Reading Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. David Ng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
Review by Rani Neutill, University of California, Berkeley
I begin my work with a question in response to the communal violence that forged the independence and Partition of India: can forms of mourning find a place in the literary re-creation of the world of post-colonial and diasporic India? The question of mourning reaches new heights in the constitution of a political, national, and psychoanalytic subject. How are we to understand the making of an independent India without comprehending the constitutive losses that were incurred in gaining independence? If psychoanalysis is understood as the “talking cure,” can literature be examined as a discursive equivalent to the functioning of analysis? And if so, do practices of re-writing the historical narratives of communal conflict attempt to provide a discursive space for national and equally importantly diasporic mourning? Literature as aesthetic experience can restructure the subject–the subject as reader and the subject as figured in the text, be it the national or individual. I argue that Indian English literature forms a space from which we can both understand the historical moments of communal conflict, but simultaneously literature may be a venue from which we can re-image these events and re-imagine relationships of difference, both religious and nationalist. The possibility for and actual re-imagining of relationships of difference is a site for the mourning of the trauma that forged India’s independence. While post-colonial criticism has engaged in both the psychic and structural trauma of colonization, it has yet to contend with the trauma of the Partition of India. Partition left two million dead, 12 million homeless, and seventy five thousand women raped and/or mutilated in the heat of religious communal “madness.” Indian English literature, a product of both native and diasporic Indians, has continuously been read as a narrative account of the trauma of colonization and the conflict between tradition and modernity, either as mimesis, or allegory. For instance, Sara Suleri in her book The Rhetoric of English India queries how the “apocalypse” of colonization slips into narrative. I would ask the same question of the Partition and communal violence, in its political, material and psychic forms. At the precise moment at which India broke from the material force of colonial domination it became the site of yet another trauma, the Partition. This rupture in history requires attention as it re-presents itself as a narrative trope in Indian English Literature. The reiteration of the riots of 1946-1948 is additionally apparent in nationalist narratives, which assert that every communal conflict can find its origin in the Partition. In trying to understand the Babri Masjid conflict of 1992, filmmakers, novelists and politicians [1] frequently propose an indexical relationship between the Partition and this event, as well as almost any other wave of communal warfare. Partition thus serves as the ur-narrative from which all other violence between Hindus and Muslims can be comprehended. I propose this “originary” tale should be understood first and foremost as trauma, and concurrently as the historical event that permeates Indian literary practice, in both a latent and manifest manner. By reading Indian English literature as it translates the traumatic events of Partition we may begin to comprehend the world after it has been “made strange through the desolating experience of violence and loss.” [2] In thinking about the processes of mourning, work on collective loss and historical trauma has been crucial for my research. In this vein of literature, David Ng and David Kazanjian’s volume Loss delivers a much-needed analytical look at the losses and remains of the 20th century. Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History’s claim that we must bring the past to memory, to break from a historicism whose empathy lies with the victor, Loss engages with the historical traumas of “war, genocide, slavery, decolonization, exile, migration, reunification, globalization, and AIDS.” [3] The eighteen essays in this volume bring the past to memory through a critical look at the relationship between loss and the remains of those losses. As Kazanjian and Ng put it, “to induce actively a tension between the past and the present, between the dead and the living.” [4] The product of this moment is the engagement with the past that the volume seeks to reveal in its political and psychic importance. Loss asks how “loss has been animated for hopeful and hopeless politics.” [5] For the losses and remains of the Partition of India Ng and Kazanjian’s volume provides a methodological framework from which I may look at Indian English literature as a space for such hopeless and hopeful politics.” The anthology is divided into three sections: Bodily, Ideal and Spatial Remains. Body, space and ideal as configurations of loss arise from Sigmund Freud’s infamous statement from his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” that the lost object may be “a loved person, or some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” [6] The reference to Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia is the foundation of the books theoretical basis. . Mourning indicates a psychic state of recognized loss, a grieving period whereby the subject is able to move forward onto new objects. In contrast, melancholia deals with the unconscious incorporation of the lost object into the libido. In melancholia, the object is not recognized as lost, and there is an incapacity to form new attachments. Self-beratement is indicative of the state of melancholia, a beratement whose target is unconsciously the lost internalized object. The symptomatic distinction between mourning and melancholia is best summed up by Freud’s claim that “in grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” [7] Perhaps the most important and striking feature of melancholia is the immobilization of the psyche due to the inability of the subject to recognize the object as lost as it has been encrypted into the libido. Loss interrogates how the theory of mourning and melancholia relates to historical trauma. Scholars have been seeking to understand the processes and possibilities of social and collective bereavement since the late 1960’s, beginning with Alexander and Margarete Mistcherlich’s The Inability to Mourn published in 1967. Mistcherlichs’ work examines the (im)possibilities of mourning for post-Nazi Germany. The Inability to Mourn frames mourning as a political and ethical imperative. In 1990 Eric Santner contends with Mistcherlichs’work in Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Santner’s text distinguishes linguistic and historical mourning, arguing that our very entrance into language comes with a loss, that a structural loss constitutes us as human beings as we enter into the linguistic scene, and this loss is not the same as the actual historical losses of loved ones. In creating this distinction Santner opens the possibility for a recuperation of melancholia as a productive psychic state. Recent scholarship articulates that as subjects we are constituted and alienated by language, meaning we are constituted melancholically. The theory of alienation also has been analyzed in racial and sexual terms from Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power to Anne Cheng’s Melancholy of RaceNg and Kazanjian add to this ongoing debate on the differentiation between mourning and melancholia, and the possibilities of a productive melancholia. Through the examination of Space, Body and Ideal, Loss takes on the weighty task of reading loss in its plethora of perspectives, which the anthology does overwhelmingly well. By lookin
g
at all three variations of
loss, I use their text to look at the bodies, nationalism as ideal and the geographic fracturing of India as sites of loss in my research. Although Ng and Kazanjian create an ultimately invaluable analysis of the losses and remains of the 20th Century, the recuperation of melancholia as politically viable remains an ambivalent terrain of inquiry. To attribute a creative quality to loss itself, as the editors argue in the introduction to Loss, is not a problematic claim. However, Ng and Kazanjian further argue that “melancholia might be said to constitute . . .an ongoing and open relationship with the past, this engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.” [8] In Freud’s analysis of melancholia, the subject who has experienced a loss, of either a person, or some abstraction that has taken the place of one, the incorporation of the lost object disables the subject from knowing that he or she has lost anything at all. That is, when Ng and Kazanjian claim that melancholia is an open relationship with the lost object, they are forgetting the profound unconscious nature of melancholia. Additionally they claim that mourning is a process whereby the past is “declared resolved, finished, and dead.” [9] The assumption that in mourning there is an absolute forgetting of the lost object misconstrues what memory means for both mourning and melancholia. In mourning, it is precisely a remembering that enables a detachment from the lost object, whose preservation is in memorialization through memory, a conscious recognition of loss. Remembering is thus the key difference between the two states. If an object is not recognized as lost, what is the ethical relationship between the subject and the object? In melancholia the profound unconscious nature of the psychic state disables the ability to remember the lost object because the subject does not know he or she has lost anything at all. Freud states, “melancholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss.” [10] Through remembering the lost object we can become intimate with the object in a way that was not previously possible. The loss is remembered, held memorial through memory not through incorporation. Once memories are rendered they become like photographs, objects which remain a part of our past as an active reflection of our future. In writing on Post-colonial India and discourses of nationalism the lost object is the past, and the melancholic attachment to that past creates a violent present. Scholars such as Santner, Ng and Kazanjian argue that melancholia is an unavoidable necessity in the constitution of the subject, and additionally as a state that must be passed through to get to the state of mourning. Societies in which the writing of history passes over the losses of the past remain in an immobilized sate of melancholia, unable to develop new productive attachments. I look at the potential literary venues of mourning the melancholic attachments to nationalist narratives. Regardless of my disagreement that melancholia may be a productive site for collective and individual subjects of loss, Loss is a vital and brilliant addition to the understandings of social and collective bereavement and facilitates work on collective loss, such as my own. It is an anthology that validates the work of psychoanalytic inquiry in the face of historical and social trauma.
[1] For instance Kamal Hasan’s film Hey Ram, numerous novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, and the Hindu Right Wing in particular.
[2] Das, Veena, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. [3] David Ng and David Kazanjian eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2.
[4] Ibid., 1.
[5] Ibid , 2
[6] Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Stranchey) London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 167
[7]Ibid
[8] David Ng and David Kazanjian eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 4.
Rani Neutill: Reading Loss
Reading Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. David Ng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
Review by Rani Neutill, University of California, Berkeley
I begin my work with a question in response to the communal violence that forged the independence and Partition of India: can forms of mourning find a place in the literary re-creation of the world of post-colonial and diasporic India? The question of mourning reaches new heights in the constitution of a political, national, and psychoanalytic subject. How are we to understand the making of an independent India without comprehending the constitutive losses that were incurred in gaining independence? If psychoanalysis is understood as the “talking cure,” can literature be examined as a discursive equivalent to the functioning of analysis? And if so, do practices of re-writing the historical narratives of communal conflict attempt to provide a discursive space for national and equally importantly diasporic mourning? Literature as aesthetic experience can restructure the subject–the subject as reader and the subject as figured in the text, be it the national or individual. I argue that Indian English literature forms a space from which we can both understand the historical moments of communal conflict, but simultaneously literature may be a venue from which we can re-image these events and re-imagine relationships of difference, both religious and nationalist. The possibility for and actual re-imagining of relationships of difference is a site for the mourning of the trauma that forged India’s independence.
While post-colonial criticism has engaged in both the psychic and structural trauma of colonization, it has yet to contend with the trauma of the Partition of India. Partition left two million dead, 12 million homeless, and seventy five thousand women raped and/or mutilated in the heat of religious communal “madness.” Indian English literature, a product of both native and diasporic Indians, has continuously been read as a narrative account of the trauma of colonization and the conflict between tradition and modernity, either as mimesis, or allegory. For instance, Sara Suleri in her book The Rhetoric of English India queries how the “apocalypse” of colonization slips into narrative. I would ask the same question of the Partition and communal violence, in its political, material and psychic forms. At the precise moment at which India broke from the material force of colonial domination it became the site of yet another trauma, the Partition. This rupture in history requires attention as it re-presents itself as a narrative trope in Indian English Literature. The reiteration of the riots of 1946-1948 is additionally apparent in nationalist narratives, which assert that every communal conflict can find its origin in the Partition. In trying to understand the Babri Masjid conflict of 1992, filmmakers, novelists and politicians [1] frequently propose an indexical relationship between the Partition and this event, as well as almost any other wave of communal warfare. Partition thus serves as the ur-narrative from which all other violence between Hindus and Muslims can be comprehended. I propose this “originary” tale should be understood first and foremost as trauma, and concurrently as the historical event that permeates Indian literary practice, in both a latent and manifest manner. By reading Indian English literature as it translates the traumatic events of Partition we may begin to comprehend the world after it has been “made strange through the desolating experience of violence and loss.” [2]
In thinking about the processes of mourning, work on collective loss and historical trauma has been crucial for my research. In this vein of literature, David Ng and David Kazanjian’s volume Loss delivers a much-needed analytical look at the losses and remains of the 20th century. Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History’s claim that we must bring the past to memory, to break from a historicism whose empathy lies with the victor, Loss engages with the historical traumas of “war, genocide, slavery, decolonization, exile, migration, reunification, globalization, and AIDS.” [3] The eighteen essays in this volume bring the past to memory through a critical look at the relationship between loss and the remains of those losses. As Kazanjian and Ng put it, “to induce actively a tension between the past and the present, between the dead and the living.” [4] The product of this moment is the engagement with the past that the volume seeks to reveal in its political and psychic importance. Loss asks how “loss has been animated for hopeful and hopeless politics.” [5] For the losses and remains of the Partition of India Ng and Kazanjian’s volume provides a methodological framework from which I may look at Indian English literature as a space for such hopeless and hopeful politics.”
The anthology is divided into three sections: Bodily, Ideal and Spatial Remains. Body, space and ideal as configurations of loss arise from Sigmund Freud’s infamous statement from his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” that the lost object may be “a loved person, or some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” [6] The reference to Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia is the foundation of the books theoretical basis. . Mourning indicates a psychic state of recognized loss, a grieving period whereby the subject is able to move forward onto new objects. In contrast, melancholia deals with the unconscious incorporation of the lost object into the libido. In melancholia, the object is not recognized as lost, and there is an incapacity to form new attachments. Self-beratement is indicative of the state of melancholia, a beratement whose target is unconsciously the lost internalized object. The symptomatic distinction between mourning and melancholia is best summed up by Freud’s claim that “in grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” [7] Perhaps the most important and striking feature of melancholia is the immobilization of the psyche due to the inability of the subject to recognize the object as lost as it has been encrypted into the libido. Loss interrogates how the theory of mourning and melancholia relates to historical trauma.
Scholars have been seeking to understand the processes and possibilities of social and collective bereavement since the late 1960’s, beginning with Alexander and Margarete Mistcherlich’s The Inability to Mourn published in 1967. Mistcherlichs’ work examines the (im)possibilities of mourning for post-Nazi Germany. The Inability to Mourn frames mourning as a political and ethical imperative. In 1990 Eric Santner contends with Mistcherlichs’work in Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Santner’s text distinguishes linguistic and historical mourning, arguing that our very entrance into language comes with a loss, that a structural loss constitutes us as human beings as we enter into the linguistic scene, and this loss is not the same as the actual historical losses of loved ones. In creating this distinction Santner opens the possibility for a recuperation of melancholia as a productive psychic state. Recent scholarship articulates that as subjects we are constituted and alienated by language, meaning we are constituted melancholically. The theory of alienation also has been analyzed in racial and sexual terms from Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power to Anne Cheng’s Melancholy of RaceNg and Kazanjian add to this ongoing debate on the differentiation between mourning and melancholia, and the possibilities of a productive melancholia.
Through the examination of Space, Body and Ideal, Loss takes on the weighty task of reading loss in its plethora of perspectives, which the anthology does overwhelmingly well. By lookin
g
at all three variations of
loss, I use their text to look at the bodies, nationalism as ideal and the geographic fracturing of India as sites of loss in my research. Although Ng and Kazanjian create an ultimately invaluable analysis of the losses and remains of the 20th Century, the recuperation of melancholia as politically viable remains an ambivalent terrain of inquiry. To attribute a creative quality to loss itself, as the editors argue in the introduction to Loss, is not a problematic claim. However, Ng and Kazanjian further argue that “melancholia might be said to constitute . . .an ongoing and open relationship with the past, this engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.” [8] In Freud’s analysis of melancholia, the subject who has experienced a loss, of either a person, or some abstraction that has taken the place of one, the incorporation of the lost object disables the subject from knowing that he or she has lost anything at all. That is, when Ng and Kazanjian claim that melancholia is an open relationship with the lost object, they are forgetting the profound unconscious nature of melancholia. Additionally they claim that mourning is a process whereby the past is “declared resolved, finished, and dead.” [9] The assumption that in mourning there is an absolute forgetting of the lost object misconstrues what memory means for both mourning and melancholia. In mourning, it is precisely a remembering that enables a detachment from the lost object, whose preservation is in memorialization through memory, a conscious recognition of loss. Remembering is thus the key difference between the two states. If an object is not recognized as lost, what is the ethical relationship between the subject and the object? In melancholia the profound unconscious nature of the psychic state disables the ability to remember the lost object because the subject does not know he or she has lost anything at all. Freud states, “melancholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss.” [10] Through remembering the lost object we can become intimate with the object in a way that was not previously possible. The loss is remembered, held memorial through memory not through incorporation. Once memories are rendered they become like photographs, objects which remain a part of our past as an active reflection of our future.
In writing on Post-colonial India and discourses of nationalism the lost object is the past, and the melancholic attachment to that past creates a violent present. Scholars such as Santner, Ng and Kazanjian argue that melancholia is an unavoidable necessity in the constitution of the subject, and additionally as a state that must be passed through to get to the state of mourning. Societies in which the writing of history passes over the losses of the past remain in an immobilized sate of melancholia, unable to develop new productive attachments. I look at the potential literary venues of mourning the melancholic attachments to nationalist narratives.
Regardless of my disagreement that melancholia may be a productive site for collective and individual subjects of loss, Loss is a vital and brilliant addition to the understandings of social and collective bereavement and facilitates work on collective loss, such as my own. It is an anthology that validates the work of psychoanalytic inquiry in the face of historical and social trauma.
[1] For instance Kamal Hasan’s film Hey Ram, numerous novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, and the Hindu Right Wing in particular.
[2] Das, Veena, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
[3] David Ng and David Kazanjian eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2.
[4] Ibid., 1.
[5] Ibid , 2
[6] Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Stranchey) London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 167
[7]Ibid
[8] David Ng and David Kazanjian eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 4.
[9] Ibid, 3
[10] Ibid