Episode 181 - Mourning Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink

[00:00:02] David: The podcast where two philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:07] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson

[00:00:08] David: And I am David Peña-Guzmán

[00:00:11] Ellie: Mourning is something that countless humans over the course of millennia have engaged in. But the internet has changed the way we relate to it in significant ways

[00:00:23] David: I couldn't agree more, Ellie, and I have a quote here from the sociologist Julie Alev Dilmash, who writes about this, and Dilmash says, "Death traditionally involves a clear temporal and spatial separation. The dead are not with us anymore. They have left this world. We live much of our lives online, constantly accessible and present to others.

The permanence of the internet disrupts this dynamic of separation, of moving on, producing both new forms of mourning and challenges to the grief process."

[00:01:01] Ellie: Yeah. This is really interesting. I mean, uh, no longer is somebody interred or cremated, um, you know, scattered to the winds, but is also still present with us, right? And I guess you could say, I guess you could say, you know, that existed with photographs or portraits or letters, so it's not as though there was necessarily, like, no image or representation, let alone trace of the loved ones.

Of course, there are always traces of loved ones after they pass. But I think there's something unique about being able to listen to another's voice, look at another's image, um, see their entire Instagram profile after they've passed, right? And also, there's, you know, now more and more technology that is creating digital avatars of loved ones after they've passed.

Um, fellow philosopher Barry Lam, friend of the pod, did an amazing Hi-Phi Nation episode on this a couple years ago called "The Digital Future of Grief" that I definitely

recommend

[00:02:01] David: Yeah, no, that's right, and I think you could even push it further back than just photographs or paintings, say, of the deceased. Somebody could say that's just the work Of memory, right? Like, uh, the deceased.

[00:02:14] Ellie: Oh, Yeah, like the people who have died.

Yeah, sorry. It's, it sounded like you said diseased

[00:02:19] David: No, the dece- ah. The deceased.

[00:02:23] Ellie: yeah. sorry. is that the right...

[00:02:24] David: Okay. Um, and so, like, you could make the argument that even just the existence of memory in, uh, our, in, in our life as human beings is already, uh, the creation of a kind of vault for the protection of the dead that keeps them alive, right? Like, we often speak in that way. We say they are still alive in our minds, in our memories, in the way in which we remember them, either individually or collectively.

But nonetheless, I do think that there are ways in which new technologies put pressure on how we experience, um, the remembering of those who have passed. And, uh, aside from, uh, the ones that you mentioned, like, you know, uh, Facebook or avatars, I'm also here thinking... but

Yeah, uh, yeah, you did know.

[00:03:07] Ellie: I, Instagram, it's fine

[00:03:08] David: Oh, s- sorry, same thing, uh, from my very millennial perspective.

but I'm also thinking here about holograms, for example, that go beyond and actually recreate sort of like the 3D body of the person who is no longer here and who is no longer of this world in order to introduce them into this world, into our time, and into our space. And even more recently, uh, the development of AI voice technology, which is hyperrealistic and allows you to not only hear the voice of the dead, but to hear them saying things that would suggest that they are here and now, because they are saying things that they have never said, but they're doing so in their own voice, mimicked, of course, or hallucinated

[00:03:51] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah, so it's not just previous recordings, it's literally having a, quote-unquote, "conversation" with them now.

[00:03:58] David: Yeah. No, no, that's right. Um, And the, the Hi-Fi Nation episode gets into some really interesting technology around that too that's emerging

Yeah, and I, I think you use the term afterlives, like the afterlife of grief. Yeah, so like people can have, after death, many different kinds of afterlives that are mediated and facilitated by all these technologies. And aside from the fact that it might, uh, complicate the grief process, uh, Dillmash argues that social media and the internet just structurally foregrounds joy and euphoria and simulation and play so much that it's just not the right place to

[00:04:35] Ellie: It says stimulation here, not simulation

[00:04:38] David: Oh, sorry, sorry.

Did I say simulation? I meant stimulation, yeah. And aside from this, Dilmash argues that social media and the internet in general, they structurally foreground joy and euphoria and play and stimulation such that it's just not the right forum for the seriousness of the work of mourning. So everything about the information superhighway is saturated with images, with screens, with, um, sensory activation, and the speed of that sensorial sort of overwhelming of the subject is very much at odds with the slow pace of mourning.

So there is a temporal gap here. And, uh, they also point to a gap at the level of language in, in terms of how we talk about death, grieving, and mourning, because on the internet, and I, I think this is right, we are expected to speak in certain ways. We are expected to convey positive affect, um, we give likes, we share emojis.

Again, there is this idea that we talk about things in a light way when we are online, largely because of the limits of these platforms. But that's not at all how we talk about death in real life, right? Even if you send somebody who just lost their parent, for example, a sad emoji, think about how inappropriate that is.

The emoji is caricaturesque. It's cute. We don't foreground that at a real funeral.

[00:06:10] Ellie: Wait, I'm sorry. I just need to interject with one, like, particularly egregious example here. There's someone close to me who really didn't know how to respond to a friend's pet death, and when receiving a message saying, "I'm so devastated, my dog died,"

Responded with an emoji of a dog paw and a broken heart.

[00:06:30] David: Exactly. I

[00:06:31] Ellie: Like, that is brutal. I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't respond with that."

[00:06:35] David: Yeah, and in a sense, you can see why that's sort of like the appropriate response from within the logic of the emoji world, you know, dead pet. But it, it just highlights how it almost makes a mockery out of the very experience of loss that we feel. And the point here that I wanna underscore is that according to Dilmash, this ultimately leaves us feeling very uneasy around death whenever we have to deal with it

in online spaces. We are like on edge around the topic

[00:07:09] Ellie: You know, it's always hard to know what to say to a friend who's grieving, um, because grieving and mourning are such individual processes, even when you're going through them collectively in the company of others.

You know, and especially if it's not also your loss, uh, but it's the other person's loss, it can be just so, so hard to know what to say. And I think when something is written down because it's like, you know, coming in a message or something like that,

It feels like the stakes are higher too because then, you know, there's a record of that rather than just like something you said in conversation. Plus you can't have the emotional valences of like give me a hug or I'm so sorry this is happening. It's just like reduced to the words. And so yeah, like it's hard to know what to say, um, especially when the form of social media, uh, or even like text messaging I would say isn't really made for that kind of nuance or even that kind of seriousness.

[00:08:04] David: Today we are talking about mourning

How does culture shape our relationship to mortality and death?

[00:08:10] Ellie: And what effects can the passing of time have on the process of mourning?

[00:08:14] David: A lot of studies of mourning focus either on cultural rituals of mourning, as this is studied by anthropologists, or on individual strategies for coping with the loss of a loved one, and this is what you get from psychology. We're gonna touch upon rituals a little bit later in the episode, but I wanna start right off the bat by stating that as a philosophy podcast, we're gonna be primarily taking a theoretical angle to the question of mourning

[00:08:44] Ellie: Totally, and I think that expression of, like, the narrowness of the scope here is really important while we're in the space of such statements. I should also mention that we decided to have this be an episode about mourning rather than about grief, and that also narrows our scope, right, relative to the various approaches that we could take.

There's a lot of really important research on grief, including within philosophy, but a focus on mourning allows us to get into some of the specific texts that we wanna consider today. And I was even thinking about it in preparation for this episode, like, what's the distinction between mourning and grief, you know, at least within philosophy?

And I feel like to some extent, the distinction is really just geographical. There's something very continental European about a focus on mourning rather than on grief. Like, mourning feels like a very French and German concept, whereas grief perhaps more an American one. At least when we think about, like, the main texts on mourning, they're ones that come from those countries, and those are the ones we're gonna be focusing on today, right?

[00:09:44] David: Yeah. Well, and it, it really changes by region and nationality because in Spanish we use the term, uh, for example, for sorrow, which is pena, but it's actually a combination of mourning, grief, and also shame. And so, you know, like it, it really changes based on what tradition you're using. Um, and we'll get into some of this when we talk about the Mexican philosopher that I wanna bring into this discussion, uh, later in the episode, who is responding, uh, to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's work on death and mortality.

Uh, but, but I do think that you're right, that the distinction between grief and mourning seems somewhat arbitrary

[00:10:19] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Well, but I think like, not necessarily arbitrary, just geographical, right? Which I guess you could say is arbitrary. It's not, not conceptually driven, but I don't know that I would go that far 'cause I do think like the, the mourning tradition is very important in Freudian psychoanalysis and the way that that then translates into French philosophy.

So I should say when I'm talking about French and German language philosophy, not just literal French and German, since of course Freud was Austrian. Um, but I think, you know, this focus on mourning is fitting for us given that we have a background in continental European philosophy, and so I'm super excited to talk about this.

I know you are always excited to talk about Freud. I'm usually not excited to talk about Freud, but I actually really enjoyed rereading this essay. We're gonna focus this part of the discussion on Freud's essay, "Mourning and Melancholia."

[00:11:07] David: Yeah. Written 1915, published 1917, in the context of war. And in this essay, which is not that long, I highly recommend our listeners, and viewers to listen to it, to read it on their own. But Freud is trying to make sense of this distinction between mourning and melancholia, which is a difference between a healthy way of dealing with and coping with the death of a love object, and a way of dealing with that loss that is pathological and that gets in the way of the ego and the self, um, living a full flourishing life

[00:11:41] Ellie: Yeah, and this is the way that the distinction between mourning and melancholy in the Freudian tradition is made. That is between mourning, which is non-pathological, and melancholy, which is pathological.

So where do you wanna start here? Do you wanna go through the features of mourning and then talk about like when it kind of transforms into melancholy? That seems

[00:12:02] David: Yeah, I, I think that's, that's good. So let's think about mourning for a second. Mourning has a structure according to Freud. Somebody dies, you lose that love object, and when that happens, you are confronted by the reality principle, what Freud calls the reality principle. That is to say you look around, uh, desiring to see them, but reality tells you they're not here anymore, right?

Like, they're not in their room. You're not gonna see them anymore. And that conflict between your desire, because you're still effectively attached to that person, you still wanna see them, you project yourself, uh, in a relationship with them versus the reality of their absence creates what Freud refers to as an inner conflict, um, that requires you to then sort of rechannel and rearrange your libidinal investments, like what you care about, what you

[00:12:56] Ellie: your attachments

[00:12:57] David: Exactly, your attachments, and that can be really hard to do. But according to Freud, in the work of mourning, when we go through the process of reattaching ourselves based, on the reality principle, using it as our guide, we eventually succeed in reconstructing our psychic economy in order to accept and adapt to a new reality.

and that's when he says the ego becomes free and uninhibited again, right? Like you become healthy even if it takes a while to undergo that process of mourning.

[00:13:28] Ellie: It does take a while because, you know, uh, he says that we never, we never freely give up, uh, objects of libidinal energy, right? Like our attachments, it, it... We have to pry our attachments from our cold, dead hands, or in this case, the cold, living hands that, you know, have to let go of the dead ones. Um, sorry if that was a little macabre.

But

[00:13:48] David: your version of the Paul heartbreak emoji.

[00:13:52] Ellie: and I think, you know, the temporal aspects of this process are essential. Freud says we detach the libido bit by bit from the lost object, and that, of course, takes time. However, what's important here in the process of mourning is that nothing is hindering that process.

It has a temporality of its own, but it's just kind of like chugging along, right? Um, the unfolding of the mourning process is happening of its own accord, and then it naturally reaches an endpoint. He doesn't define what that endpoint is, as opposed to like the DSM-5, which has like very weird ways of distinguishing mourning from more pathological conditions.

We're gonna leave that aside now 'cause that's not the main focus here. Um, but yeah, I just wanna point that out as well, is like there's a kind of, there's a kind of unfolding of the process of mourning

[00:14:42] David: Well, and I do think that he tells us what that endpoint is loosely, which is, a self that can function again in the world without being, taken down by the, the feelings of sadness

and, and grief and mourning that come with

it.

[00:14:57] Ellie: the ego's free again, as you mentioned

[00:14:59] David: yeah, uh, and uninhibited, as Freud says. And the point here is that that process does unfold and should unfold of its own accord,

But there are some cases where the process sort of goes off the rails and it becomes pathological, and that's what Freud is trying to understand in this essay.

How is it that in some instances we get stuck in a position of a kind of mourning that is sick and that does not unfold as it should, and that locks the subject in a complex, and that's what he calls the complex of melancholia. And he says, uh, just to sort of put our cards on the table here very quickly, he says there are three factors that are associated with melancholia, and of course we have to talk about those

Because those are what differentiate melancholia from mourning. So the first one is the loss of the object. So in both cases you lose something that you love. The second factor is what Freud calls ambivalence, and that is that in the case of melancholia we actually have a really ambivalent relationship to the thing or the object that we have lost.

Like maybe we have conflicted feelings. Maybe we love that person, but we also resented them or even hated them. And so when you have that ambivalent libidinal attachment to an object, you are more likely to be thrown into a complex of melancholia. The third and final feature of melancholia is that there is what he calls a regression of libido to the ego.

This is a really important concept, which is that essentially what ends up happening in melancholia is that my negative feelings toward the object that I've lost were never resolved because I was ambivalent. I had an ambivalent relationship. And so I sort of project them onto myself, and I start relating to myself in the way I used to relate to that object.

So I supplant my ego for the place of the object

[00:16:57] Ellie: Yeah, or the rather the, the object becomes incorporated into one's own ego, and then the ego gets kind of split, which we'll talk about I, I think in a little bit. Um, yeah, and so in drawing this analogy between mourning and melancholy, Freud says there are certain similarities, right? They both involve this work that unfolds over time, but they have really different effects, um, and really different features.

And in particular, this idea that mourning, you know, has a natural endpoint is not found in melancholy. In melancholia, Freud says, the path is blocked, so there's a hindrance in the process of detaching the libido bit by bit.

Um, and the hindrance of that process results in not the withdrawing of the libido from the object, but in the kind of incorporation of the lost object into oneself. So one of the things that you find behaviorally in cases of melancholy is an absence of self-regard that can take the form of self-denigrating behavior and statements like, "I'm worthless," uh, you know, "I have no purpose in this life," and so on and so forth, even like self-harming or suicidal, uh, you know, tendencies.

It can also take the form of like not taking care of oneself, you know, just like withdrawing from one's obligations in the world as well as the requirements of, you know, like daily life

maintenance. Yeah.

[00:18:21] David: Like, you don't eat, you don't bathe, that sort of thing

[00:18:24] Ellie: yeah, And he says that absence of self-regard should really be taken seriously as a core phenomenon of melancholy.

He says this idea that "I am worthless," that people with melancholy expressed, should be taken literally, not because they really speak to, like, the actual worthlessness of the person who's uttering them, but rather because they are speaking some kind of truth. So Freud says it would be fruitless to contradict a patient who brings these accusations against his ego. He must surely be right in some way and be describing something that is as it seems to him to be.

And so what does it mean then to take seriously the melancholic's claim that they're worthless? Freud thinks when the analyst really listens to this patient, what they find is that that accusation of worthlessness is really being directed to the internalized object, uh, of the other, right, rather than to themselves.

And so that ambivalence that they had to the lost and loved object manifests as a self-hatred because what they're actually hating is the other within the self

[00:19:30] David: Yeah, and so just to use maybe a concrete example, let's say that my father dies, and I had really mixed feelings about my father. Maybe I loved him because he raised me, but I also recognize that he was a bad friend and a manipulator and so on and so forth. When he dies, it might be that I transpose or transfer my dislike of my father onto me because I can't express myself that way of a dead person, and maybe, says Freud, because I wasn't even fully conscious of the extent to which I dislike my father, because that's an important aspect of melancholia for Freud, that the ambivalence that I feel toward the object of, of my love need not be conscious.

In fact, I I may not be aware of it, and that's another differentiating factor between mourning

[00:20:15] Ellie: You might be like, "Uh, my father was my best friend. You know, I was,

[00:20:19] David: But deep down, yeah,

but deep down there is unresolved tension. And so in mourning, I know what I lost. In melancholia, I'm not sure, and there's a lot of unconscious content sort of like creeping under the surface.

And so in those cases, when my father dies and I have the unresolved issues, I start thinking of myself as a piece of crap, as unworthy of love. But in reality, I'm speaking about my father, and that's the substitution that Freud thinks is absolutely essential for the analyst to spot. But they cannot spot it if they don't take seriously the testimony and the discourse and the expressions

of their patient.

And that's ultimately the fundamental difference, I would say, between mourning and melancholia, that in mourning I feel like I lost something external to myself. That other person disappeared. Melancholia manifests itself in a narcissistic structure where I feel like a part of me is dislikable and I must, uh, express loathe toward it.

And that's something that Freud says with a quote that, that really stood out to me. He says, "In grief or mourning, the world becomes poor and empty. In melancholia, it is the ego itself."

[00:21:35] Ellie: Yes. Yes. And that manifests in things like profoundly painful dejection, he mentions, like a lack of interest in the outside world, as well as the other things that we talked about, you know, those consequences of a lack of self-regard. And, you know, you might be wondering, like, what led to this ambivalence?

Like, why do you kind of low-key hate your father even though you also love your father and think you love him? I love that you chose the example of a father because you, like, actually don't know your father, so you could, you know, you could, like, get away with that. I don't think any of us who do know our fathers could, could get away with using that as a real example.

[00:22:13] David: maybe Freud said, maybe Freud would say everybody can get away with that because it's probably true based on the Oedipus complex.

[00:22:19] Ellie: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, yeah, but so what led, you know, you to this ambivalence, hypothetically speaking? So the first is that you had this object choice. You were attached to that person, right? And then second, you experience a real slight or a disappointment coming from this loved person, right, that then shatters your relationship with them.

So you have this attachment, and then that attachment is disappointed, and the relationship to them is shattered as a result. and I think this doesn't necessarily need to mean that you're, like, actually estranged from them, that the, the relationship actually ended, but rather that there was something psychic that occurred, even if you continued, you know, hanging out with them, having Christmases with them, and so on and so forth.

The result of that shattering of the relationship is strange for Freud because usually when there's a withdrawal of libidinal energy, that l- uh, libido gets directed elsewhere, but that's not what happens here. The free libido in this case was not displaced onto another object, but it was withdrawn into the ego.

And I have to say, like, when he's describing this, it kind of sounds to me like it could also be construed as something that happened while the person was still alive. I don't know if you have thoughts on that, because this is presented as a kind of reconstruction of the process that led them to melancholy.

[00:23:42] David: So I mean, but melancholy develops in the process of mourning or in the process of coping with the death. So not necessarily when they were alive, but even when you're going through the process of trying to adapt to a new reality. But it's really important to note, uh, precisely what you said, that when the libido is withdrawn into the self, I really like the way Freud talks about it.

He says it stays there like an open wound.

Uh, so instead of like, you know, instead of, um, scarring over so that I can then move on with my life, melancholia is when I experience the loss of the love object as an open wound that keeps hurting me and I can't make progress. I can't get on with my life, and that's what blocks the process.

And so in that regard, it, it does happen sort of after you lose them, once they die. But Freud also is very clear that loss is a very broad concept, and we lose things not just in terms of death. You lose somebody when they move away. Uh, you lose a partner when they dump you, and he even says we can experience melancholia in relation to things that are not people.

We

can experience it in relation to, like, ideals

or

[00:24:52] Ellie: of a country he mentions.

[00:24:55] David: like the loss of a fatherland

or the loss of my sense of security, and I think that's really, uh, helpful actually for thinking about psychopathologies at a political level, where it's not just about me as an individual in my personal relationships, but also in terms of my political beliefs and

[00:25:12] Ellie: Yeah, totally. And there's been, I think, a lot of good work on that, too. You're gonna talk about collective mourning a little bit later anyway, right? Yeah. So, um, okay. So yeah, and I now feel like my question was really silly, which is like, does it have to happen after they die? It seems like no, ' cause obviously the answer is no, it doesn't have to happen after they die.

Freud literally defines mourning as a response to a loss, and therefore also melancholy as a response to a loss. doesn't say that loss has to be limited to death. okay, that seems now in retrospect, very obvious to me. I feel kind of like silly for thinking about that. especially because I do think that, you know, for so many of us, mourning is very clearly not confined, even if we're just limiting it to personal losses, to people who die, right?

Like, like you mentioned, moving away or loss of a friendship. Oh my gosh, I had a really painful-- I feel like I might have talked about this on a previous episode, but I had a really painful falling out with a close friend a number of years ago who kind of withdrew themselves suddenly from our entire friend group.

And that was like absolutely, uh, something that we mourned. And I feel like I've even had some breakups that k- kind of verge from mourning to melancholy territory in kind of rough ways, which is also something I wanna talk about. I'm curious what you think about this. I think A lot of the Freud, for me, I think about in terms of one of the most well-known responses to Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholy, which is Derrida's troubling of this distinction.

So Derrida writes about mourning in a bunch of different texts, but in his work on mourning, he suggests that Freud's neat distinction between the pathological work of melancholy and the normal work of mourning is tenuous at best. In fact, all mourning involves some kind of melancholy. I think distinctions are valuable often, and that distinction doesn't need to be 100% airtight in order to be valuable.

And sometimes therefore, when Derrida does things by being like, "You think there's this binary, but actually these two seemingly opposite terms are not so opposite," I'm kind of like, "Cool trick, bro." But I, yeah, I'm curious what you think about this. Do you think the distinction between mourning and melancholy is valuable, or do you think it is worth deconstructing?

[00:27:30] David: Yeah, so I do think it, there is value in deconstructing it because in all loss there is... I mean, our relationship to objects is always ambivalent, right? To all objects. We never have an object of desire or libidinal investment that is just, like, explicitly good or explicitly bad. And so if that's a defining feature of melancholia, that our relationship is ambivalent, then show me a meaningful personal relationship that doesn't have at least a little bit of it.

And similarly, I think identification works in such a way that we often incorporate or internalize aspects of the other into, into the self, and so when we lose them, we also lose a part of ourselves and how we relate to them. And so at least in that sense, I think, yeah, the, it can be challenged and problematized.

Nonetheless, on a practical level, I think we all recognize that there are pathological experiences of loss where clearly something is blocked. There is an open wound, and most of us would say that even though, quote-unquote, normal grief is devastating, and when you live it from within it feels like the world is ending, nobody would say that it's a pathological reaction to loss.

We recognize that it's normal to, to grieve and to loss the death of someone

[00:28:47] Ellie: I will say though, the incorporating of the other into the self, um, at least when Derrida's reading, and he's influenced here by a couple of other psychoanalysts, Abraham and Torok, um, that incorporation is actually characteristic of mourning. What's characteristic of melancholy is that the other is not incorporated into the ego, but is introjected into the ego, and is, is alienated from the ego.

And that, in rereading the Freud, uh, doesn't really come out explicitly because I think Freud is talking about the way that, um, in mourning there's a withdrawal of libido from the object because the object is gone, whereas in melancholy the object is within.

Derrida wants to draw a distinction between two ways that the other can be drawn within, either by being incorporated into the self, which I think happens after the loss of any relationship that's important to us. I'm really fascinated by the way that this happens after breakups. You know, you kind of incorporate what you learn from the other person, into your own experience.

But, um, there can also be this other weird way of bringing the other in, which is introjection, where the other is kind of there, not digested, just like alienated. Um, and, and Freud gets at that a bit with talking about how in melancholy there's an opposition that forms between one's conscience and one's ego.

The ego becomes a forsaken object that the conscience is judging, right? So that like absence of self-regard, that self-hatred, that sense of like, "I'm worth nothing," that's the conscience talking about the forsaken ego

[00:30:19] David: Well, and that difference between incorporation and introjection, sometimes the language that is used in psychoanalytic circles to talk about this is almost as like the creation of a vault within. It's

almost as if like the crypt. Exactly. That is, that is exactly right. And so like I, I keep the other inside me in this protected space that prevents me from digesting and thereby prevents me from moving on with my life because in order to move on, the reality principle has to kick in to tell me this, this crypt is not there anymore, right?

Like it only exists in this introjected form. And so there is this tension between the creation of the crypt and, uh, the r- the reality principle that leaves that wound still open, still bleeding. And as a subject, Freud would say I become unfree and inhibited,

and that's, that's, the condition of, of melancholia

[00:31:12] Ellie: So I wanna ask you now how we might think about this in relation to the digital afterlives that we mentioned earlier in the episode, because it seems to me that, you know, having a photo or even a digital archive of your loved one through seeing their Instagram isn't gonna inhibit the work of mourning, but having an AI companion that is talking like them could arguably, you know, get in the way and then lead us to melancholy, at least if we're taking this Freudian distinction seriously and sort of leaving aside Derrida's troubling of it.

Do you think that having an AI companion of your loved one who has passed or is gone, uh, maybe, yeah, maybe they just, you just broke up with them, right? And you kind of like continue to have this, quote-unquote, "relationship" with the person. Um, but it's like

really an

[00:31:57] David: a quote unquote person.

[00:31:58] Ellie: Yeah, Yeah, Do you think that might lead more to melancholy?

[00:32:02] David: I, I think so, and I think the answer here has to be grounded in Freud's concept of ambivalence. Uh, because when you are less sure of what you've lost, you're more likely to slip into melancholia,

[00:32:14] Ellie: Hmm.

[00:32:15] David: uh, because you have difficulty understanding how to cope with the loss and how to move forward because you don't know what the loss is in the first place.

And so if I make, let's say, an AI, uh, avatar/copy/uh, personal assistant of my partner, Rabi, and I continue to have chats with this AI avatar in the morning, and they continue to ask me how my day was, if they continue to have the sorts of discussions that I have with my partner while they were alive, what have I lost exactly?

Would it be fair to say that I just lost the body of my partner, but their mind is still here?

Ugh, that sounds grotesque. Yeah, but like, again, the, the point here is not that there is an answer one way or the

other, but that the technology problematizes my lived experience of the loss and prevents me from conceptualizing what has been lost, and that already puts me on a path to this open wound

[00:33:12] Ellie: Since the turn of the 21st century, people have been turning away from engaging in traditional grief rituals and towards creating their own personal grief rituals. This is at least the argument defended by the scholars Karina Sass and Alena Coleman. And they suggest in a piece that they published in the journal Death Studies in 2016, that rather than turning to traditional rituals, we've seen a trend toward designing and adopting new rituals emphasizing pragmatism, playfulness, and creativity to ensure meaning-making of self-relevant events.

I mean, I think it's really interesting to think about in relation to what we were discussing with mourning, this idea that in order to move past a loss, it's helpful for people to, you know, have an eye to the practical, the playful, and the creative to make things their own

[00:34:04] David: Yeah, although the question here for me is to what extent is a playful, personalized ritual for, for dealing with death rather than a traditional one really a ritual, um, at least in an anthropological sense, because one of the core features of rituals, um, is that they are collective and somewhat inflexible, right?

You have to follow certain rules, uh, certain patterns of behavior. But it, it does remind me of something that I stumbled upon in my research, which is that nowadays it's quite common for funeral homes to offer all sorts of personalization services so that people can grieve, quote-unquote, on their own terms, like with their own signature in their own personalized style.

So I was just, like, browsing some funeral home websites and things like that, and I found that you can, for example, uh, be offered things like a personalized grief journal where they'll, where they'll, like, give you a journal and then you'll write your personal thoughts over the course of grieving. you can buy custom-made wind chimes that remind you of the loved one in some way, um, you can make, uh, the funeral home make you little, like, um, keepsakes for you to give to people but that, like, have a signature either of you or of the, of the person who has died.

Um, you also can now inject the ashes of the dead into your skin by putting it in tattoo ink, uh, such that, you know, you have a tattoo and it's like, oh, that's my mother or that's my uncle or whatever.

Uh, but

[00:35:35] Ellie: talk about those cremation tattoos.

[00:35:37] David: Oh, really? Um, yeah, but so the, the point here is that there is now this shift toward choice, individual consumer choice over how to mourn so that you don't even have to choose a traditional funeral.

Um, like all of, all of the examples I gave were of like a quote-unquote traditional funeral with a personal twist, but you can even choose like an entirely different way of mourning as well, right? Like you can go for a hike or you can go on a vacation to mourn.

Uh, you can spread the ashes or not, et cetera.

Like there is just so much variation that is taking us potentially away from the centralized ritual

that previously used to be collective and agreed upon

[00:36:17] Ellie: Yeah, and I think especially for a lot of non-religious people, questions emerge around what kind of funeral you would wanna have. Um, my partner Trevor's dad passed away, um, in 2020, And we had to wait quite a long time as a result to celebrate his life.

Um, and we started dating, like, right when, right before he died, actually a few weeks, so I never got to meet him. But a couple years later, when we were going to India, we decided to, um, scatter some of his dad's ashes where the Ganges starts, and that had always been something that Trevor's dad wanted. He wanted some of his ashes scattered at the Ganges because,

That was, you know, also, because visiting India had meant so much to him. Trevor's mom is from there, and you know, so it, it meant a lot to him. But he's not Hindu, so before we went to India, we had to buy this special little necklace that allows you to put some ashes in it and then kind of, like, clandestinely travel with them.

Hopefully, I'm not gonna, like, get indicted for, for this. But, um, so and then we had to, like, take some of his ashes and put them in this tiny little vial. And I mean, I kid you not, David, I'm literally, like, up close and personal with these ashes, like physically trying to get them, trying to, like, stuff a few into this tiny little vial, which was, you know, quite an experience.

And if you, if you find things that are a little bit macabre somewhat amusing, I could go into more detail. But for those who

have a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think for, for others, I will leave that aside. Um, but so then when we actually went to India, we then ended up scattering his ashes there, but, you know, we hired a priest to do some rituals.

And, like, part of our family is Hindu, and they were there, and so there was, like, you know, that meant something to them. But I think also for Trevor, it's like, "Okay, I'm doing, I'm doing what my dad wanted, um, and also that involves having some rituals wrapped up that are not really my own," right? Then I sang a terrible rendition of, uh, a Beatles song, and that was, like, our own individual moment.

But

[00:38:19] David: like, so it seems like this is a story that kind of blends like an individual kind of like personal choice also with some ritualistic dimensions, right?

[00:38:28] Ellie: Yeah, And what do you do when, you know, somebody passes who has a lot of things that are important values to them, but who doesn't have, you know, like a traditional religious attachment?

[00:38:41] David: Yeah. And I mean, not, not all rituals around death and mourning need to be religious. Some of

them can be regional, cultural, et cetera. But point well taken, and I think this, this is a great way for me to sort of introduce an idea that I wanted to introduce that comes from Mexican existentialism, which is that there are some places where rituals are still a really strong, um, factor in people's lived experience of mourning.

[00:39:07] Ellie: Yeah, I think for people who aren't religious especially, there are a lot of questions around, like, what sort of celebration of life would I want, and how do I want others to mourn me collectively, right? 'Cause there i- is so much utility to having a collective process of mourning, but also, you know, that can feel really removed from the life of the person who actually passed if it's just, like, you know, some ritual, especially a religious ritual,

that really didn't have much to do with their everyday lives. I think most of us have probably been to a funeral where somebody who, you know, never went to church suddenly gets this, like, church funeral, and you're just sort of like, "What is going on here? This doesn't feel authentic to who they were at all."

[00:39:47] David: Yeah, and so there are questions here about, like, our personal relationship to the ritual, um, uh, like the role of religion here, also the role of culture. But in general, I am, uh, maybe a little bit suspicious of the claim with which we began this discussion, which is that now we're moving toward individual choice rather than collective rituals.

And I think that claim is just highly culturally specific, because as somebody who grew up in Mexico, I'm thinking that doesn't seem right, at least of, of my Mexican culture, because in Mexico, we still have a very strong tradition of collective and public mourning that

is anchored in very clear, tightly followed ritualistic practices that are not really up for individual choice.

Um, so,

[00:40:32] Ellie: what kind of stuff?

[00:40:33] David: uh, so I'm thinking about, um, uh, how, like the procession of the body, that we carry it to the cemetery from church. Um, if a family chose not to do that, they would be seen with suspicion. Um,

[00:40:47] Ellie: But so the, so you also have to have the funeral in the church?

[00:40:50] David: Yeah, like there is a mass, uh, but like the funeral is usually at the home followed by a mass, uh, and then followed by like certain prayer traditions.

I'll say something about that in a hot second. But I think overall in Mexico, the very idea that mourning is something that you could do in the privacy of your family alone or just like in the privacy of your selfhood would be nonsensical. Uh, and so because it's inherently public and collective, it has to be ritualistically framed

[00:41:18] Ellie: Yeah, I think this is true in a lot of places, but certainly not, at least not to the same extent here in the US. I think death is often something that we keep private within the space of the family and close friends, sure, but not something that is actually publicly put on display and mourned

[00:41:37] David: Mm-hmm. Well, and that also points to just different cultural conceptions of death, right? Like just how different cultures not just perform certain rituals, but understand the very notion of life and death. And this is an, a really important theme in the writings of, um, Mexican existentialist philosopher by the name of Emilio Uranga, who is writing in the 20th century about this,

And this is a common theme in the writings of a lot of Mexican existentialist philosophers from the 20th century who are wrestling with this question of how Mexican people, specifically in light of our history, in light of our experience, in light of our politics, how we experience death and how we think about it and how we relate to it.

And one figure who writes about this is the philosopher Emilio Uranga, who wrote this really important text called Analysis of Mexican Being, where he essentially suggests that Mexicans do in fact relate to death differently, and that philosophy would benefit from understanding this concept of death rather than the concept of death and mortality that we get in European philosophers like Sartre or Heidegger.

[00:42:51] Ellie: Yeah, where death is really conceived of as individualizing

[00:42:55] David: Yeah, as individualizing and also as in the future. That's a really important point, but

I'll, I'll come back to, to, that in a hot second. But basically, Uranga develops this whole existential ontology about the Mexican being, where he says, "Look Ontologically speaking, there are three things. There is being, there is nothingness, and in between them is what he calls the accident.

Accident is how being and nothingness interact, and the human condition unfolds at the level of the accident. We are not nothing as humans, so we're more than nothing, but we're not full self-sufficient being either. So we live in the space of the accidental. And then he makes this claim, about which I have mixed feelings honestly, where he says Mexican people inhabit the accidental more than anybody else.

Uh, so there's this, like, kind of cultural, like, exceptionalism

here. It's just that it happens to be Mexicans rather than French or German who are placed at the center. So I kind of like it, but I'm also like,

[00:44:02] Ellie: The Volksgeist of the Mexican

is to be living an accident

[00:44:07] David: Yeah, so it's a Mexican universalism of sorts. And he says the Mexican people inhabit the accidental because we have a different relationship to death, where we don't see death as something that is to come.

We see it as something that is always already there with us. So we are not being toward death as Heidegger would say. We are being with death. Um, and you see this in a lot of aspects of Mexican culture, uh, Mexican folklore, Mexican history. And the way he puts it in this text analysis of Mexican being is that for the Mexican, death is not something that follows after life, so it's not like a sequential, like, first and second, but rather they are a dynamic duo that are always interpenetrating one another.

So this is a quote from Uranga: "Death is, for the Mexican, a symbol of his own life, since the parameters with which we delineate life are the same parameters that allow us to delineate death."

And so the way I, I read this is that for him to say that death is to come, as Heidegger would say, is as incoherent as saying that life is to come or that we are toward life.

We are already always in it, and life and death are inseparable terms. And you see this appreciation for the duality and commingling of those terms in Mexican traditions like Dia De Los Muertos,

where the dead are among us.

Um, in certain mourning rituals, like what we call La Novena or, um, El Novenario, which is basically after somebody dies, there is a nine-day period of consecutive nightly prayer, uh, following the funeral.

And on the ninth day, all this mourning turns into an affirmation of life. So it becomes a party, and people bring, like, tamales, and they bring mole and hot chocolate. And so we celebrate death as celebrating life as celebrating death

[00:46:12] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I wanna go back to Heidegger here because I think Heidegger's claim that death is individualizing and, uh, and in the future, like not something that we have access to right now, is actually pretty convincing. And so I don't know exactly what I've been-- Udanaga's book has been on my list for literally years, and I haven't read it, um, yet, so I, like, really, really need to.

I've been hearing such great stuff about his work. But I'm curious how he might respond to this because Heidegger's claim is that essentially, yes, death in the common sense way of understanding it is all around us all the time.

We're reading obituaries in newspapers, we're going to people's funerals, and so on and so forth. But our own death is not something that we have access to, right? And it's not something that anybody else will ever have access to. And so the reason that death is individualizing is because only I can die my death for me.

Even if somebody else sacrifices themselves for me, they're dying their own death, right, in that case. And so to say that I am being toward death is to say that I'm individualized in virtue of my death. It's also to say a few other things which I won't go into in detail here, but I think that's really important.

So Heidegger's not saying that, like, death isn't around us. It's just that there is a kind of individualization to it as well as a futurity. Because the truth is, even if I am necessarily being toward death, I'm not currently experiencing my death. Like, death, as Heidegger puts it, is the utmost possibility of my own impossibility.

[00:47:49] David: Okay, so good because this is where Uranga has beef with Heidegger, where he says for the Mexican person, the right term to understand death is not impossibility. It's actually possibility. So our recognition of mortality, that death is life and life is death, and that the two are co-occurring, is not a limit that, that represents the horizon of what I can be.

It's actually the ground from which I undertake all of my possibilities.

[00:48:18] Ellie: would say the same thing.

Heidegger explicitly says, like, death is not a limit in the sense that the fruit has ripened and now is dying or something like that.

It's the possibility of my own impossibility.

[00:48:31] David: Uh, yeah,

and so that,

[00:48:33] Ellie: important for him

[00:48:34] David: yeah, but it, it's the possibility of the impossibility. We're gonna get super technical here, but I think for Uranga, the point here is that death, when conceived about being in the future, separates us from it. And even your claim that, like, right now I am alive, you know, and, like, I am toward death, Uranga would say, no, we are dying and we are death already, at least from a Mexican cultural historical perspective,

[00:48:58] Ellie: those are two different claims. If we're dying, to dying, uh, you-- I think you can also be dying but living, right? Obviously. If you're, if you're dying, you're still alive. You're not dead yet. But we're not death, right? If we were, uh, use, use the death or we could say we're not dead. were dead, then we

[00:49:15] David: Y-

[00:49:15] Ellie: be living

[00:49:16] David: Yeah, and so maybe also another way of articulating the claim is that because of the cultural history of Mexico, like the mythology, the politics, so on and so forth, the Mexican is more comfortable living in proximity to death than the European, according to Uranga, because we already recognize that we live at the edge of being in nothingness, which is the accident.

Um, and so there's... He then points to a, a bunch of things like, mm, how Mexican people experience emotions like mourning and grief, or the way they talk about luck and randomness and things that are accidental, that suggests that for the Mexican, it's not as if we are living in a position of security that will end, but that the ground is always already shaking, always already broken, and that's the space of the accident and what he calls insufficiency, the insufficiency of being, which is a space between to be and not to be

[00:50:15] Ellie: I just think that's more compatible with Heidegger maybe than Uranga thinks it is. Not to be the person being like, "It's already in Heidegger." However, what is definitely not already in Heidegger is an emphasis on the collective mourning rituals and the experience of death around us. He just kind of like vaguely gestures toward it.

And so very early on in Overthink's history, I asked you if we could do an episode on this concept, zozobra, which is associated with the work of Uranga and other Mexican philosophers. Um, and you were like, "Uh, I don't know, that seems maybe a little specific for an episode," but we wanted to touch on it at some point, so here we are doing that.

So I'm really fascinated by this concept, but I haven't studied at length, so tell us about this

[00:50:58] David: tell me in one or two sentences just, like, what you've heard about the concept

[00:51:02] Ellie: it is a, um, Mexican concept, a Spanish word obviously, a Mexican concept of collective mourning that has something to do with mourning, um, a sad political situation

[00:51:15] David: Okay. So yeah, so sobra is, uh, the name of a festival in Santa Fe, um, where it's very similar to Burning Man when it's collective and mourning and you burn like an effigy and

all of that. New Mexico.

[00:51:29] David: But it's also the term for an emotion in, uh, Spanish, and it's an emotion of, it's a state of extreme unrest and incertitude, which is why it's so appealing to Uranga, the philosopher of the accident or the accidental. And so in Sosobra, you recognize that you are living in a space where anything can happen any second.

There is no safety. There are no guardrails, and that's part of the intimacy that he wants to posit between the being of the Mexican and the being of the accident. And, uh, interestingly, I didn't know this, but I, I, I researched it, the term actually comes from, like, ships and maritime practices, w- and it, it refers to the moment when, um, a captain loses complete control of the ship when they are at sea because the waves are st- are too strong for them to control it.

And so it's at that moment when you become completely at the mercy of the impersonal will

[00:52:30] Ellie: Whoa.

Oh

[00:52:31] David: s-

[00:52:32] Ellie: Oh, that's so evocative

[00:52:34] David: Yeah, it, yeah, and so the, the idea here is that that maritime experience captures this emotional state that is in fact the existential condition of the Mexican people. Um, and so it's not that we experience sozobra when we go on a cruise, right?

Or when we get on a boat,

um, but that yeah, but that we are actually in a kind of perpetual, uh, condition of sozobra, and that that's why our being is more authentic, according to Uranga, than the being of Europeans who are sort of fooling themselves into thinking that they are in a place of safety and sufficiency, and that they are closer to being rather than nothingness

[00:53:16] Ellie: Yeah, this move of a certain exceptionalism is always, always an interesting one. And I mean, you know, better, better from the mouth of Uranga than from Heidegger, who thought that the German people, you know, were where it's at. But I find there are a number of philosophers who will respond to the frequent European exceptionalism we see by being like, "Actually, you guys just got the people wrong.

We're the ones who have the most, uh, truth or who have the destiny of history at our fingertips." Du Bois does this as well,

[00:53:47] David: Yeah.

[00:53:48] Ellie: Yeah.

Uranga here.

[00:53:49] David: Well, and Vasconcelos does too, another very important Mexican philosopher whom we touched

upon in our episode

on mestizaje, right? Where the idea is that, like, the brown people are, like, the perfect blend racially of all things, uh, which is, like, racist in its own way

[00:54:03] Ellie: Yeah, but I do remember hearing, it might have been the philosopher Francisco Gallegos who talked or wrote about this, um, because he works a lot on the, on Uranga. Um, but hearing about how so sobra seems to be a more generalizable condition in recent decades, especially post-election of Trump in the US.

[00:54:22] David: And in the wake of COVID, actually.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I mean, the, the condition of living under COVID is precisely that, that death is around us. Like, it, it might already be, like, in us. We might already have contracted the virus. Uh, and so any sense of like, "Oh, we might die in some indefinite future," uh, gets challenged by the sense of urgency, um, of that which cannot be controlled

[00:54:46] Ellie: All right, so we talked about Freud, we talked about Udanga, we talked a little bit about Derrida. I wanna talk about a French philosopher here who wrote a book called Mourning Diary that is a very lyrical, lovely account, uh, of mourning the death of his mother, and that is Roland Barthes.

I realized upon reading this book, um, through doing a little background research, 'cause I was like, "Oh, dude, this w- this guy was really close to his mom," that Barthes actually lived with his mother for most of his life until her death at the age of 84 in 1977. And then very sadly, Barthes himself died just a few years later after his mother's death when he was killed by a van while walking home from lunch.

I did not know this.

[00:55:33] David: Oh yeah, I knew that. It was a laundry van actually carrying dirty laundry in Paris.

[00:55:38] Ellie: brutal. Really brutal. Um, and posthumously, the journal that Barthes wrote after his mom's passing, which he jotted down on these small quarter sheets of paper in the years between their two deaths, were published as a book, and that book is Mourning Diary. And it seems likely that Barthes himself eventually did wanna publish a book based on this journal, but he just never had the chance, so it's kind of like an unfinished work.

And because these were written on small sheets, the quarter sheets of paper, the entries are short, they're even fragmentary, And sometimes he'd grab a quarter sheet and jot something down while he was otherwise, like, working on one of his books. But at the same time, even though part of the fragmentary nature of this book is due to those circumstances, I think it's also very true of Barthes' writing style in general. He often writes in pithy chapters or in fragments. And I found this book quite beautiful for depicting the intensity of grief after someone has died.

You know, we talked especially with Freud about mourning in pretty abstract terms. Barthes writes with such pathos, and he-- You know, this is especially close to him because this is a loved one who lived with him, or whom he lived with. Um, in fact, he was called a mama's boy. Even, even for a French guy, he was a mama's boy.

[00:56:54] David: I was gonna say we talked earlier about father issues. It seems like mommy issues. We have episodes on both

[00:56:58] Ellie: we do. We do indeed. But the New York Times review of this book in 2010 was called Wallowing in Grief Over Maman

Mommy

[00:57:15] David: In the French. Uh, yeah, for our listeners who don't know, maman is like mommy. Uh, yeah, it's, like, very infantilizing. Uh, but was the review positive or was it critical? 'Cause that almost makes it sound patronizing, to be

honest, in French.

[00:57:21] Ellie: I did read the, I did read the article, but it was-- I think it was short, and I now read it, like, you know, a few weeks ago, so I'm forgetting. Um, but yeah, I, I just love the shade in that title alone. Um, so there are some really interesting themes in this journal that I think deepen some of what we've already discussed, and so I wanna hear your thoughts on them, you know, as I recount some of the, the things that Barthes says here.

So one of the main themes in this Mourning Diary is the way that mourning transforms the relation between self and world. he says things about his own self-transformation after the passing of his mom, some of which sound kind of Freudian. He says things like, " Henceforth and forever, I am my own mother."

But I also think we can read that in a non-Freudian sense, right? He's just really, like, especially if you're living with a mom, cohabitating, she's,

let's be real, probably doing the cooking and cleaning, or I don't know. No, I mean,

[00:58:18] David: Yeah.

[00:58:18] Ellie: writer, so he might've been paying the bills, but I,

[00:58:20] David: does, doesn't mean

[00:58:21] Ellie: I think Mommy was doing the

cooking and cleaning.

Yeah. Um, so he has to now, you know, presumably do those, uh, or maybe just, like, hire somebody to. But okay, in a non-shady non-shady territory, he says that after her passing, he tries to live every day according to her values and to reproduce something of her household order and her nourishment of him for himself, and he feels really devastated by the fact that he falls short of this.

He feels he doesn't actually live up to her values. And so there's a way that, you know, this transformation between self and world has to do with the adoption of her and her values into him. Then it also has to do with the fact, and I think, you know, it's fair to say there might have been a little guilt around this, and I think I was sensing that from how he was writing about this, about how his mother's passing means that he could fulfill some of the desires that he couldn't before then when he was taking care of her.

Um, but the weird part is, even though he can fulfill those desires, right now he has the time to do those things that he couldn't before, " I no longer desire what I used to desire." Her death has so transformed his value system that he just doesn't even have the same desires at all.

[00:59:37] David: Okay, so I think that's wonderful. I have not read this text and I've been wanting to for some time, so I'm really glad that you're sharing insights, um, with me and with us today. Um, one thing that comes to the foreground for me is precisely the question of value, how your values change in the, uh, wake of the loss of a loved one, especially somebody who is really close.

Because those values only meant anything to you in a world in which that person was alive, and when that world is transformed in that way, some of those values can seem shallow, um, and inconsequential in retrospect. At the same time, there can be, I'll say a reconfiguration of value in relation to the, to the person who died, right?

In this case, he says like, "Oh, I'm not good enough for her. She was too good for me." And I think that's an example of when the guilt that we often feel for not having been better toward the people who died transforms itself into hagiography, like into like treating other people as if they were saints.

And, uh, I think that's the sort of thing that sometimes maybe, well, it's not something that worried Freud, but that maybe we could say feeds the sense of ambivalence of like, oh, that person was so, um, unequivocally, unquestionably good that we don't allow ourselves the space to process our complex feelings toward them

[01:00:56] Ellie: totally. I experienced that a little bit in my own family where, like, one side of my family is really real about the failures of uh, our patriarchs and matriarchs, and the other side of the family is very tempted towards hagiography. And my cousins are kinda like, "Yeah, but you know, it wasn't, it wasn't all

rainbows and unicorns, right?"

And you know, I've been talking a little bit about the transformation of self that happens with mourning for Barth. And I think related to this is also the transformation of world, and both of these have to do with the transformation of values. I think that, you know, th- that's kind of like the umbrella here.

he suggests that the world becomes unreal to him and depressing to him after his mother's death, which I think is, you know, kind of a standard thing to hear in a mourning account. But one of the points that really provided a glimpse of something different, and I think quite unique, is the fact that he recounts bursting into tears while listening to a song that he previously thought was totally cheesy and bourgeois.

Um, a song by Suset. I don't know the context there, to be honest. But he's like, "Yeah, I thought this song was just, like, really bourgeois," and yeah, you know, whatever. Uh, we can elaborate from there. It would, it would be like-- What would be a good example here? Um, just like me-- Oh, okay. Bless him, but Josh Groban, "You Raise Me Up," a song that is often played at funerals.

Is that song sentimental as heck? Yes. Does that song hit so hard when one is mourning? Also yes. Been there um, for myself.

[01:02:30] David: Yeah. So the idea that grief hits you randomly I think is a really important point because it coheres with accounts of grief. Like anybody who has, uh, lost a loved one will tell you that the feelings will come out of the blue in the most unexpected places. And I think that also helps us complicate the view of grief and mourning that we get from Freud, where it's almost too linear and too neat of a process when it unfolds in its natural, um, you know, following its natural trajectory when it's not pathological.

Freud seems to say like, "Oh, the reality principle helps us realize that they're not here anymore, and over time we just, like, get fixed," quote, unquote. Um, but there are very competing accounts, very different accounts of grief, and I'm here thinking in dialogue with Barthes, um, I-- The Year of Magical Thinking by,

uh, Joan Didion, where she's reflecting on her life during the year after the passing of her husband and also her daughter.

Um, and she also echoes this sentiment that minute things would suddenly engulf her existence as reminders that came out of the blue. And I think if we wanna make a meta point, that fragmentary quality of the process of mourning is productively reflected in the way Barthes wrote this text,

right? In these quarter sheets. How else would you write about mourning if not in shreds of paper that are not unified into a, a linear account? I think that's wonderful.

[01:03:59] Ellie: I think what you say, David, is really insightful too, because it also coheres with Barthes' main contestation of Freud in this book. He rejects the psychoanalytic concept of mourning that we get in Freud largely because he doesn't think it makes sense to think about mourning as a process that has a natural endpoint.

He says that mourning itself is immobile, and he describes instead going about one's daily life and then kind of occasionally being plunged back into that mourning state. And whether it's happening two days after the-- or after his mother's passing or two years after his mother's passing, that actual state feels the same to him.

So he says mourning is immobile. What really happens over time is not that the mourning process comes to an end, but just the increase, the sheer increase of a lapse of time when he's been able to live without his mother. But the mourning itself is not subject to time or wearing out. It is as fresh as it was on the first day whenever it re-emerges

[01:05:06] David: Though, so that's really good, and this allows us to think about the work of mourning or, like, the event of mourning, maybe. Uh, work makes it seem too linear and temporally unfolding. Um, but the event of mourning as similar to trauma,

uh, where there is a reenactment that transcends the laws of time, you know, like a flashback or, like, a reenactment of a traumatic event.

Uh, but it also underscores the limit of concepts for capturing the truth of the event, right?

Like, what words do you use, um, to capture these things that freeze you in time and take you out of time and violate the order of time? Um, and, and one thing that I think trauma theorists have said about trauma i- that's really useful and that can be used to think about mourning, is that trauma is that which escapes conceptual capture.

You can't talk about it. You cannot exhaust it. Uh, and I think mourning is very much

[01:06:01] Ellie: Yeah

[01:06:02] David: a form of trauma

[01:06:04] Ellie: Well, you think... I thought you were making an analogy between

[01:06:07] David: I am making an analogy, but I do-- I I think it actually goes a little bit more than an analogy because, I mean,

[01:06:12] Ellie: Hmm.

[01:06:13] David: somebody is traumatic

[01:06:14] Ellie: I don't agree that mourning is a form of trauma. Some-- Yeah, I think they're, I think they're

[01:06:18] David: The loss

[01:06:19] Ellie: distinct. Yeah.

[01:06:21] David: loss of somebody is traumatic.

[01:06:22] Ellie: Yeah, that

[01:06:23] David: And s- so...

[01:06:25] Ellie: is...

[01:06:26] David: is like working through trauma,

[01:06:28] Ellie: Yeah. Those need to

[01:06:30] David: it goes beyond...

[01:06:31] Ellie: for mourning to be a working through trauma

[01:06:32] David: Yeah, I agree, but I, I guess I do wanna say that it's more than just an analogy. There is a, a

connection between trauma and mourning that's more than just, like, making the same point in both registers

[01:06:44] Ellie: Yeah, something else that comes up in this book that I found provocative is the idea that mourning itself is not an emotion or even, like, a complex of emotions, but rather it's a susceptibility to emotion. So he describes it not as a specific feeling itself, but rather as a susceptibility to being moved.

A painful availability awaiting the onset of a sense of life is how he describes it. What do you think about this?

[01:07:11] David: So I actually don't like that very much because it makes it seem as if mourning is just a form of reactivity or irritability when I just say like I'm quick to an emotion.

And I think that just folds mourning too much into the biological category of irritation or irritability, which is a property of muscles. You know, if you take like, if you rub a muscle for a long enough period of time, it will get irritated. And so for me, that's, that's almost too biological of a concept, and also it's too broad Because there are a lot of conditions that make me irritable but that have nothing to do with mourning, right? I'm very quick to emotionality when I'm angry, when I'm frustrated. Honestly, when I'm hungry, I'm like a classic case of a hangry, um, person, and I would not wanna confuse those with the seriousness of mourning.

So for me, we need a more nuanced account of mourning that is not just quickness to feeling.

[01:08:15] Ellie: Okay, fair. I hear that, and I do think also you might mention the fact that when you're mourning, you're much more susceptible to certain emotions than others, right? You're much more susceptible to sadness rather than to delight. Although Barthes also does suggest that he's torn between a profound mourning and a certain lightness.

And towards the end of the text, he suggests that there's a difference between the lightness that he feels immediately after his death, what we might call like the unbearable lightness, and which he later comes to realize is a kind of false freedom.

That is the freedom from caregiving, um, and so on and so forth. That is very different, according to Barthes, from the freedom he eventually comes to have, which he calls a desolate liberty.

We might think here, even though he's rejecting the Freudian idea of mourning as a process that comes to an endpoint, is this realization of a kind of desolate liberty not in fact a return to that uninhibited ego that Freud talks about? I think Barthes would say, no, it's not, because the ego is now desolate, right?

The freedom is not just like the same old freedom that one had. But nonetheless, you might still see a kind of process at work there