uses the terms incorporation and introjection interchangeably, and it is the failure of introjection that results in melancholia. This failure, she claims, is due to the excess of the oral cannibalistic instinct, and an identification with the introjected dead objects and simultaneously a dread of harboring them.

That Kleinian model of loss, which is endemic to melancholia and introjection, comes to shape the Lacanian notion of introjection but with a significant difference. Klein’s emphasis on objects is displaced by Lacan in favor of the introjection of signifiers: “introjection is always the introjection of the speech of the other” (Lacan, 1953–4/1988, p. 83). Introjection thus belongs to a different register from the imaginary process of projection. Slavoj Žižek (2000) will remind us of an important distinction between lack and loss in Lacan’s writing, not with reference to introjection specifically, but certainly implicitly with an understanding of the implications of the shift from object to signifier. Loss is not lack because the concept of lack rests on the idea that the problem often resides in the confusion, and indeed delusion around the idea that one might have owned the lost object in the first place. Such ownership is not possible, and the illusion of that object once owned and now lost feeds the idea of melancholia which is itself carrying the delusion of the ability to mourn.

Perhaps the most significant intervention on the topic of introjection and incorporation is in the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (Abraham et al. 1984; Abraham & Torok, 2005), in which broadly the terms map onto the Freudian terminology of mourning and melancholia, respectively, with some sense of incorporation and melancholia being unsuccessful, thus following the logic of the “diseased,” the “excessive cannibalism,” and an illness. The illness is turned inward with a self-beratement. And yet one might say that, as with the Freudian psychosocial problem articulated in “Thoughts for the Times,” the problem resides in the ideal itself that is lost, resulting in a profound sense of disappointment. That disappointment raises the question of whether the fault lies with the disappointed or with the ideal, and whether it is debilitating or revolutionary. The inside and the outside, which from Ferenczi on has defined a distinction between the neurotic and the manic, on the one hand, and the paranoic who expels onto the outside world, on the other, are perhaps more bound together than one might imagine in the moment in which one considers the psychosocial dimension of the theory. To be sure, the clinic must always demand the question of where the “I” is in the theory, which, by definition, generalizes even as it finds each case to question its own exemplarity, but what constitutes that subject is a matter also of identifications that put pressure on the distinction between the inside and the outside. Introjection, because it pulls in objects or signifiers, is thus well distinguished from projection, but it is also a distinction that questions the very border it defines.

Abraham and Torok’s theory of introjection and incorporation, then, return us to mourning and melancholia but with a slight twist. It takes it away from the maturation process and identification (or the process within which the subject is transformed through the assimilation of aspects of another) that characterized the trajectory mapped by Klein within which an anxiety concerning the loss of the mother results in introjection of partial objects. Even as mourning and melancholia may ultimately come to form a personality, the structural consequences of loss, which is then most clearly articulated in the Lacanian concept of lack, becomes less important than losses that result from death or the loss of an ideal. It returns us, then, to the question of death and loss through mourning. While Abraham and Torok criticize Klein and others for a misinterpretation of the distinction between incorporation and introjection, it is perhaps more the case that they redefine them, through an oral metaphorics in keeping with the cannibalistic form of Karl Abraham’s analysis. Incorporation involves a failure to metabolize the other, and thus the melancholia characterized by the other being stuck in the throat, shaping speech and creating a crypt within which the secret repressed material is buried and may pass through generations. Interestingly, on the level of signification, this repressed material may emerge in demetaphorization, or the taking literally of something that makes sense only figuratively, an idea encapsulated, in fact, in the idea of the choking block in the throat, a swallowing whole of the lost other, that shapes anything that emerges from the larynx. Introjection, on the other hand, like successful mourning, involves a full chewing up, and thus a nourishment by the absorption of the lost other into the self. There is no shroud or sarcophagus built around the other, no displacement of repressed material within this idea of introjection.

While Abraham and Torok write of many instances of such crypt making (from an analysis of Freud’s case study “The Wolfman” to the writing of a sixth act of Hamlet to resolve that protagonist’s pathological mourning), they extend their compatriot Sandor Ferenczi’s readings also to understand the traumas that get passed through generations, that thus, in effect, shape family and the social through their own fictitious structures. The lost “object” comes to be swallowed whole, and it is that object’s loss of their being, a false identification, that comes to characterize an ego. The “imaginary and covert identification” with the lost object, “the ‘mourning’ that this ‘object’ allegedly carries out as a result of losing the subject; the subject, consequently, now appears to be painfully missed by the ‘object’” (Abraham et al. 1984, p. 5). With no ability to acknowledge the full loss, a fiction is built around the wound and there is an illusion of no distance between oneself and the lost other because the elaborate crypt resides within one. A metalepsis of sorts thus occurs, whereby the subject who has lost is effectively mourned – the lost object becomes me, and there is no subject that remains. One might consider this in the context of the loss of an ideal in which the lost object is incorporated, and in the false identification, it is I who becomes lost, I who becomes inadequate to the ideal, and I who therefore is wrapped in the ideal even as it is inadequate and undeserving of that idyllic status. And it becomes unable to be analogized or have a metaphorical existence because its absorption, which makes sense only figuratively, is being lived literally. The actually formerly existing lost object, through a fiction created around the wound of loss, effectively becomes the wounded mourner whereby, for example, the ideal of the civilized nations’ desire for peace might result in self-beratement and a sense of failure concerning the citizen’s ability to create and sustain it rather than as a problem of the “civilized” states themselves in really carrying the ideal of world peace rather than monopoly capitalism and monopoly over the citizen’s capacity for violence.

Inability to Mourn

In addition to the foundational works mentioned above, the work of Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich (1975), which belonged to a body of Germans though shaped by Erich Fromm and Horkheimer, considered the inability to mourn of those who had lost the fascist father figure of Hitler during World War 2. In a departure from their earlier work, which, like Marcuse’s, focused on fatherless societies as producing mass societies shaped by siblings for whom the paternal function was absent, The Inability to Mourn centered on the cumulative losses characterized by the loss of a once-loved leader, Hitler, and then followed by an inability to mourn those that he and indeed they were responsible for killing. Reconciling the losses also involves understanding the reason for the overidentification with Hitler, and that, according to Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, is about the prior breakdown of the paternalistic society in which current autonomy also leaves citizens unable to mourn the figure of the dominant father.

Paul Gilroy (2005), in his work Postcolonial Melancholia, refers back to Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich in order to explain the Blair government’s sense of indignation at the Parekh report’s suggestion that there is institutional racism that has and continues to shape British consciousness. This is typical of a larger trend of understanding Britain in terms of an ethnic absolutism and cultural nationalism that are fully in stride simultaneously without any acknowledgment of the tensions within their nations. This is an example, Gilroy suggests, of a particular kind of melancholia that has overtaken Britain since the end of World War 2, with the victory against Hitler being greeted with the arms of a defeat, which was effectively the loss of the empire. Quite different from the sadness of the nineteenth century (that was in many ways characterized by the “poor widdy” of the figure of Queen Victoria), the postwar period gave rise to something quite different in Gilroy’s analysis. Against that “dignified sadness” of the earlier period lay a “guilt-ridden loathing and depression” that characterize the xenophobia against postcolonials today. The profound ignorance concerning empire and the deliberate erasure of the realities of empire, beyond nostalgia and civilizing ideology, result in an inability to mourn. Explaining how the Mitscherlichs provide a way of understanding how “melancholic reactions are prompted by ‘the loss of the fantasy of omnipotence’ and suggest that the racial and national fantasies that imperial and colonial power required were, like those of the Aryan master race, predominantly narcissistic” (Gilroy, 2005, p. 152). Gilroy calls for a new form of conviviality that can be achieved only through understanding the intertwined colonial history of Britain and her colonies, and thus of the makeup of Britain and what it means to be British today. In this interpretation, there is nothing useful to be gained by melancholia, only delusions concerning the past with dire consequences for the present.

Clearly such psychosocial accounts as the Mitscherlichs’, which are roughly working in the era of others by such figures as Marcuse and Erikson, on the one hand, beg the question of how a psychoanalytic theory can explain sociological, historical, or even biographical occurrences. On the other hand, they raise the question too of the implication of historical material for psychoanalysis. In addition, if, as Slavoj Žižek (2000) contends, we must be wary of confusing lack with loss, we must also consider whether the melancholic, and by implication the theorist of melancholia, is always misapprehending the lost object (known or unknown) as something that actually existed, rather than the product of an anamorphosis. While this problem is articulated explicitly in Lacanian terms by Žižek and as a resistance to those invested in the devotion to a certain idea of alterity implied within the idea of the nonassimilability of the lost other, it is actually the case in most valuations of melancholia (even in those described above) that the projection implied in the notion of the other is already understood as at least potentially a misidentification, or at least a loss of something understood from a certain perspective.

Zizek gestures toward an intellectual trend that opposes Freud and romanticizes the lost other in melancholia. He interprets this prostration toward the other, which exists in the name of ethics, as flawed, and sees it as a “story (that) can be given a multitude of twists, from the queer one which holds that homosexuals are those who retain fidelity to the lost repressed identification with the same-sex libidinal object, to the post-colonial/ethnic one, which holds that when ethnic groups enter capitalist processes of modernization and are under the threat that their specific legacy will be swallowed up by the new global culture, they should not renounce their tradition through mourning, but retain the melancholic attachment to their lost roots” (Zizek, 2000, p. 658). Zizek’s attack on this ethical turn is clarifying but is invested in banalizing much of the work on melancholia that tries to grapple with gender and coloniality. In fact, he sketches out a logic that would render that work nativist that most postcolonialists (though not decolonialists) would understand as the flawed second stage of decolonization identified by Fanon. Like Zizek, Chow makes a similar claim concerning the melancholic turn, claiming that Cheng, Eng, and Khanna attempt to hold onto an idea of an original lost object that is lost and cannot be retrieved (Cheng, Chow, 2008, p. 572).

While it is unclear who exactly Zizek has in mind when he refers to gender and postcolonial analysis (because there is no direct engagement with the work, neither are references footnoted in order to provide examples of the type of work he criticizes), Zizek’s criticism implicates those who fall into the category of the ethical turn in deconstruction, by which Zizek means those shaped by Derrida’s writing – especially Specters of Marx (1994). Zizek chooses to read this work, alongside others on mourning and on the writings of Levinas on alterity, without considering Derrida’s foundational text on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” from 1967, the logic of which renders any sense of nativism, authenticity, or a knowable other that resides behind the surface of the face questionable.

Midmourning

Derrida developed the idea of midmourning in his work from the late 1970s when he was reading the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and in the context of his readings of Freud in The Postcard (Derrida & Bass, 1987, p. 335). Alan Bass’ ingenious translation of demi-deuil as midmourning (sometimes translated as half-mourning) provides for a way to understand how, for Derrida, mourning could never be complete, and that there would always be an unknown alterity in what is lost. Midmourning, formulated in his work on Abraham and Torok in “Fors,” highlights the space in between introjection and incorporation, in fact in the shuttling back and forth between the two in the constitution of the self that is understood in the repetitive gestures of the death drive formulated by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Derrida, 1995; Derrida & Johnson, 1977). Derrida’s reading of Freud’s legacy underscores also the male line and all the fantasies of masculinity that go along with that, and an idea that is built on the foreclosure of any real question of sexual difference that may be associated with the fantasy around the loss of the mother’s body, but also around the yet to be imagined of sexual difference. His seminars on Life/Death similarly think through the implications of loss for an understanding of alterity – and specifically of incomplete mourning and the particulars of melancholia as underscoring that which is unknown in loss and, after Abraham and Torok, may manifest in slips, false translations, and associations in language – in other words, in the language built around an absence that is necessary for the production of language. This logic of the supplement implies a haunting alterity that makes a demand on the present but is in itself, unknown, irreducible to culture, context, politics, or genealogy. We may come to understand much of that remainder, but it can only be through a reading of its language or its demand, in the way Derrida analyzes the demand made by the ghost of King Hamlet on his son in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International.

As the title implies, the work of mourning is engaged with by Derrida as a way of understanding Marx today, his metaphorics of haunting drawn from both The German Ideology and the famous beginning of The Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism” (Marx, Engels & 1977 [1848], p. 34) and of the demand made by that language on an idea of contemporary internationalism. What do the traces of the past, sometimes foreclosed by the legacy of Marx, leave us as demands on the future? What does the unknown future demand of us? How might we conceive of a future international that is devoid of the problems associated with former internationals when it comes to the world outside of Europe? What absences and losses (in the shape of supplements and remainders) are the foreclosures based upon which we may discern through a close analysis of the language? The spectral demand of that language is what characterizes the ethical turn – an ability to respond to an alterity that manifests itself in the shape of an absence.

Dis/Identification

In terms of gender, one might surmise that Žižek’s criticism of such an ethical turn is referring to the work of Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble (1990) usefully brings together much of the work on melancholia in psychoanalysis to suggest the melancholic structure of gendering, and through that, of sexuality. Whereas the Kleinian understanding of developmental sexual formation may lead us to think that pleasures of polymorphous perversity or bisexuality are given up and these are lost in the trajectory toward normative heterosexuality, Butler emphasizes something different. For her, gendering itself is in effect a function of a demetaphorization, and one that is realized in the performance of heterosexuality as it is founded on a loss that is sustained in a crypt. Butler notes Irigaray’s questioning of the developmental form of sexual difference in Freud, emphasizing how this encrypted loss is affirmed through speech and ultimately through performance, such that it is not a loss that is introjected, but incorporated and thus manifested and repeated in every moment of the assertion of gender and sexuality. The incorporated loss of the mother’s body, which in effect structures an idea of lack in Lacan, is here then foundational in the subject. Lack is not an ungendered realization of the insufficiency and non-self-sameness of the subject. By reinserting a Kleinian reading into the Lacanian structure, as well as by stressing the manner in which the Freudian “diseased critical agency” of melancholia has its normative afterlife in the superego as that which permits and simultaneously restricts (Butler, 1990, pp. 57–72), gender and sexuality are seen as less about identification than they are about performativity. And in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), they are more specifically shaped through an idea of disidentification.

Butler achieves this idea of iterative performance (from Abraham and Torok and through Derrida) alongside the apparently developmental form of Kleinian introjection that informs Butler’s understanding of Freud’s superego through a Foucauldian notion of power. For Butler, Foucault provides a different account from either Freud or Marcuse concerning sublimation, or the redirection of prohibited libidinal energies into something else more acceptable and nonsexual. According to Butler, while for Freud sublimation is the basis of an unhappiness in civilization, and for Marcuse it is the greatest realization of human capacity, Foucault provides an understanding of how prohibitive law, far from restricting an original desire, operates and is justified by creating such a narrative concerning its origin. Thus, it can mask its own role in creating and sustaining power relations.

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler puts less emphasis on the Abraham and Torokian idea of the fantasy built up around melancholy and more on an idea of melancholic “refused identification,” pivoted through Melanie Klein. It is perhaps this turn to Klein, which in many ways alerts us to the foundational question of sexual difference in the Lacanian notion of lack, that causes critics like Zizek and Chow to suggest that there is a romanticization of a lost past in scholarship on melancholia, rather than an understanding that the lost past in that work is a product of melancholia rather than its inverse (whether argued through Foucault as in Butler, Mitscherlich in Gilroy, or the late Freud or Lacan, there seems to be shared sense that the law is less a product of the slaying of the father described in Totem and Taboo as an initiation into the world of the social, and more the inverse of that, as suggested in Moses and Monotheism).

In the work of José Muñoz (1999) in his book Disidentifications, we see an idea of melancholia that is psychoanalytic but is also generalized within a social sphere through a reading of the arts informed by Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling,” or “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships.” (Williams, 1977, p. 132). In his analysis of twentieth-century queer art, he suggests, “The works of mourning that I am discussing offer no … escape from the lost object. Rather, the lost object returns with a vengeance. It is floated as an ideal, a call to collectivize, an identity-affirming example” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 52). While refused identification is in many ways a form of melancholia for Butler, disidentification in Muñoz’s work is an adjacent affect – “Like melancholia,” he writes, “disidentification is an ambivalent structure of feeling that works to retain the problematic object and tap into the energies that are produced by contradictions and ambivalences” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 71). Through the arts, he finds a depathologized melancholia that performs a certain failure of identification and is thus a galvanizing force in the creation of a new collective. That melancholic failure of identification is the lived experience of the everyday for queers of color and other “communities in crisis,” he suggests. There is, in this performance, a way of addressing the fundamental ambivalence of identification as a psychosocial practice (Muñoz, 1999, p. 71). Other queer theorists like Douglas Crimp, also working in the arts and in AIDS activism, would consider the problem of the two sides of melancholy impacting those who were most affected by the moralism around AIDS that was devastating particularly to gay men. Between devastation and debasement, he suggested, emerged melancholia and moralism on the part of the gay community (Crimp, 2004, p. 8). If the world wars each produced major theorizations of loss, mourning, and melancholia, the impact of the profound losses wrought by the AIDS pandemic that were, in Crimp and Muñoz’s work, made explicit certainly shaped an understanding of loss more generally from the 1980s on. This is in evidence in much of the work included in the volume by David Eng and David Kazanjian (2003) on loss from many angles, from the left melancholy discussed by Wendy Brown (1999) in relation to Walter Benjamin’s essay of that name, to loss of home, and of the manner in which identification always carries with it the logic of melancholia.

Melancholy Race and Coloniality

The early 2000s saw a continuation of series of studies that brought together questions around race and melancholy. Anne Cheng’s (2001) The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief begins by asserting that melancholia, far from a category of identity, looks at the conditions in the USA in which “racial grief” turns to “racial grievance.” In distinction to Muñoz, “racial melancholia serves not as a description of the feeling of a group of people but as a theoretical model of identity that provides a critical framework for analyzing the constitutive role that grief plays in racial/ethnic subject-formation” (Cheng, 2001, p. xi). Melancholia, she suggests, impacts both those who discriminate against racial groups and those who endure such discrimination. The unassimilated racial other is rendered as the foreign within, for her, in a double bind between incorporation and rejection. Melancholia accounts for both aggression and woundedness. While the USA is actually built on assimilability of others, racial melancholia, the simultaneous exclusion and retention of racialized others, begins to gain legal backing. Drawing on Abraham and Torok, she writes of the work that has to be done in order to maintain these sets of distinctions of race, when actually the simplicity of inclusion is consistently disavowed. Racial melancholia thus becomes the condition within which one perceives both “confirmation as well as crisis, knowledge as well as aporia” (Cheng, 2001, p. 14). Readings of literary texts as well as legal transcripts allow less for an image of the lamenting or pathological racial other as victim, and more for a ghostly presence that provides insight into the workings of racialization in the USA – what can be excluded but not forgotten.

Whereas Anne Cheng’s work focused on the massive amount of work performed by a population in order to maintain this double bind of racial melancholia, David Eng’s work on mourning and melancholia was first touched upon in Racial castration: Managing masculinity in Asian America (2001) in which he explores how the foundational loss of the mother cannot be understood in terms only of the loss that comes with heterosexual identification and thus the constitution of the binary of masculine and feminine genders. This is further explored in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003) and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Eng & Han, 2019).

Like Eng and Cheng, Khanna develops a theory of colonial melancholy in psychoanalysis and simultaneously takes psychoanalysis to task for its blind spots and its inability to understand the subject it describes as a creation of psychoanalysis as a colonial discipline (Khanna, 2003). The ontology posited through both the archaeological frame for the self and the one that sees the self through the “Ego and the Id” (and thus through melancholia) must be understood as something that comes into being with the colonial enterprise, she suggests. If Paul Gilroy would show us that Britain’s postcolonial melancholia comes to constitute an idea of racial purity, Khanna (through Freud, Abraham, and Torok, and also through Derrida) contends that there might be something that becomes partially legible as a demand about the repressed understanding of coloniality in the melancholia of inhabitants of postcolonial nations. The ideal of the independent state as one that ensures the well-being of its people is a delusion imagined to be possible in the reflection of the ideal form, which does not exist. Psychoanalysis, reconfigured through its location as a colonial discipline, becomes for Khanna the means through which contingent postcolonial futures can be imagined ethically. Freud’s concept of melancholic “critical agency” alongside the notion of “pseudo-melancholy” developed by Antoine Porot during his time as the psychiatrist for the French administration in Algeria, as well as Fanon’s resistance to that idea, allows colonial melancholy, in her interpretation, to become the means and symptom through which a critical attitude toward colonialism and its aftermath can be perceived. If the legacy of psychoanalysis as a body of thought about individuals can be seen to tell us about the social, it is through the constrained signifiers and speech that are analyzed for their foreclosures. The incorporation of a lost ideal one never had, she suggests, manifests in the work of reifying that ideal. But the dissolution of the subject or the impoverishment of ego that manifests itself in melancholia provides the occasion for insight into the formation of the nation-state and perhaps alternative internationalist futures. These might be imagined as a counter to this imprecise loss that is less an event than a historical period.

In the context of Afro-pessimist work, like that of Frank Wilderson III’s, the explicit refusal of analogical thinking is explained in terms of the nonhuman status of the black in the context of a notion of humanity that is antiblack. While not explicitly about mourning or melancholia, it is about death and an excess of death. Like Freud witnessing World War I, Wilderson III sees an excess of death. If Freud can no longer believe that the civilized countries want peace, Wilderson III cannot believe in any status of the black because status itself depends on the idea of presence. The specter of racial justice may haunt his project, but it is not through loss or suffering, melancholic remainders, or dissolution of the colonial subject, but through death itself as the condition of nonbeing of the black. He writes, “Human Life is dependent on Black death for its conceptual coherence. There is no world without Blacks, yet there are no Blacks in the world” (Wilderson III, 2020, p. 229). “The Human who made this world and continues to make it, made it with Blackness as nothingness--not as subordinate human but as non-human. If there is one word that is provided as content for this nothingness, it is slaveness” (Wilderson III, 2020, p. 229). “The Black is not a sentient being whose narrative progression has been circumscribed by racism, colonialism, or even slavery, for that matter. Blackness and Slaveness are inextricably bound in such a way that whereas Slaveness can be disimbricated from Blackness, Blackness cannot exist as other than Slaveness” (Wilderson III, 2020, p. 229). Following Saidiya Hartman (2008), he engages with the paradox of this nothingness for the issue of rape. The black slave woman (the means of the reproduction of the labor force) cannot be raped because as property, she has no possibility to consent or not consent. This slaveness, like the description of slave as plough (as technology that enframes the matter of slave as ground as worldless), has no gender for Wilderson – because the world in which the human exists constitutes the black as “of a different species” (p. 198). And abolition reveals the same logic – that the human world has overtly created an idea of black advancement while simultaneously enjoying the consistent violation of black flesh.

Wilderson’s refusals – of analogy, of historical shift, and of the idea that law or rights might serve one – bring to mind Antigone’s refusals and Lacan’s analysis of them. What Lacan describes as Antigone’s splendor and terrifying beauty is her refusal of the law of Creon in the name of a higher law – a law beyond the law, presented as a natural or family law, and yet uncodified and inevitably driven toward death. In the name of the gods, she refuses the legitimacy of a human law in the name of another law. Whereas one might say that Antigone is cursed to be death driven in her insistence, she also refuses to take the decision for life recognizing that she is already in the zone of death. Her understanding of the enjoyment of the enforcers of the law – the defilement of the dead body of her brother in the name of justice – can be countered only with the decision to realize one’s nothingness – to make a decision to die, be buried alive, and become worldless in the earth as stone, rather than to concede to a living death in which only Creon will be comforted by having her assume the role of the almost human. The pleasure of Creon’s enforcement of the law is somewhat akin to Wilderson’s description of the enjoyment of excessive violence against black death and indeed the spectacle of black suffering.

The refusal of analogy is rhetorically significant given what we have understood about demetaphorization. Yet Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake announces its mourning work, wake work, or woke work, in the title itself. The specter of the hold hangs over the various meanings of wake – the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, and coming to consciousness, or awakening. She distinguishes wake work from its close associate – the work of mourning – which happens on the level of actuality. But, she asks, how does one mourn the interminable event of loss? This, she suggests, is quite different from acknowledgment of melancholia, because that would imply only that mourning itself is interminable. Wake-work functions on multiple registers, she writes: “containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 21). The coinage of wake work begs the question – is mourning and melancholia theory insufficient to understand the profound losses of some psychosocial forms?