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- Title
Dead Loss: Freud and the Aesthetics of Mourning.
- Authors
Waller, Thomas
- Abstract
This article rereads the aporia in Freud's theory of mourning as a problem for representation and aesthetics. Drawing a parallel with Kant's account of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the mourner's stubborn willingness to persist in the reproduction of images of the lost object, in spite of their conscious knowledge of the irreversibility of the loss, wrests a minimal zone of autonomy from the sphere of practical interests. In dialogue with Adorno and Laplanche, I conclude by arguing that Freud's inability to adequately explain the problem of mourning is less a shortcoming of his theory of libidinal economy than it is proof of the enigmaticalness of mourning itself.
- Subjects
AESTHETICS; BEREAVEMENT; DEAD; GRIEF; PSYCHOANALYSIS
- Publication
Paragraph, 2024, Vol 47, Issue 2, p214
- ISSN
0264-8334
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3366/para.2024.0463