Loss in the Post-pandemic Era: Judith Butler’s Melancholia, Mourning, and Mania

This essay aims to explicate the psychological loss in the post-pandemic era in terms of Judith Butler’s melancholia, mourning, and mania. Melancholia is explained in Gender Trouble (1990) as a mechanism in which the abandoned love object constructs a gendered ego of a subject. Later, in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), it is discussed as a social phenomenon of public anger and public resistance to emphasize the performativity of rage and militancy in queer rallies and die in demonstrations against denied public mourning. Since her ethical turn in Undoing Gender (2004) and Precarious Life (2004), Butler focuses more on ‘grievability’ as the equal recognition of loss to resist inequalities in public mourning, as prohibited mourning by dominant prohibitions leads to social and cultural melancholia. The Power of Nonviolence (2020) pays particular attention to mania and critical faculty as the protest against destructive actions directed the world and the self. The equal livability of life and the equal grievability of loss based on radical egalitarianism is a possibility of non-violent political struggle to resist social inequality, through public mourning and solidarity in mania, going towards a universal sensibility for a livable life against violence.