Feminism in the Time of Violence

What We Do Now

As we face the challenge of removing Bush from office, the rhetoric of the left is necessarily, though sometimes problematically, action oriented. David Cortright, for example, ends his recent Nation article with the rallying cry, “We have no time to mourn. A lifetime of organizing and education lies ahead.”¹ This call to dismiss mourning assumes that mourning and activism are in fact separable, but it also inadvertently mirrors Bush’s suppression of history, whether private or public, through the rhetoric of the urgent moment. The language of political action tells us that we have no time for times past. Does this mean that there is also no time to consider the potentially devastating political consequences of this clean-slate mentality?

Writing about the place of mourning in AIDS activism in 1989, Douglas Crimp questions the utility of slogans such as “Don’t mourn, organize!” or “Turn your grief to anger” precisely because they rely on the same underlying assumption that mourning can simply be converted into something more useful. To pay attention to mourning, however, is not to focus exclusively on the emotional lives of individuals at the expense of activist goals; rather, it is, according to Crimp, to recognize that the unconscious plays significant roles in political movements, and that understanding these roles can lead to more effective organization:

It is because our impatience with mourning is burdensome for the movement that I am seeking to understand it. I have no interest in proposing a “psychogenesis” of AIDS activism. The social and political barbarism we daily encounter requires no explanation whatsoever for our militancy . . . On the contrary, what may require explanation . . . is the quietism.²

More recently, Wendy Brown has made a similar point in relation to “Left Melancholia”: “My emphasis on the melancholic logic of certain contemporary Left tendencies is not meant to recommend therapy as the route to answering these questions. It does, however, suggest that the feelings and sentiments – including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses – that sustain our attachments to Left analyses and Left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims.³

While mourning can occur in response to the death of a friend or loved one, as the AIDS activist community, which has sustained such devastating losses, well knows, it can also be triggered, according to Freud, by the loss of an ideal, such as the fatherland, or liberty.⁴ If we accept this formulation, then feminism, currently burdened by an overwhelming sense of lost ideals, has to consider how it will mourn rather than cut its losses so that it can avoid falling into a melancholia that will prevent it from developing much-needed radical political visions for the future.

1. David Cortright, “What We Do Now,” Nation, April 21, 2003, at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030421&s=cortright. [↩]
2. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 129-50, at 139. [↩]
3. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” in Loss, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 458-65, at 464. [↩]
4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 164-79, at 164. [↩]