(Many thanks to Jeremy at Danwei and Matt at Pas au-delà for the cites on my preceding "AIDS in China" post, as well as to Angela at Archive: sOmetim3s for the cite on the "Schmitt and Mao" piece which helped to put in motion the discussion of which both the "AIDS" post and this one are part. This post began as a response to a very helpful comment by Matt to the "Schmitt and Mao" piece on LS, but by the time it had concluded it had grown considerably, so I decided to cross-post it here as well).
"I mourn, therefore I am."
Gillian Rose cites Derrida’s (anti-)Cartesian aphorism in her introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law, and suggests that it emblematizes her contention that what Derrida (and “post-modernists” in general) mistakes for mourning actually “cannot work; it remains melancholia; it remains aberrated not inaugurated ” (64). To illustrate her contention, Rose then develops an extended discussion of Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” suggesting that Derrida argues that
the ghost of Communism will finally be laid to rest if this spirit—dare one say this essence?—of Marxism is retrieved from the rubble of old Europe, before the fresh rubble, accruing daily in a new Europe that is dying not to be born, submerges us all (65).
It appears to me that Rose’s insinuation here represents a significant misreading of Derrida’s argument (Rose was relying only on Derrida’s original 1993 lecture and not the final version published as Specters of Marx, and consequently includes no direct quotes from this text to substantiate her claims). In fact, Derrida’s entire argument is explicitly premised on using this concept of spirit as a way of avoiding the need to attribute any concrete and unitary “essence” to Marxism (and, if anything, it is Rose herself who implies that Marxism should remain inextricably linked to such essential components as “[c]lass structure, class consciousness and class struggle, the party, the laws of capitalist accumulation, the theory of value, human practical activity”). In the passage cited by Matt, furthermore, Rose criticizes “post-modernists” for failing to recognize that
the other is never simply other, but an implicated self-relation. This applies to oneself as other and, equally, to any opposing self-consciousness: my relation to myself is mediated by what I recognize or refuse to recognize in your relation to yourself; while your self-relation depends on what you recognize of my relation to myself (74; emphases added).
What Rose is arguing for here is actually quite similar to the point which Derrida makes in the second part of the very same passage on mourning which Rose emblematically quotes in the introduction:
I mourn, therefore I am, I am—dead with the death of the other, my relation to myself is first of all plunged into mourning, a mourning that is moreover impossible (Points 321; emphases added).
Like Rose, Derrida explicitly states here that the constitution of “my relationship to myself….” is predicated on a necessary engagement with alterity and absence. What I find more interesting than Rose’s critique of Derrida’s failure to mourn, however, is the suggestion which immediately follows her citation with which we began:
“I mourn, therefore I am.” By contrast Mourning Becomes the Law affirms that the reassessment of reason, gradually rediscovering its own moveable boundaries as it explores the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred, can complete its mourning (11-12).
The syntax here is rather convoluted, but basically Rose is suggesting that "reason" (or the “reassessment of reason”?) can “complete its mourning” by “explor[ing] the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred.” What does it mean, however, to “explore the boundaries…of the city”?
Rose develops this connection between mourning and (city) boundaries most evocatively in the chapter entitled, “Potter’s Field: death worked and unworked.” She opens this essay by directing our attention to “Potter’s Field” on Hart Island, off the coast of New York, which she notes has long been a burial site for “unidentified murder bodies, for paupers, and now, for the new category of destitution: those who die of AIDS in the triage wards of the city hospitals.” Rose argues that this act of extra-mural burial essentially forecloses the possibility of mourning which is essential for a new beginning:
If all meaning is mourning, and mourning (or absence) must become our norm (or presences) for there to be morning (dawning or future) and not interminable dying, then all meaning and all mourning belong to the city, to the polis (103).
The inverse of Rose’s attention to the “political consequences” of this act of extraterritorial burial is paralleled, meanwhile, by Bonnie Honig’s exploration of the political implications of the simultaneously transgressive and transformative potential of the foreigner, in her Democracy and the Foreigner (many thanks, Eileen, for the tip). In her study, Honig poits that
In the classic texts of Western political culture (both high and low), the curious figure of the foreign-founder recurs with some frequency: established regimes, peoples, or towns that fall prey to corruption are restored or refounded (not corrupted or transcended) by the agency of a foreigner or a stranger.
Drawing on a range of examples, ranging from the Biblical opposition between Ruth and Orpah (as “ideal immigrant” and “bad foreigner,” respectively) to current debates over immigration in the US (model minority vs. illegal immigrant), Honig argues that this idealization of the “foreign-founder” actually goes hand-in-hand with a parallel apprehensiveness about the destabilizing potential of the foreigner:
The foreigner who shores up and reinvigorates the regime also unsettles it at the same time. Since the presumed test of both a good and a bad foreigner is the measure of her contribution to the restoration of the nation rather than, say, to the nation’s transformation or attenuation, nationalist xenophilia tends to fee and (re)produce nationalist xenophobia as its partner (76).
In one interesting discussion of the Book of Ruth, furthermore, Honig draws on D.W. Winnicott’s and Eric Santner’s theories of processes of mourning, suggesting that one of the factors responsible for this bifurcation or “good” and “bad” foreigner comes down to a question of an inability or failure to mourn effectively. In terms very similar to Rose's, Honig argues that,
….These two moments in Santner’s theory and in Ruth’s story mark two familiar moments of immigration dynamics. One, a furious assimilationism in which all connections to the motherland are disavowed. And two, a refusal of transition and a retreat into an enclave that leaves the immigrant stranded in relation to the receiving country and relation to the lost homeland. The two moments are figured developmentally by Santner and Winnicott, but immigrants and their receiving regimes may experience them simultaneously. […]
Like Antigone’s mourning of Polynices, Ruth’s mourning of Orphah is forbidden for the sake of a regime’s stability and identity. Thus, Ruth’s mourning—like Antigone’s—is endless, melancholic. Her losses get in the way of the closure this community seeks to attain through her and in spite of her (69, 71).
These questions, raised by Rose and Honig, of the location of death and
of the transformative founder in relationship to the acknowledged
boundaries of the city or community, and of the role of the mourning
process in mediating or exacerbating these existing boundaries, returns
us to the question of the essentially “tellurian” (territory-based)
quality of Schmitt’s “partisan.”
I will conclude by picking up on the theme of AIDS as developed by both
Rose (above) and Derrida (in the passage cited at the end of my initial
tangential response to Matt’s comment), and linking it back to Derrida’s twist on the famous Cartesian formula. In Notes of a Desolate Man
(荒 人手记 )—a novel almost precisely contemporary (1994) with both Derrida’s ”The Rhetoric of Drugs” interview (1993) as well as Rose’s essay on
Potter’s Field
(undated, but written between 1992 and 1995)—Taiwan
author Zhu Tianwen (朱天文 ) narrates her protagonist’s struggle to
recover from the death from AIDS of his close friend. At the center of
this mourning process, meanwhile, is her/his existentialist
formulation: “I write, therefore I am. “我写故我在
Comments