Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

INFINITE GRIEF

James A. Godley

To cite this article: James A. Godley (2018) INFINITE GRIEF, Angelaki, 23:6, 93-110, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546994

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546994

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 23 number 6 december 2018

Jarovit by Zuzana Ridzoň ová.

He had made it his: that long line, of which
we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he
was giving it back, as everything must be
given back, so that, passing through death,
it can live forever.
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”1
a beloved abstraction
veryone knows the event of a loved one’s
E death can change the mourner’s fundamen-
tal convictions about reality, their basic outlook
or Weltanschauung, but why this is the case is
not easy to account for. We ask ourselves how
the remembered life of that person affects the
still living, how it makes a difference and
changes the given, but it is hard to know
whether such ideas really come from the truth
of our dead, or if they are just an extension of
ourselves. Theoretical treatments of such
issues, faced with a quandary that quickly
becomes overwhelming, tend to cleave to one
side or another of an interdisciplinary
approach – historical, anthropological, socio-
logical, psychoanalytic, philosophical – that,
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/18/060093-18 © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546994
james a. godley
INFINITE GRIEF
freud, hegel, and lacan on
the thought of death
while ostensibly being rooted in such questions,
end up multiplying the terms of the problem to
the point where the initial inquiry has become
obscured.
On one side are matters of the corpse – that
is, the finite individuality, localizable (if non-
locatable) within infinitesimal circles of histori-
cal, cultural, familial networks of signification.
Then there is what is sometimes called the “dia-
lectics of mourning” that concern larger scale
frameworks like ideology or metaphysics, and
whose implication is probably best described
as one of critique.2 Mourning here has more to
do with abstract loss: structures or orientations
that assume loss in some way, “take it up,” even
“work through” it. Such directions can seem

93
 infinite grief
exciting and give us consolatory hope even in
their statement, for to be able to “work
through” a loss implies a passage that, if it
does not leave death behind exactly, at least
allows us to build a road around it or,
perhaps, a bridge over it. It implies that the dis-
aster of the other’s non-existence need not entail
their end as such and can, in effect, lead to
something new. Such a promise, supported by
a simple narrative telos – for example, the “pro-
gress” from hopelessness to triumph – is reiter-
ated through centuries of consolatory literature,
from Boethius and Bunyan to modern-day
guides for grievers. But can the death of
someone really provide an adequate object of
“work” – psychical, intellectual, or otherwise?
To put it more pointedly, can the theoretical
work of making mourning into an object of
thought, of turning the experience of grief into
a general concept (as in the passage of Erriner-
ung into Gedächtnis) offer any hope of “over-
coming” the anguish of loss?
There appears to be a tacit ethical proposition
implied in these considerations, which we would
do well to investigate at its extremities. Let us
consider the implications – the noblest and the
most monstrous – of proposing that mourning
could be the means of adopting a new concep-
tual orientation. At the noble end, if what theor-
ists hope is true and the work of mourning can
accomplish what it proposes, then it offers a
praxis that not only will console us for our loss
but can even change the way we are disposed
toward death, hence change the way we live. If
the other’s loss brings me to face the remainder
of my finite existence, as well as to pay better
attention to the way others confront theirs,
then the ethics of the singular can readily be
seen to intersect with the politics of the univer-
sal. So when I think about how best to honor the
dead or how to deal with the pain her death (and
life) have caused (recognizing that this is the
way to honor her) then I am likewise reflecting
on how best to elevate life, how best to live,
and thus to honor the life of the loved one
through championing what she leaves behind.
The vicissitudes of mourning can make me
feel the pull of truths that lead me toward a
more ethical life and thereby of finding ways
of inspiring others to do so as well. At best,
the dead are our monuments and examples.
We look to them to know what to repeat.
But there can also be monstrous implications.
To see the death of a loved one as an opportunity
for advancement, even if that means a moral
improvement or an overture to a new way of
thinking, can smack of a frightful disrespect.
Thus, in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1914)
when Freud regards as proper and normal the
survivor’s desire for detachment (Lösung)
from the loving bonds of the deceased in order
to clear the way for the libido to eventually
reinvest in a new object,3 it can remind us of
unfeeling pragmatic calculations, economic
investments, the conversion of loss into profit.
At its worst, it implies faithlessness to the
dead and the exploitation of grief, turning the
occasion of mourning – one’s own or others’ –
into a narcissistic resource to be utilized for
private gain.4
Along these lines, Tammy Clewell in her
influential essay “Mourning beyond Melancho-
lia” criticizes the early Freudian conception of
grief-work (Trauerarbeit) as “self-serving [ … ]
less a lament for the passing of a unique other,
and more a process geared toward restoring a
certain economy of the subject.”5 Emphasizing
the fact that during the years Freud wrote his
principal essays on mourning he devoted much
of his attention to the economics of narcissism,
Clewell argues that Freud’s view of the experi-
ence of grief was myopically focused on issues
of self-preservation rather than the ethics of
remembrance. “Mourning and Melancholia,”
the fifth of the extant metapsychological
essays, mainly discusses mourning in compari-
son with his clinical observations of melancholia
as a disturbance of “self-regarding feelings” that
also, paradoxically, featured a sharp reduction of
libido directed toward others. Like melancholia,
mourning featured the withdrawal of libido but
not to the extent of disturbing self-regard, as in
the pathological condition. Given this clue,
Freud was able to discover important differences
in the way the two conditions identified with the
lost object. For example, whereas the mourner
ends up asserting distance relative to the
object, letting it be in its estrangement, the
94

melancholic identifies with the lost object,
reeling it into the self where it gets jumbled.6
Although Clewell’s main concern is to uphold
the irreplaceability of the deceased, the “self-
serving” implication of her criticism is thickly
entwined with Freud’s theoretical focus on nar-
cissism as such, leading her to downplay the
differences between the two states in order to
hone in on their similarity. By focusing on the
economic management of the survivor’s pain,
Freud’s theory appeared to regard constant
devotion to the dead as pathological. By exten-
sion, Clewell argues that this position made
him complicit in “a longstanding epistemologi-
cal and cultural tradition in which the subject
acquires legitimacy at the expense of the
other’s separateness.”7
In my view, mourning in early Freud is more
attuned to the other’s separateness than Clewell
allows, but the advantage of her rebuke is that it
allows us to see the threat implied by the “legit-
imation” of a theory when given occasion to
exert itself against who or what cannot
respond. This is in part why speculation in its
equivocal guises is regarded with such distrust.
Under the conditions of global capitalism,
theoretical speculation continues to be attached
to the same suspicions attendant upon its not-so-
distant metaphor, economic reification. Could
this be the case with Freudian Trauerarbeit as
well? Is the theory of working through a loss
already to reify the dead, exploiting their
memory for the survivor’s emotional gain? If
so, then the “detachment” (Lösung) from the
lost object could only mean infidelity and
betrayal; an occasion, moreover, for the distor-
tion of facts, memories, archives. Such a
threat seems tantamount to erasure. It would
be to commit the dead to absolute non-existence
– to stop up their transmission.
Perhaps such a horror occurred to Freud
when, late in his career, thinking of the death
of his daughter Sophie, he admitted to his
friend Ludwig Binswanger (who had lost a
son) that he needed to rethink his earlier pos-
ition about the resolution of mourning:
Although we know that after such a loss the
acute state of mourning will subside, we
95
godley
also know we shall remain inconsolable and
will never find a substitute. No matter what
may fill the gap, even if it be filled comple-
tely, it nevertheless remains something else.
And actually this is how it should be. It is
the only way of perpetuating that love
which we do not want to relinquish.8
Many have taken this personal letter as indica-
tive of a turning point in Freud’s ethics,
almost a private mea culpa of his earlier theor-
etical stance. Here, rather than to choose the
path of forcing oneself to look for something
to fill the “gap,” he seems resolved to an
ethics of dedication and faithfulness to the
dead, even if it means remaining inconsolable
for the rest of his life. A term like the “lost
object” to which Freud’s theory of mourning
is regularly referred, doesn’t quite capture the
poignancy of what it means when Freud
speaks of his daughter this way. In both extre-
mely personal and highly abstract terms,
Freud is indicating what the “object” of mourn-
ing is for him – a gap, a hollow of agony that
never goes away. The difficult implication is
not that he can’t forget his daughter, but that
the pain of her loss is unworkable; the loss of
the loved one is here an immitigable wound
that at best can only be temporarily forgotten
and at worst means he would retroactively
cancel (“relinquish”) his love for the sake of
future opportunities.
If such a declaration is understandable for a
father, it’s perhaps harder to accept such a
bleak conclusion from the father of a thera-
peutic practice. It is tempting to revert back
to the earlier, “self-serving” model – better to
let go and move on than give up on the good
work of consolation. Or should we take
Freud’s confiding statement to his friend to
mean that he thinks mourning continues indefi-
nitely, a “work” that goes on forever, like an
infinite task? Laplanche sounds a word of
caution here that only deepens the quandary:
the “seal of authenticity that marks Freud’s
‘necrological notes’ or ‘condolence’ letters
reflects only the pursuit of a self-analysis
which was never abandoned.”9 Troublingly,
this would make mourning indistinguishable
from (interminable) analysis, where both one
 infinite grief
and the other amount to the auscultation of the
“gap” that holds the place of death and necess-
arily fails to get anywhere. It appears, in other
words, that in Freud, the work of mourning,
however this is meant – whether productive or
endless, whether its focus is the other or the
self that auto-analyzes – presupposes an object
that is non-finite.
This idea only really makes sense when we
recall Freud’s materialist insistence that there
is no unconscious belief in death. This is
stated most famously in “Thoughts for the
Times on War and Death”:
It is impossible to imagine our own death;
and whenever we attempt to do so we can per-
ceive that we are in fact still present as spec-
tators. Hence, the psychoanalytic school
could venture on the assertion that at
bottom no one believes in his own death,
or, to put the same thing another way, that
in the unconscious every one of us is con-
vinced of his own immortality.10
This assertion, which continues to scandalize
philosophers, is not so much to say that death
is refused or denied as that it is literally
unthinkable as such. The emphasis therefore
is less on the naive disavowal of the facticity of
mortality as on identifying the limits of reflec-
tive consciousness. Simply knowing that death
is or that we are finite changes nothing for us
because we do not have an experience that
would refer to it. Rather, all that the belief in
finitude can evoke is precisely what death
would mean for consciousness, wherewith a
limit is exposed that is precisely the limits of
the thinking being. Such a confrontation, in
effect, is often one of the principal fears of
obsessional neurotics, where loss of conscious-
ness equates to death. If the unconscious holds
no belief for finitude, then, it nonetheless can
provide a sense of the kind of death the loss of
belief in the omnipotence of consciousness sig-
nifies (i.e., the threat of castration).11
The corollary to the non-belief in finitude, so
often misunderstood, is that there is nonetheless
a very palpable experience of death that most of
us have, which is the death of a loved one. Such
an experience is not something we have the
luxury of disbelieving, though we may well
deny many of its effects. Here, on the contrary
to what might be supposed from the quote
above, there are unconscious beliefs about
death, if by this we mean thought-constructions
that are taken to have truth value but that are
derived secondhand, as it were, from experi-
ences of loss. Through mourning, our speculat-
ive thoughts of death, including mortality and
immortality, are given a highly refined concate-
nation. In Totem and Taboo, Freud even goes
so far as to propose that “man’s first theoretical
achievement – the creation of spirits” arose in
response to the necessity to make sense of the
death of another.12 The incipit of theory, its
inaugural gesture, is mourning. Granted that
this is not a syllogism; there is a subduction
here that is not entirely clear. Why wouldn’t
the intellectual awareness of finitude suffice as
origin of reflection? What special process does
the emotional reality of death involve that
forces this leap to theory?
One famous line from “Mourning and Mel-
ancholia” serves to orient these speculative
implications: “Mourning is regularly the reac-
tion to the loss of a loved person, or to the
loss of some abstraction which has taken the
place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an
ideal, and so on.”13 There are three remarkable
things about this sentence. First, mourning here
does not react to death as such but the “loss of a
loved person” (Verlust einer geliebten Person).
Despite its simplistic phrasing, this already
implies an intersubjective dialectic: a loved
person, beloved, is loved by a lover. In losing
the beloved, the mourner is without that
which made him what he was (viz. the lover of
this beloved).14 Consequently, he becomes
other to himself, whether by remaining
devoted – continuing to love what is no longer
existent, or by letting go and moving on,
thereby ceasing to be the lover. In any event,
this “loved person” stands for the difference
the Other’s inexistence makes. Recognition
founders upon misrecognition in this “loved
person” – now that she no longer exists, the
beloved remains as an abstraction. I cannot
be sure that this abstraction is the same as she
whom I loved. What is remarkable here to the
96

point that it almost seems to resound with the
most crushing cynicism is the idea that what
we loved in another might only be a semblance.
Is that all she ever was?
The second thing to notice is that this
abstraction – the beloved that is missing – is
nonetheless a privileged abstraction that
resists any equivalence with other ideas that
are also marked with loss, even as it connects
to them. This is because the abstraction sticks
in the “place” (Stelle) of loss. Strictly speaking,
this place can be occupied by anything that a
subject values in a highly intensive (“libidinal”)
manner: a nation, a concept, even life itself, pro-
vided that it is an abstraction that, as Freud
says, stands for the loss of a loved person. In
other words, it must signify the truth of that
loss. We could say, then, that what is at stake
is the truth-value of a belief, a word whose
English etymology, derived from German, feli-
citously gives us the combination “be” and
“leif” – beloved or dear; literally, “be-loved.”15
Such a “beloved belief” is what grounds and
gives ultimate shape to an abstraction of a
complex human relationship, the condensation
of innumerably various lived experiences in
metonymically reduced form.16 What this tells
us is that if our beloveds can be reduced to
abstractions, so can our beliefs be loved as
flesh-and-blood lovers. Here, cynicism is
turned on its head and becomes dewy-eyed
idealism: beliefs matter. Even the cynicism of
the cynic takes the place of a beloved.
Finally, what makes belief matter, or at least
what allows us to recognize how much it matters
to us, is what we feel when this place of belief
has been vacated through death. Mourning is a
“reaction” to a loss that reveals that the subjec-
tive truth-effect of the beloved belief is defined
strictly in consequence of its having been
negated. In other words, death provokes a
response that tests whether a belief can remain
what William James would call a “living hypoth-
esis” – a proposition that elicits the emotionality
of conviction – after it is countermanded by the
“command of reality,” which is to say, the law of
finitude.17 Either the belief must be abandoned
so that something else may take its place, or it is
held to despite the fact that it is no longer
97
godley
tenable, whereupon it takes up residence in
the personality of the survivor as a spectral
inhabitation.
In fine, condensed into Freud’s definition, is
the theory that mourning is regularly the reac-
tion to the sense of loss that afflicts us when
we realize that a certain belief has been
negated in its existence and is no longer
tenable – when the place of the beloved has
lost the validity of that abstraction that keeps
her attached to a continued existence. In mourn-
ing, it is this singular thought-construction
(inclusive of memories and fantasies of the
dead) whose sacrifice appears to be at stake in
the perishing of the body of the beloved
person, because it is a belief that appears imper-
iled by negation. Hence, the agony of the melan-
cholic mourner would be that invalidating that
abstraction is too much, a greater loss than it’s
worth, so it’s preferable to try and hold on to
an untenable belief rather than to submit to
the necessity demanded in the name of finitude.
However, if the perishing of the abstract belief
that keeps the other “alive” is possible, so too
is it possible to conceive of finitude itself as a
specific thought-construction, a determinate
negation that is not the “final word” but pre-
cisely a thought of death that is itself subject
to the possibility of being negated. Whereupon
the enigmatic place of the beloved, like the
“gap” that opens up within Freud following
the death of his daughter Sophie, bears
witness to the persistence of a love that passes
beyond death. In this way, the love at issue in
mourning stages an encounter with infinitude.
paradoxes of transience
In the midst of World War I, Freud wrote the
essays that defined his speculative approach to
the question of death and mourning, among
which was “On Transience.”18 Wandering the
countryside with two literary companions
(most likely Rainier Maria Rilke and Lou
Andreas Salome), Freud enthuses about the
beauty of the mountains and trees, while his
companions find no joy in the pastoral scene.19
One of them, a celebrated poet (Rilke, prob-
ably), says that though he admires the sights,
 infinite grief
he is disturbed that all the beauty they behold is
only fated for extinction. Disputatious of his
friend’s vanitas, Freud finds that he does not
share his friend’s thought of death. Instead, he
considers that they might be experiencing “a
foretaste of mourning over decease,” wherein
the threat of impending loss intrudes, casting
a pall upon the spectacle’s transience rather
than elevating its beauty.20
To account for the aesthetic he wishes to
defend, Freud proposes an economic formula:
“Transience value is scarcity value in time.
Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment
raises the value of the enjoyment.”21 At first,
such a formulation, which sounds like the “scar-
city principle” in economics, might suggest
merely that a thing’s worth is determined by
the exclusivity by which it is separated from
the circulation of goods. By its rarefication, it
is more “special,” like an exclusive commodity.
But this would be to incorrectly place it within
the same logic of finitude that Freud wants to
criticize, treating time as though it were an
arbiter of judgment. By extension, we would
be led to infer that the capacity to enjoy any-
thing is likewise limited by time, as in advertise-
ments that shriek, “Enjoy NOW while supplies
last!” Once the rush to “seize the moment” sub-
sides, the enjoyment dissipates as well.
But the drift of Freud’s logic goes in a decid-
edly different direction: an object’s “transience
value” is its subjective significance not as a
limited, exclusive thing that can be consumed
or used up within the span of a certain duration
but something enjoyed for its own sake without
diminishment in the quality of that enjoyment:
“since the value of all this beauty and perfection
is determined only by its significance for our
own emotional lives, it has no need to survive
us and is therefore independent of absolute dur-
ation.”22 Immersed in time we are; but it is not
because of time that we enjoy, nor is Freud
saying that temporal finitude is the condition
for our enjoyment. Such would erroneously
attribute the quality of a condemning judgment
to time, making it into a subject-supposed-to-
judge. The point is comparable to the reason
Freud gave for why we cannot imagine our
own death: the attempt to do so assumes an
impossible perspective of non-perspective. Like-
wise, the mournful reaction to the passing away
of all things presupposes an unchanging stand-
point, as of some uniquely transcendent “seer”
who was capable of penetrating an ultimate
meaning beyond the shifting surfaces of experi-
ence and passing judgment. On the other hand,
when we appreciate the beauty of transient
things we are enjoying something that surpasses
the boundedness of finite duration, the miracle
of desire’s insistence. As we are taken up in
the flux of time, what we take to be most
worthy of love is carried within us and may
well survive our deaths.
Not without a trace of bathos, Freud notices
that his entreaties have had little effect upon
his friends. The poignancy of transience seems
to him to have been misrecognized, as one
might say of a gloomy companion that “the
moment is wasted on him.” Nor can Freud con-
vince himself that his own point of view is incor-
rect – after all, like everyone, he is perfectly
aware of finitude, but that does not prevent
him from feeling joy when he contemplates
the countryside’s transience. Dismayed, he
senses that some obstacle prevents him from
sharing the same thought of death with his
friends so that they can bond over this shared
feeling. Freud is moved to speculate upon the
economic riddle of mourning:
We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of
capacity for love – what we call libido –
which in the earliest stages of development
is directed towards our own ego. Later,
though still at a very early time, this libido
is diverted from the ego on to objects,
which are thus in a sense taken into our
ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they
are lost to us, our capacity for love (our
libido) is once more liberated; and it can
then either take other objects instead or can
temporarily return to the ego. But why it is
that this detachment of libido from its
objects should be such a painful process is a
mystery to us and we have not hitherto
been able to frame any hypothesis to
account for it. We only see that libido
clings to its objects and will not renounce
those that are lost even when a substitute
lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning.23
98

There is a troubling ambiguity in this formu-
lation that threatens to contradict Freud’s
earlier point that the capacity to enjoy is not
limited by duration. Freud’s hypothesis of tran-
sience, consistent with his economic theory of
the pleasure principle, depends upon the idea
that libido is simultaneously quantitatively
limited (different in intensity), and qualitatively
unrestricted (plastic in its choice of object). Of
course, Freud does not quantify the libido
because of any assumed substantialism (hence
it is not a measurable quantity of libido like
200 ml), but as an abstract comparative quantity
that can differentiate the degree of relative
attachment to certain objects. But at the same
time, the objects to which the libido becomes
attached are themselves understood as tem-
porally limited, but in a way that does not
affect the quantity of libido. In other words,
time (hence, finitude) is not a condition of
attachment but of the object. A quantity of
libido may be bound or liberated from its
objects but none of the vicissitudes that affect
the object affect the quantity of libido. It is
not only an abstract but a fixed quantity.
When it is a question of loss, the libido does
not lose anything of itself. What is lost, what
death destroys, is only the object, which is
finite, not the capacity for love, which is
unbounded or in-finite. And despite the fact
that this capacity is defined quantitatively, its
fixity as such, its imperviousness to any funda-
mental alteration or loss in number, means it
is insusceptible to mortality.
Thus there is something that doesn’t quite
add up that leads to the strange situation that
the libido in Freud’s account is unlimited or
in-finite because it is determinately fixed as
finite. It is this finite quantification of the poten-
tial for love, in other words, that conditions
Freud’s notion of death as determinative of
the object’s “transience value.” Paradoxically,
libido is finitely infinite. The theory of mourn-
ing suffers from this ambiguity, and echoes of
this theoretical problematic also haunt Freud’s
later formulations of the infamous economic
paradoxes of the death drive and the problem
of interminable analysis (as the notorious
“quantitative problem”).24 But it is in the
99
godley
theory of mourning that we see it confronted
explicitly as a problem that squares a certain
abstract love (or beloved) with death via the
logic of finitude. As it happens, it was also a
problem that Hegel struggled to clarify.
infinite grief
In his 1820s lectures on aesthetics, Hegel uses
the phrase “infinite grief” (unendlichen
Schmerz) to describe the image of Christ’s cruci-
fixion in Romantic art as an allegorical significa-
tion. For Hegel, Christ’s life and death
dramatize the realization of absolute subjectiv-
ity, which is not immediately given to it, but
accomplished through subjective destitution,
“the elevation of the spirit out of the finitude
of its immediate existence into its truth.”25
But before this elevation takes place, the
subject must first “detach[ … ] itself from
itself” in a “self-diremption” or splitting,
whereby infinity is at first opposed to it as the
image of an Ideal to which it strives to overcome
itself as finite and merely natural, a “process in
the course of which a struggle and a battle
arises, and grief, death, the mournful sense of
nullity, the torment of spirit and body enter as
an essential feature.”26
Traditionally, this Romantic agony is read as
a purifying episode whereby the life of the indi-
vidual bestial man with all its carnal pleasures,
lust, etc. is ascetically forsaken in favor of the
sanctification of spirit. But Hegel describes
this moment as an “infinite grief” for a good
reason – because what is at stake is a process
where subjectivity treats itself as an object and
kills off its finitude:
For just as God first cuts himself off from
finite reality, so finite man, who begins of
himself outside the Kingdom of God,
acquires the task of elevating himself to
God, detaching himself from the finite, abol-
ishing its nullity, and through this killing of
his immediate reality becoming what God
in his appearance as man has made objective
as true reality. The infinite grief of this sacri-
fice of subjectivity’s very heart, as well as suf-
fering and death, which were more or less
excluded from the representations of classical
 infinite grief
art or rather appeared there as mere natural
suffering, acquire their real necessity only
in romantic art.27
To kill off one’s finitude in this sense is not just
to die, but to commit something to death: here it
is God that dies in the guise of man. In the image
of crucifixion such as we might find in, say, Car-
avaggio or Peter Paul Rubens what Hegel finds
is the vanishing point of spirituality, as in
Christ’s cry “My God, My God, why have You
forsaken me?” – a moment of nihilism or
radical atheism wherein God abandons himself
and ceases to believe that he himself exists.28
But this destruction of the finite subjectivity is
a passage at the same time that it is a nullity.
If Hegel were using this language just to describe
the harrowing of Christ’s torment unto death, he
would not be telling us anything particularly
new. But by thinking of it as a description of
mourning, we see something markedly different.
Here, Christ’s accomplished Resurrection
weirdly means he has endured his own finitude
as a loss that he retrospectively mourns. When
Christ dies, his “infinite grief” corresponds not
just to his death as mortal but to the death of
the possibility of the infinite as a higher exist-
ence. Needless to say, there is something enig-
matic about what it could mean to “grieve”
existence as such. At stake is a distinction that
appears to confound any empirical comprehen-
sion no less than a reflective or transcendentalist
approach. How to reconcile mourning with the
thought of reflective finitude, without erasing
the former with the melancholy of the latter?
The answer for Hegel is that it is not an
either/or. When regarded as a moment within
the process of mourning, death itself changes
and ceases to be the mere abstract belief in fini-
tude. The qualification of the subject’s grief as
infinite in “infinite grief” therefore needs to be
taken literally: there are good reasons why it
should be both an infinite “grief,” that is, an
endless or impossible mourning, and an “infi-
nite” grief, a mourning of the infinite.
In his early essay Faith and Knowledge
(1802), “infinite grief” appears in a more expli-
citly diagnostic sense to criticize a kind of mel-
ancholia that developed in the Enlightenment
and its aftermath in the Protestant culture of
sentimentality. Kant’s philosophy, he argued,
had succeeded in dispelling the Enlighten-
ment’s spurious ideas about God only to estab-
lish new spurious ideas about the thinking
subject. That is, in the interest of Enlighten-
ment’s project to place Man at the center of
the universe formerly occupied by God, Kant
had formalized the reflective subject through
the transcendental categories, and thereby
demonstrated the infinite capacity of thought,
“the purity and infinity of the negative” that
exceeds the positive form of experience.29 But
in so doing he also ended up replacing the “dog-
matism of being” with the “dogmatism of think-
ing”: by positing the transcendental form of the
“I” Kant effectively psychologized the infinite,
thus tainting reason with finitude and dooming
it to passing away.30 Moreover, this did not
really do away with God but only elevated him
into an even higher station, beyond the limits
of finite cognition. We see this most explicitly
in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason, where Kant notoriously leaves some
of the most irrational elements of the religious
imaginary very much intact on the margins of
reason. Here, in what he calls the parergon (a
supplemental note or aside) can be found
works of grace, miracles, mysteries, and means
of grace as phenomena in which only an act of
strictly blind faith can be spoken of.31 Kant
had preserved these religious experiences as
unknowable and inconceivable “beyonds” of
the limits of rational faith, but Hegel’s point is
precisely that by granting such free reign to a
strictly inconceivable set of impossible possibili-
ties he had kept them alive precisely as sacred
beliefs about finitude.
In this way, Kant’s philosophy paralleled the
historical development of the Protestant culture
of sentimentality in which God now had to be
conceived strictly in the form of the inconceiva-
ble, thus forcing religious desire onto the
avenue of sublime feeling and the artistic
forms of the ineffable, as in Romantic art.
With God thus removed into an unknown and
unknowable beyond, He nonetheless lurked in
the void of the empty heaven the subject fills
with fruitless longing. The problem is that if
100

the thinking being meets its absolute negation
in physical death, a certain subjective vanity
arises, such that one may legitimately wonder
what point there is in attempting to find a way
of thinking beyond this limit if the mortal
limit of finitude is the limit of all possible
thought for this being that thinks. But for this
same reason it limited knowledge only to the
finite and restored eternity as an empty ideal
point to which knowledge could only attempt
to make a Sisyphus-like journey: an infinite pro-
gress that, as Hegel never tired of pointing out,
amounts to a spurious progress since there is no
possibility of movement but an absolute fixity.
Hegel returned to a similar argument in The
Science of Logic when discussing “the most
obstinate of the categories of the understand-
ing,” the logic of abstract finitude: “The deter-
mination of finite things does not go past their
end. The understanding persists in this sorrow
of finitude, for it makes nonbeing the determi-
nation of things and, at the same time, this non-
being imperishable and absolute.”32 The
subject of finitude supports the illusory idea
that life is geared toward a teleology of loss:
the ideal point of death casts its shadow over
all of life, as if everything that comes before
the end is just an anticipatory foretaste of a
final (anti)climax.
The victory of the Enlightenment sealed by
Kant’s transcendental subject had thereby
resulted in the defeat of the subject by the over-
whelming pressure of time as an ever-impending
death. But this flawed notion of finitude had
merely held infinity in place, instead of letting
it “directly somersault into the positivity of
the absolute Idea.”33 In other words, the infinite
had to cease to be a fixity and become other to
itself in the flux of time. The fixity or fixation
of the (infinitely) finite had to pass into a
newly secularized infinity. It is this element of
passage – that is, the full avowal of transience
– that Hegel emphasizes in his conclusion to
Faith and Knowledge as the traversal of the
despair of infinite grief:
But the pure concept or infinity as the abyss
of nothingness in which all being is engulfed,
must signify the infinite grief [of the finite]
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purely as a moment of the supreme Idea,
and no more than a moment. Formerly, the
infinite grief only existed historically in the
formative process of culture. It existed as
the feeling that “God Himself is dead,”
upon which the religion of more recent
times rests; the same feeling that Pascal
expressed in so to speak sheerly empirical
form: “Nature is such that it signifies every-
where a lost God both within and outside
man.” By marking this feeling as a moment
of the supreme Idea, the pure concept must
give philosophical existence to what used to
be either the moral precept that we must
sacrifice the empirical being, or the concept
of formal abstraction [i.e., the categorical
imperative]. Thereby it must re-establish
for philosophy the Idea of absolute freedom
and along with it the absolute Passion, the
speculative Good Friday in place of the his-
toric Good Friday.34
Like the analogous moment in Christ’s Passion,
insoluble despair gives way to the resolve of
mourning: upon realizing that transcendence is
impossible, the subject is at first paralyzed
with despair, but by marking infinite grief as a
“feeling” that has already occurred, the
subject historicizes it and in the process realizes
that he has already moved on. Hence, a truer
apprehension of the absolute, in Hegel’s sense,
would realize itself as the inaugural point of a
passage from the “historic Good Friday” of nihi-
listic despair to the “speculative Good Friday”
that would recapture the speculative Idea as
absolute – that is, not just as an abstract
formal freedom like Kant’s categorical impera-
tive or as the “moral precept” that we should
conceive of our existence as an enforced martyr-
dom or moral masochism, but as the inherited
truth of a previous form of existence.
Only once the emotional and intellectual
dimension of absolute negativity is articulated
and affirmed can mourning’s confrontation
with the infinite effectively get underway.
Having survived the Other’s death, the subject
becomes aware of what it signifies. Pascal’s
quote here is felicitous: “Nature is such that it
signifies everywhere a lost God both within
and outside man.” The psychoanalytic theory
of mourning could not put it more directly:
 infinite grief
the event of death reduces the Other to a lost
object (objet petit a), such that the symbolic
order reflects the cataclysm of this loss just as
the subject also feels it as a loss within
himself. The “death of God” in this sense is
translated directly into signifiers of loss, that
is to say, precisely “signifiers that are subject
to other signifiers.” Bypassing Nietzsche and
Freud, Hegel anticipates Lacan: the death of
God is less a fable of paternal law, guilt and cas-
tration but the triumph of the signifier over
finitude. Death itself changes its meaning, its
reality emerges as the “place” of the lost
object whose existence can only be given
through signifiers that mark or commemorate
the traces of that loss. When the death of God
is apprehended and lamented, it occurs as a
moment that passes, the same as the death of a
loved one. Thereby the signifier makes death
into a passage through which the subject is radi-
cally transformed. Everything in the world –
that is, the world of signifiers – everywhere sig-
nifies a lost God that is also lost to itself, a God
that has undergone infinite grief, leaving in its
wake the acute vulnerability of the subject
bereft of its transcendent illusions. In its place
is a speculative inheritance – the Absolute, for
Hegel. For psychoanalysis: the death drive.
“death” in the circuit
Although it might seem an unlikely candidate,
the Todestrieb, or “death drive” might point
to a new beginning for what death could mean
apart from God or finitude. Far from abandon-
ing his earlier “naive” view that there is no
death in the unconscious, the death drive was
Freud’s response to centuries of tradition that
cemented finitude as the iron law that decides
what is and is not possible in life given one’s
ultimate prospects. Here, Freud revises two
key premises of finitude: its restrictive aspect
and its prospective dimension. As he defines it
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “death” is
not an ultimate restriction but an ultimate satis-
faction, the “aim of all life.”35 At the same time,
it expresses the tendency of life to go not for-
wards but backwards, to “return to an earlier
state of things.”36 We no longer look ahead to
prospective death to give us an idea of what mor-
tality signifies for life; now the only thought of
death that has any real weight leads us to the
past, or, more precisely to signifiers (which are
historical by definition). Most of our fears and
hopes about the final instant of life is thereby
a displacement from a catastrophe that has
already happened. In what remains perhaps
the clearest literary presentation of this
paradox we are like Gatsby, believing in the
“orgiastic future that year by year recedes
before us,” while in fact we “beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.”37
According to Lacan, the thought of “death”
in Freud’s death drive was a genuine novelty,
the latter’s own “creationist sublimation.”38
This does not just mean that Freud came up
with a new idea of death, but that death, con-
sidered psychoanalytically, is a satisfaction
that takes sublimated form. This is the defi-
nition of sublimation for Freud, as Joan
Copjec puts it: “the satisfaction of the drive
through the inhibition of its aim.”39 That is,
the drive pushes on toward satisfaction only to
continually reinvent a detour. Keeping in
mind the disbelief in finitude that Freud main-
tained as a rule for the unconscious, the
paradox of the death drive is that its aim is
nothing other than its inhibition. To achieve
“death” is nothing less than to fail to achieve
it, instead taking a circuitous path through sig-
nifiers. There is therefore no teleology of the
drive other than itself: in its aspect of radical
destructiveness, the notion of the “death” of
the death drive is the pure repetition inaugu-
rated by the signifier, the “will to create from
zero, a will to begin again.”40 Finitude passes
into repetition and thereby is resurrection.
The inaugural moment of death’s elaboration
is born again from zero in each iteration of the
chain. Such pure repetition of the drive is none-
theless historical, however, in that the signifier
is “memorable and memorized” in connection
to other signifiers according to a specific
sequence or mnemonic circuit.41
One of the clearest demonstrations of this cir-
cuitous death is Freud’s classic example of the
forgetting of the name “Signorelli” in The
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Psychopathology of Everyday Life. During a
conversation with a stranger, Freud failed to
recall the painter of the frescoes of the “Four
Last Things” in the Orvieto (which is itself an
allegory of death). In his efforts to recover the
artist’s name, Freud retains only the “-elli,”
while “Signor” undergoes repression and trans-
lates into “Herr,” crossing wires with an earlier
moment in the conversation when he relayed an
anecdote he had heard about the Turks of
Bosnia-Herzegovina: “If one has to inform
them that nothing can be done for a sick
person, their reply is: ‘Herr [Sir], what is there
to be said? If he could be saved, I know you
would have saved him.”42 Displaced in
Freud’s memory we find that “Signor” meets
up, via the “Her-” in Herzegovina, with the atti-
tude of resignation before a good doctor (Herr)
who is, however, powerless in the face of death.
This, as Lacan reminds us, is the thought of
death as “absolute Herr,” the law of finitude.43
Note, however, the past tense modals, which
are called the “modals of lost opportunities”:
“If you could have, you would have saved
him,” but death overpowers us all. The doctor
never had a chance, an opportunity never pre-
sented itself, so there is nothing to regret.
But this is only one side of the unconscious
circuit: as Freud fails to remember “Signorelli,”
he first says “Botticelli” (via the “Bo” of
Bosnia), then “Boltraffio.” With the latter
word, Freud subsequently remembered he had
momentarily thought of “Traffoi” – the name
of the town where, days ago, he had learned
the disturbing news that a former patient
(“over whom I had taken a great deal of
trouble”) killed himself because he could not
bear living with sexual impotence.44 Without
fully realizing what was going through his
mind, Freud even almost made an inappropriate
joke related to the tragedy. He wanted to say
(but suppressed) an observation he had made
that Turkish men love sex so much that it is a
common expression that a man would rather
die than become impotent. The intermediate
layer of the jest only throws the tragedy it obfus-
cates into starker relief. The suicide was cer-
tainly no joke to Freud, but it makes sense
that he wanted to ease some of his inner
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tension. As Lacan describes it, the real reason
why the forgetting of the name and unconscious
formation takes shape – the reason why “Herr”
and “Signor” restlessly circulate in his
memory – is that they ultimately implicate
Freud himself.45 Lacan does not spell out
exactly what he means by this, but Freud gave
us enough clues to guess what it could be. If
the first part of the unconscious thought of
death posed a fairly typical idea of finitude as
a necessity against which the physician is ulti-
mately powerless to help his patient, the
second part of the unconscious thought-circuit
implies why this is a particularly painful
thought for Freud – of all physicians, Freud
had discovered more about human sexuality
than anyone and had actually succeeded in
helping others overcome their sexual impotence;
hence, he might have been able to do some-
thing. Hence, there is a reproach: he did not
seize the opportunity he might have had to
prevent the preventable. The point, of course,
is not that this is more or less objectively plaus-
ible, but that a cruel self-judgment resides in the
place of death, one that also extends from a
thought of the failure of a sexual relationship
(Freud’s failure to help his patient’s impotence,
itself a threat of impotence).
In Seminar XI, Lacan explicitly links the
Signorelli episode to Nietzsche’s death of
God.46 Like Freud’s “myths of the death of
the father” (the Oedipus complex, the father
of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo, etc.)
the death of God, for Lacan, is a fable that
attempts to obfuscate a traumatic reality, not
just of loss or death but of a certain implication
about death. They are so many frescoes in the
Orvieto, intensely generative networks of
traces that contain death and invoke an explana-
tory meaning precisely to evoke a “law” that
would restrain a dangerous excess of enjoyment.
For his part, Lacan says he “distrusts” these
myths “precisely as myths,” which is to say,
insofar as they function as explanatory of a fun-
damental law of existence. However, when read
psychoanalytically, myths, like dreams, sympto-
matic acts, and slips of the tongue, are ulti-
mately successful in that they point toward the
truth in fictional form. For Lacan, the truth of
 infinite grief
the Signorelli circuit concerns the same object
as that of the “death of God.” This object is
not “death” in the sense of empirical or biologi-
cal demise, but the singular object-cause of
desire at stake in sexual difference. That is, to
be precise: at stake in Freud’s thought of
death is not finitude, but the gap constituted
by “death-and-sex.” What the work of analysis
uncovers are the signifiers that quiver in that
gap, which implicate the subject’s desire. As
in Hegel’s analysis of infinite grief, after the
death of God there remain certain signifiers
that indicate not just that an irreversible cata-
strophe has occurred but that there are “immor-
tal truths” that remain with us that are
imperishable and absolute. Speculative beliefs
– beloved abstractions – emerge from the
ashes of the dead God.
the act of inheritance
I think it would be fair to say that Lacan inherits
the death drive through his theory of the signif-
ier. Inheritance in this sense is true to the Freu-
dian definition, as given in a quotation from
Goethe at the end of Freud’s posthumously pub-
lished work, An Outline of Psychoanalysis:
“What thou hast inherited from thy fathers,
acquire it to make it thine.”47 In other words,
inheritance is retroactive invention – we take
from what has come before and honor it by
adding something new, which also reorients
the past. Perhaps this is what “death” can lead
to in psychoanalysis, a new fate against fatality.
A new orientation that answers or resolves, and
thereby gives back, what has come before. I
would like to propose that such an act of inheri-
tance could answer to the dilemma of mourning
that I identified at the beginning of this piece.
Lacan’s reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in the
Ethics seminar might offer a possibility here. In
the figure of Antigone, Lacan is struck by what
the text of the play repeatedly calls her Até,
loosely translated to mean “inflexibility” but
that he gives us to understand is actually the
enigmatic, unyielding insistence that is charac-
teristic of the death drive.48 Because of this
characteristic, Antigone shines with a splendor
that is also “atrocious” (a word that comes
from Até) that makes her a formidable and
even terrifying figure.49 But the Até is not an
isolated personal quality, even if it is inseparable
from Antigone herself. It inscribes the entire
travail of the Labdacids, inclusive of its
wearing upon Antigone’s body and the blight
that she expresses as one whose “race is
already run” from the beginning of the play.50
Lacan doesn’t mince words: after everything
that’s happened with her father, the war of her
siblings, the ruin of her homeland and the irre-
parable loss of her family’s prestige – she’s
ready to go. But the route Antigone takes is
not melancholic; she does not withdraw pre-
emptively from fate or time’s cruelty. Instead,
she is resolved to see it through in her act, to
elevate not her individual existence but the
legacy of that which burns within her of pride
and love. In short, there is something excessive
about her that is also indistinguishable from her
resolution to bury her brother and thereby to
immortalize her love’s inheritance. From his
discussion of Antigone’s Até, Lacan is able to
formulate an ethical final judgment that
answers to the judgment of finitude: “Have
you acted in conformity with the desire that is
in you?”51
To recall the outlay at the beginning of the
play – after Oedipus dies at Colonus, Antigone
returns to Thebes to find it has been ruined by
a war over her father’s succession waged by
her brother Eteocles, loyal to Creon, and
rebels led by Antigone’s brother Polynices.
Creon, the new King of Thebes, has killed Poly-
nices and left his body to rot outside the per-
imeter of the city, forbidding anyone to honor
it with customary rites or bury him. Antigone
decides, against the wishes of her sister
Ismene, that she will bury her brother and
prevent his body from dishonor due to the
lack of a symbolic commemoration. Precisely
the horror that galvanizes Antigone from the
beginning of the play is the idea that her broth-
er’s corpse, deliberately exposed to the
elements, has been reduced to its bare finitude.
Branded by shame, his bare corpse would stand
for a denuded existence, prey to indifferent
nothingness. This monstrosity is unthinkable:
there simply is no question but that she will
104

violate Creon’s law. This, indeed, is part of what
Lacan means to emphasize by her Até. There is
an insistence within her of something that,
beyond the appeal of reason, practical morality,
or the threat of death, resolves her to carry out
her task, where Até “designates the limit that
human life can only briefly cross,” a beyond of
the mortal threshold.52
For Lacan, this crossing of the limit is expli-
citly related to the crucifixion and the moment
Hegel identified as an “infinite grief” (where
Christ cries “Father, why hast thou forsaken
me?”), but Antigone’s resolve forms a counter-
point to the Christian cathexis because it is
not about self-sacrifice but honoring the death
of a beloved; an act of mourning.53 She goes
through with her act and takes all its conse-
quences because his place is ineffaceable,
though love may come to fill it with some beau-
tiful memorial or other, it cannot replace it. In
that respect the fact that Antigone’s act involves
her brother’s corpse is of capital importance, for
it consecrates the material with the creative
capacity of the drive to seek death in symbolic
form at the limit of a second death that would
otherwise be an erasure. Likewise, there is no
escaping the uncanniness in the propinquity of
Antigone’s devotion to taboo, both of her
incest-tinged affection and of the taboos of
handling an exposed corpse. It is only by
keeping these elements in mind that we can
understand Lacan’s point that in commemorat-
ing her brother, Antigone “perpetuates, eterna-
lizes, immortalizes that Até.”54 What this means
is not that Antigone immortalizes herself, but
that the love that is “in her more than her,”
the excessive object of her drive, takes up and
surpasses the finitude of the beloved. Through
sublimated immortality, the object is inherited,
what has come down from the circuit of her
family is acquired and given back. Such inheri-
tance involves the signifier of the beloved’s
truth: through her resolve to commit this
object to eternity Antigone literally makes
sense out of her brother’s death, she invents a
new meaning that retroactively re-determines
the history that preceded it and becomes the
sublime object of a new tradition. There is a
fury in her act that is not just sacrificial but
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intended to redress an affront to the dignity of
her family’s inheritance, an affront that, no
less, arises from within her family.
We should remember that the unresolved
mourning of Oedipus, too, is implicated in the
play. When Oedipus dies at Colonus, after all,
he refuses to allow his daughters to know the
location of his tomb, but gives the “secret”
only to Theseus and tells him to pass it down
to the patriarch rulers in each successive gener-
ation.55 Despite the fact that she was by his side,
and exiled herself along with him, she was not
given to know what would have given her
some solace: the location of the grave. Derrida
is right to point out that this situation creates
for Antigone an “infinite mourning,” an infinite
grief that haunts her afterwards that is also a
“mourning of mourning” inasmuch as Oedi-
pus’s death represents a burning problem for
her that puts the resolution of her grief precisely
in suspense.56 Her later act of burying her
brother can therefore be seen as her answer,
not just to Creon but to Oedipus, and through
him, the tradition of the patriarchs and the
cult of death that remains the esoteric heritage
of the polis. Antigone’s act of burying her
brother fulfills a circuit of death that followed
from a crisis of infinite grief, her unresolved
“mourning of mourning,” which, as can be
seen clearly in terms of its spiritual impli-
cations, has to do with the installation of the
singular “abstract” object of her inheritance
within a larger structure of infinity.
But it would be insufficient to limit Anti-
gone’s act to a political protest, let alone the
messianic form of the promise, so long as this
still means (as it does for Derrida) a certain dis-
position toward finitude as an eventuality. Anti-
gone’s defiance is more elevated than that – it
has a spiritual significance that should not be
discounted, where the relation to immortality
deserves to be especially emphasized. The
ethics of her act, properly speaking, is not
limited to an empirical circumstance but,
beyond it, aims at a universal significance that
only the precise conditions of her desire’s
inheritance can mark. Antigone’s act is privi-
leged in the sense that it assumes responsibility
for this inheritance. Her mourning is done not
 infinite grief
just to commemorate her brother or to defy the
war that led to his death, the cruelty of Creon’s
injunction or the harshness of her father’s
having kept the secret of his death to the line
of ruling sons, but inclusive of these impli-
cations raises to the nobility of infinity the
metonymic piece of her beloved’s truth, a
desire that she herself inherited from her
father and consecrates in a way that he did
not. When Sophocles monumentalizes Anti-
gone, what is consecrated is a privileged meto-
nymy, a piece of the real taken for the whole,
a singular-universal truth-value that is added
to the totality and thereby retroactively
changes the meaning of the totality. Something
finite passes over to the infinite through the
singularity of her act, for which she pays with
her life. On the other hand, not all of her dies.
conclusion
In these overlapping accounts of Freud, Hegel,
and Lacan I have been traversing the problem
of finitude as an infinite grief in pursuit of a
concept of speculative mourning. I began by
showing that in Freud’s original definition of
mourning there was already a link between the
empirical and the speculative, the historical
death of a loved one and the problem of what
happens to a loved belief that has fallen into
negation through the imposition of finitude.
Analyzing the idea of finitude in psychoanalytic
terms, Freud argued that it presupposes a struc-
ture of pre-emptive mourning. Turning to
Hegel, we located a similar trouble in the way
the Kantian subject maintained belief in the sac-
redness of finitude. Hegel similarly discovered
that this construction was really a melancholy
fantasy; a grieving over the infinite which had
profound implications for the culture of nihi-
lism. By pointing out that “infinite grief” is
also the expression of a desire and longing,
however, Hegel was able to show that the
problem was also the solution. The desire to
mourn the infinite also meant that the infinite
was an object of desire. The “death of God”
had left behind a wealth of signifiers. Then,
back to Freud via Lacan we followed how the
death drive disengages from finitude. As a
circuit of signifiers that form specific problems
or dilemmas, as in the case of “Signorelli,” the
drive sublimates death. Likewise, for Antigone,
whose ethics consists in her act of keeping faith
with the inheritance that she carries within her,
her Até, which is a problem and a curse but also
a point of honor. By elevating her Até to the
level of an immortal truth in the act of
burying her brother and formally mourning
him, she turned the death of finitude into a
properly symbolic death. Through her act of
mourning, Antigone actively inherited her
inheritance and posited a new signifier in the
heavens – one that retroactively
changed the meaning of what
had come before. In this way,
mourning is radically opposed
to death, or rather, to existence
as an infinite grief.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
This article has benefited from peer review. The
author wishes to thank Salah el Moncef and Angela-
ki’s reviewer for their generous and helpful input in
consideration of this article.
1 Baldwin 122. The phrase “thought of death” in
the title is partly inspired by Crépon.
2 Breitwieser, for example, describes mourning as
“dialectic’s purest case.” See Breitwieser, American
Puritanism 42; Stern 386. Staten defines “dialectic of
mourning” as “the field of movement of all affective
phenomena determined by the mortality of a love
object, as this field is articulated in certain influen-
tial texts of the Western tradition” (xi). Although
she doesn’t explicitly define it as such, Comay in
Mourning Sickness strongly implies a mode or
method of Hegelian “dialectical mourning.” Also,
there is the critical sense of “structural mourning”
that Santner evokes against Paul de Man’s attempts
to “displace and disperse the particular and histori-
cal tasks of mourning” with the “structural mourn-
ing [ … ] for those catastrophes that are
inseparable from being-in-language” (29). See also
White.
106

3 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 244.
4 For a discussion of pragmatic opportunism as
the obverse of mourning, see Breitwieser, National
Melancholy 33.
5 Clewell 47.
6 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 244–45. As
Rickels situates the difference:
in Freud’s essay the catastrophe of another’s
death summons mourner and melancholic
alike while turning them apart: the loss that
afflicts the former is conscious, whereas the
occasion for the latter’s interminable grieving
is kept in the unconscious. Which reception
of loss is available depends upon the
channel of the original object choice. Thus
Freud agrees with Otto Rank that whereas
the mourner disengages his ego from an
object loved for its separateness and
otherness, the melancholic discards
a narcissistic choice by consummating the
ego’s rapport with this cherished object
through identification, internalization, and
idealization. (4)
7 Clewell 48. Clewell’s solution, which is taken up
indirectly in what follows, critically reconstructs
Freud’s later ego theory, in order to propose a
normative melancholia that would attempt to
overcome itself by engaging in what she calls
“endless mourning” – that is, keeping a constant
channel open with the dead. My argument here is
less concerned with her readings of Freud and
more with the theoretical implications of endless
mourning or infinite grief. My aim is to reconcile
Clewell’s conclusion while rejecting her over-
reliance on the subjectivist premises of the post-
structuralist emphasis on finitude.
8 Freud, “Letter 239” 386.
9 Laplanche 6.
10 Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death” 289.
11 For a vivid example of this fear of death, see
Leclaire.
12 Freud, Totem and Taboo 93.
13 “Mourning and Melancholia” 243.
14 The terms and logic of the “lover” and the
“beloved” are based on Lacan’s use of them in his
107
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analysis of the dialectic of intersubjectivity in
Plato’s Symposium. See Lacan, Transference 50–54.
15 “Belief” and “believe” are based on “ylief,”
coming from Old English gelíefan, derived from a
mixture of Old Saxon (gilôbjan), Old High German
(gilouben) and Gothic (galaubjan). From the latter
comes the combined senses of laub̵ -dear, leub̵ -lief
and lub̵ -love. See OED Online, “believe, v.”
16 It has already been noticed that Freud’s defi-
nition of mourning is the reaction to the loss of a
belief. See, for example, Peter Homans’s term
“symbolic loss.” Homans 20.
17
Reality testing has shown that the loved
object no longer exists, and it proceeds to
demand that all libido shall be withdrawn
from its attachments to that object [ … ]
Normally respect for reality gains the day.
Nevertheless, its orders cannot be obeyed
at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at
great expense of time and cathectic energy,
and in the meantime the existence of the
lost object is psychically prolonged [ … ]
Why this compromise by which the
command of reality is carried out piecemeal
should be so extraordinarily painful is not at
all easy to explain in terms of economics.
(Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 245)
“Living hypothesis”: see James 2.
18 The others, of course, are “Mourning and Mel-
ancholia” and “Thoughts for the Times on War and
Death.” But just as significant is Freud’s prewar
theory of funerary rituals in Totem and Taboo. See
Freud, Totem and Taboo 51–74.
19 Prater 233 qtd in Ricciardi 213 n. 31.
20 Freud, “On Transience” 306.
21 Ibid. 305.
22 Ibid. 306; my emphasis.
23 Ibid. 306–07.
24 See, for example, Freud, “Analysis Terminable
and Interminable” 226–30.
25 Hegel, Aesthetics 522.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
 infinite grief
28 See Žižek 14, 126, 171.
29 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge 56. For an excellent
and important study of the link between the death
of God as a crisis of finitude and the ethics of
tragedy in both Hegel and Nietzsche, see Williams
1–30, 161–67.
30 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge 189.
31 Kant 72.
32 Hegel, The Science of Logic 101, 102.
33 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge 190.
34 Ibid. 190–91; emphasis in original.
35 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 38.
36 Ibid. 37.
37 Fitzgerald 180.
38 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 212.
39
The full paradox of the death drive, then, is this:
while the aim (Ziel) of the drive is death, the
proper and positive activity of the drive is to
inhibit the attainment of its aim; the drive, as
such, is zielgehemnt, that is, it is inhibited as to
its aim, or sublimated, “the satisfaction of the
drive through the inhibition of its aim” being
the very definition of sublimation. (Copjec 30)
40 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 213, 212.
41 Ibid. 212.
42 Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 2–3.
43 Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious 50.
44 Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life 3.
45 Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious 32.
46
The term Signor, Herr passes underneath –
the absolute master, I once said, which is in
fact death, has disappeared there. Further-
more, do we not see, behind this, the emer-
gence of that which forced Freud to find in
the myths of the death of the father the regu-
lation of his desire? After all, it is to be found
in Nietzsche, who declares, in his own myth,
that God is dead. (Lacan, The Four Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Psychoanalysis 27)
47 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis 207.
48 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 263. My
reading draws from Copjec’s masterful study of
the death drive in Lacan’s study of Antigone. See
25–47.
49 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 314.
50 Ibid. 263.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid. 262–63.
53 Ibid. 255, 273.
54 Ibid. 283.
55 Sophocles 375–76, 386.
56 Derrida 93, 109–10.
The two daughters lament but they do not
bemoan only the fact of never more seeing
their father [ … ] but on the other hand,
hidden in the secret of a foreign land, that
his corpse, their paternal corpse, should
also be buried without a tomb. Not at all,
perhaps, without a grave, but without a
tomb, without a determinable place,
without monument, without a localizable
and circumscribed place of mourning,
without a stopping point [arrêt]. Without a
fixed [arrêté] place, without a determinable
topos, mourning is not allowed. Or, what
comes down to the same thing, it is promised
without taking place, a determinable place, so
thenceforth promised as an interminable
mourning, an infinite mourning defying all
work, beyond any possible work of mourn-
ing. The only possible mourning is the
impossible mourning. (109–10)
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James A. Godley
306 Clemens Hall
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Buffalo, NY 14260-4601
USA
E-mail: jamesgod@buffalo.edu