Abstract
This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, that which assumes that suffering the death of a loved one means accommodating oneself to an absence where there was previously a presence. On the contrary, says Lacan, part of what is most deeply to be mourned is the lack in the Other around which the love relation was constructed. The paper concludes by asking to what extent Lacan’s account of mourning should be distinguished from those of both Hegel and Freud.
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Notes
Lacan (2004).
Lacan (1977).
Lacan (1977, p. 37).
Lacan (1977, p. 38).
Lacan (1977, p. 38).
Lacan (1977, p. 15).
Lacan (1977, p. 38).
Lacan (1992, p. 307).
Lacan (1977, pp. 36 & 24).
Lacan (2004, p. 120).
Lacan (2004, p. 166).
Lacan (2004, p. 166).
McCullers (1994, p. 322).
McCullers (1994, pp. 4–5).
Žižek (2001, pp. 46–147).
Žižek (2006, pp. 355–356).
Freud (1955, Vol. 14, p. 245).
Lacan (2004, p. 78).
Lacan (2004, p. 152).
Lacan (2004, p. 202).
Lacan (2004, p. 179).
Lacan (2004, p. 387).
Salecl (2004, p. 31).
Lacan (2004, p. 387).
Lacan (2004, p. 387-388).
Hegel (1900, pp. 121–122).
See Malabou (2001, pp. 15–20).
Malabou (2001, p. 17).
Derrida (2001, p. 161).
Lacan (1977, p. 38).
References
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Freud, Sigmund. 1955. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 24, ed. J. Strachey and A. Freud et al. London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-analysis.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1900. The Philosophy of History (trans: Sibree, J.). London: The Colonial Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 2004. Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre X: L’Angoisse, texte établit Jacques Alain-Miller Paris: Editions de Seuil. The English translations of L’Angoisse offered in this paper, though slightly amended in some places, are in the main drawn from a privately circulated translation made by Cormac Gallagher, working from the unedited French typescript.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VI, Désir et son Interpretation, as yet unpublished. A portion of this seminar was published in English translation as “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, “Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise.
Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959–1960 (trans: Dennis Porter). New York: Norton.
Malabou, Catherine. 2001. “History and the Process of Mourning.” In Radical philosophy 106 March/April 2001.
McCullers, Carson. 1994. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. New York: Mariner Books.
Salecl, Renata. 2004. On Anxiety. London & New York: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. On Belief. London & New York: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
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Boothby, R. The lost cause of mourning. Cont Philos Rev 46, 209–221 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9256-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9256-y