Violence, Mourning, Politics

This essay argues that mourning can provide resources for the rethinking of community and of international relations and that the military preemption and derealization of loss undermines fundamental human ties. The author suggests that nonviolence can and should emerge from the practice of mourning. The essay links a relational conception of the self to an ethics of nonviolence and a politics of a more radical redistribution of humanizing effects. In this way, the author connects a psychoanalytically informed concept of subject formation to a politics that offers a critique of the derealizing effects of U.S. military violence. Because lives, under current political conditions, are differentially grieved, egalitarian mourning offers the possibility of expanding the very conception of the human.