Greetings.
Early on in the Gaza crisis, fellow political theorist Corey Robin tweeted out a comment that has stuck with me. In it, he raised the question of the politics of mourning and grief in the following way:
It’s funny that his commentary on the concept mentions the Christian tradition, which is something I don’t see at all. It may have been the case that 17th-century Calvinism was suffused with a sense of guilt and overriding concern about the fate of one’s soul, but the very energy of that concern turned it in a world-transforming direction. Not “worldly,” obviously, at least not immediately, but utterly obsessed with work as a distraction from the ominous thrum of the inner life: Weber’s “innerworldly asceticism.” Once obsessive activity was secularized and fully severed from its transcendent source, the drive became more purely acquisitive, as well as a source or principle for social sorting based on class and race.
As part of these changes, it’s also important to note that the experience of grief and mourning were filtered through settler-colonial lenses. From its beginning, that is, American citizens learned to distinguish and discriminate between proper modes of mourning, not negating them exactly but inserting them into historical visions of progress in the so-called New World. The articulation and elaboration of whiteness occurs here. Against those who would argue for a kind of “anachronistic” critique of the Jacksonian period in particular, that is, it’s clear that 19th century Americans in particular knew that bloody and genocidal removal was not only wrong, but subject to the moral judgment of nations and history.
There’s a specific kind of mourning — a specifically liberal modality or affective register — that arises in this context, in part as a way of dealing with the problem of guilty conscience. In a formal sense it’s unsurprisingly tied to conceptions of private property and the labor theory of value, the Lockean emphasis that the world is no longer a common thing but rather belongs to the “industrious and rational.” The imperative contained in this observation sets up what Mike Rogin calls a form of “forbidden nostalgia,” a longing for communion with others and subsumption in the cycles and flows of nature, both of which become figured as symbols of indigeneity. Tribal life in so-called North America, in other words, simultaneously becomes the object of intense longing, and conceptualized as a phase or stage of human order that must be surpassed. The civilizational project of settler-colonialism, in other words, sets up powerful forms of mournful longing for an imagined past that must be overcome: the overcoming happens at the individual level through various forms of repression, and collectively through violence against tribal communities that in the settler mind must be ushered into modernity along with the rest of us.
I’ve emphasized this dimension of the politics of mourning in order to draw out and elevate its bloody, violent aspect. Powerful grief and “forbidden nostalgia” for a collective past that must be rejected for the rigors of frontier individualism in fact sets into motion a form of bellicosity that is all the more intense for its sense of regret. From the beginning, liberals have known that the demands of modernity — isolation from others, an instrumental, disenchanted attitude towards the natural world, a reduction of social life to self-interest — are a poor bargain. This self-aware sense of grief at an imagined lost world provides the energy or engine for resentful forms of settler violence against communities who have somehow evaded the painful imperatives of liberal freedom. To the liberal “it’s just not fair” that human beings can continue to live in this way.
In short, the real politics of mourning isn’t found in the writings of a Left which always loses (for example the politics of fugitivity associated with Sheldon Wolin, or Mario Tronti and the recent turn to destituency). Instead, it’s at the very heart of liberal ideology. What is more, its sense of regret, grief, mourning and sadness sets into motion a form of violence that is all the more intense for the duty it must face. It is this sense of aggrieved anger that finds expression whenever a member of a colonizing army says to a journalist “they just don’t appreciate what we’re doing for them: we offer all the gifts of modern values, and they still violently reject us.” This alleged incomprehension conceals a deeper awareness that is common to all settler-colonial orders whether they be in North America or in occupied Palestine.
Another banger