Dead Loss: Freud and the Aesthetics of Mourning

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.