According to Freud, memory resists mourning because what is lost is not only a person/object, but also the relationship a person establishes with that person/object. Therefore, there is a need for a “mourning work”: that is, the “process of killing the deceased”. In his article titled "Mourning and Melancholy", Freud distinguishes between "healthy/successful mourning" and "pathological/unsuccessful mourning". Successful mourning is about replacing the lost object/person with another object/person; Failed grief, on the other hand, is thwarted grief, a pathological condition, and leads to melancholy. In this pathological state, the ego is captured by the lost object, becomes devoted to the lost object. Emphasizing that melancholia is an unhealthy state of obsession in his early writings, Freud privileged the attitude he combined with melancholy in his later writings; What is fundamentally important for mourning is to incorporate what is lost, to consent to being changed forever because of the loss.
What is in question here is not the final severing of attachment to the loss, but the incorporation of attachment into the body as identification, and in this way the loss begins to reside in the body: The loss that is not fully abandoned is transferred from the outside to the inside and is preserved as a part of the ego. The main emphasis of Freud's analyzes in Ego and Id is the transformative effect of loss. Butler attaches great importance to this emphasis: True mourning can be achieved by the person's consent to be taken over by the loss; This is also surrender to the other/the uncertain/the unrepresentable. The condition of being a political subject today, which is cumbersome with the ghosts and weight of the past, is this melancholy or unconventional mourning dedicated to keeping the lost in the present.
Unconventional mourning is mentioned in Walter Benjamin's article titled "On the Concept of History" and in Paul Klee's "Angelus". Novus”: In this painting, Klee depicts an angel who is about to walk away from something from which he cannot tear his gaze away: His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open, his wings are stretched. The angel of history can only look like this, his face turned to the past. What appears to us as a chain of events, he sees as a single disaster, a disaster that constantly piles up the ruins and throws them at his feet. The angel would like to stay a little longer, die Bringing people back to life, reuniting broken pieces... But a storm coming from Heaven has caught his wings with such force that he can't close them again. As the ruins rise towards the sky in front of his eyes, he is dragged helplessly by the storm to the future to which he has turned his back…”
This quote perfectly expresses the ambiguous existence of those who watch the wreckage of history. The spectator, whose past, future and, of course, present do not belong to him, will probably be caught up in the storm when he turns away from the disaster he sees for a moment, and will be dragged into the future to which he turns his back; This is a passive position before history. The active relationship to be established with the debris of history is possible with loyalty to the "event" in the time of the "now", which is not transition/flow but "break". The messianic moment, which suspends the dialectic of construction-destruction, must suspend what is called progress in history in order to save the past and direct the past to the future. .
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