Brown, 'Women's Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics' (2003)

Brown highlights the question of how to live 'after' the promise of a revolutionary feminism. She argues that we are now urged 'to think feminism and women's studies in this condition of afterness, in this temporal condition of "knowing better" about our naive yet founding past, and thus also to grieve what we now know we never should have loved... a tortured and guilty grieving to be sure' (3). Brown wants to question what it might take to live in this temporality, having given up the hope for a radical overthrow of the social relations of the present. Further, she wants to delineate what indeed has been lost, what the loss of revolution is.

Indeed, she argues that what we mourn when we mourn revolution is not necessarily clear, or even necessary to delineate. Brown points to the lack of boundaries in mourning in a similar way to Butler. 'The condition of mourning is a stumbling and stuttering one, a condition of disturbed ground, of inarticulateness, of disorientation in and about time' (4). Brown also argues that a mourning being 'learns a new temporality' that punctures 'conceits of linearity with a different way of living time' (5).

Brown argues that a loss of revolution, or a fear that revolution equals totalitarian might seem to consign us to the present. 'It is this conviction about the inevitable triumph of the people over the illegitimate powers of wealth and rule that exploit, dominate or disenfranchise whose loss washes over us today' (6). Brown pushes to seeing this as melancholic instead of mourning precisely because there can be no closure in mourning a 'promise.' 'So we cannot even see or say what we mourn, gather at the site of its disappearance, weep over its remains, hold its lively embodiment in our memory as we must if the mourning is to come to an end' (7).

Brown declares that revolution is 'unquestionably finished' but then wonders why we should mourn it. For her, quite simply, it means letting go of dreams for something better. 'A severe critique that does not articulate with anticipation of a different future... an illness with no cure... how to proceed when this has become our condition?' (13) Indeed, she seems to be searching for an alternative way to live through this diagnosis. 'What as yet unpracticed political sensibility is required to dwell here?' (13)

Brown's solution seems to be to keep alive a utopian impulse while giving up indeed the blueprint of revolution. 'Above all, how to suspend this utopian impulse in a different temporality such that it could fuel rather than haunt or taunt left political life in our time?' (14) 'The task, then, would be to recuperate a utopian imaginary in the absence of a revolutionary mechanism for its realization such that this imaginary could have a political use, that is, participate in the making of social transformation and not only constitute an escape from the felt impossibility of such transformation' (14).

Brown concludes with suggesting that sitting in mourning might be productive. Through this 'dwelling,' it perhaps becomes possible to see how a 'seemingly unendurable loss is also the opening of possibility to live and think differently' (15). In other words, trying to let go of loss or disavow it or discredit it might also mean not using loss as a means to see differently. Indeed, that loss might be a pivotal place for learning to live and think differently.

Butler, Melancholy Gender - Refused Identification (1995)

Butler points out how Freud changes his position in 'Mourning and Melancholia' in the subsequent The Ego and the Id over what it might mean to resolve grief. While in MM, Freud sees grief as being resolvable through a breaking and then re-making of attachment, he later 'makes room for the notion that melancholic identification may be a prerequisite for letting the object go' (167). However, she points out that he changes what it means to let an object go, for in his later work, the letting go does not mean a final break in the attachment. Instead, there is 'the incorporation of the attachment as identification, where identification becomes a magical, a psychic, form of preserving the object' (167). These identifications are what form the ego. 'Indeed, one might conclude that melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego itself and, hence, to avert the loss as a complete loss' (167). In other words, letting go becomes about a move of the object from external to internal, preserving the object in the ego as a way to both refuse loss and simultaneously let go. As Butler explains, 'giving up the object becomes possible only on condition of a melancholic internalization or, what might for our purposes turn out to be even more important, a melancholic incorporation' (167).

Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) [1915]

Freud begins by suggesting that mourning and melancholia share a cause, namely the loss of a love object, but while mourning is considered normal, melancholia is seen as pathological. Freud explains that when a loved object is lost, there is opposition to giving up the libidinal position. However, that with mourning, eventually the reality of the object's absence wins over and the clinging to the object ceases. Freud remarks though that this is definitely a painful and time-consuming process, whereby '[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it' (245). At the end of the process of mourning, Freud explains that the ego indeed becomes 'free and uninhibited agian' (245).

Turning to melancholia, Freud makes an interesting distinction and suggests that the loss in melancholia is 'of a more ideal kind' where the loss may not actually be the death of a loved one (245). In this kind of loss, what is specific is the way that what is lost might not actually be clear. Freud explains that 'one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost' (245). 'This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him' (245). For Freud, this places melancholia in the realm of the unconscious, whereas mourning never moves past the conscious.

Further, Freud explains that this results in an impoverishment of ego in melancholia that is not found in mourning. 'In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself' (246). In other words, while mourning exhibits clear signs of an individual losing an object, melancholic individuals express a loss of ego. Freud explains that the self-reproaches in melancholic individuals are actually directed against a loved one. While in mourning the libido withdrawls from the lost loved object and is displaced onto another object, in melancholy, 'the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego' (249). In this withdrawl into the ego, it serves to 'establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object' (249).

Freud explains that both mourning and melancholy can run their courses and pass after time. Mourning's 'reality-testing' eventually frees the libido. Freud explains that 'normal mourning, too, overcomes the loss of the object, and it, too, while it lasts, absorbs all the energies of the ego' (255). Like with mourning, the process of getting past melancholia is a long and arduous one. However, Freud is less certain about how this process finds completion but seems to suggest that the process is similar to mourning - a 'detaching the libido bit by bit' (256). The process is undoubtedly different in melancholia because of ambivalence. This ambivalence is missing in mourning because usually mourning takes place after the death of an object, whereas melancholia seems to occur in less clear losses. 'In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault' (256). This same process occurs in mourning but Freud explains that the path to recovery is blocked in melancholia. The inability to settle the ambivalence towards the love object eventually leads to its incorporation into the ego. 'So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction' (257). Freud does however insist on an analogy between the work of mourning and melancholia. 'Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalance loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it' (257).