When I was leaving Berlin I was a bit of a mess. I worked until the last possible day before leaving and couldn't fit anything into my bags. I had to say goodbye to stacks of clothing that just wouldn't be able to make the trip. I also had to say good bye to some of the closest friends I have ever made and a community of people that I had belonged to for three years. It was not easy. I was not looking forward to the move. It was at this point that I decided it was incredible important that I read Precarious Life by Judith Butler.
For those of you who have never read Butler's work - I highly recommend it. It is amazing, mind blowing stuff. It is however also incredibly convoluted and hard to get though. Precarious Life was introduced to me in my undergraduate political science courses, though I had never read the entire thing until this summer. It's 5 essays in which she describes the 'powers of mourning and violence' in regards to the experience of living in post-9/11 America. Exactly the kind of book one should read in the emotionally unstable process of moving.
There is one section, in Violence, Mourning and Politics - which I have read to anyone who will listen and emailed to countless people. I have tried a thousand times to incorporate it into every paper I've written (though it never successfully makes the cut, because I never write papers about this). I don't want to unpack it, or analyse it, or do anything but make you all read it. (The three of you reading this blog).
She writes,
Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps on should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is a losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. One can try to choose it, but it may be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice at some level. I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing... When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost "in" you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. …What grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others holds us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here, about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must. Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel... (Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso: 2004, 20-24)
Butler, continues her essay, speaking to issues of sexuality, of the body, violence, war, the middle east, journalistic coverage of such atrocities, mourning, and the list goes on. But when one is sitting on a bus preparing for a major shift from one moment of life to another this is something that sticks with you.
I don't want to write a thesis about grief and I don't necessarily want to write a thesis about identity, however, there is something here... What? I am not sure. But, even though she is hard to read - I wish that all of the French social theorists of the 20th Century I had to read in the last three months would have been this coherent.
She writes,
Perhaps, rather, one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps on should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is a losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. One can try to choose it, but it may be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice at some level. I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing... When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost "in" you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. …What grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others holds us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here, about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must. Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can be so only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel... (Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso: 2004, 20-24)
Butler, continues her essay, speaking to issues of sexuality, of the body, violence, war, the middle east, journalistic coverage of such atrocities, mourning, and the list goes on. But when one is sitting on a bus preparing for a major shift from one moment of life to another this is something that sticks with you.
I don't want to write a thesis about grief and I don't necessarily want to write a thesis about identity, however, there is something here... What? I am not sure. But, even though she is hard to read - I wish that all of the French social theorists of the 20th Century I had to read in the last three months would have been this coherent.
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