Mourning Without Loss: The Affective Life of Grief

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Mourning Without Loss:

The Affective Life of Grief

Simon van der Weele | 10611177

Master Thesis

Research Master Cultural Analysis

University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. M.D. Rosello

Second reader: Dr. J.V. Sturm

15 June 2015

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Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion. But all my life haven’t I been just that: moved? – Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (43)

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Introduction: mourning without loss

To write on mourning means to be in mourning. Jacques Derrida writes that “[o]ne cannot hold a discourse on the “work of mourning” without taking part in it, without announcing or partaking in death” (“By Force of Mourning” 142). Derrida makes this

observation in “By Force of Mourning”, a reflection on the work of mourning and an ode to a lost friend written in the wake of the death of his fellow academic Louis Marin. For me, too, writing this essay was a process of coming to terms with loss. But those I lost were not friends, nor were they my peers. In a sense, I cannot claim the losses were mine. Coming to terms with these deaths has proven both the catalyst and the outcome of writing the present essay. Before I continue this introduction, I wish to pay respect to these deaths by briefly narrating both of them.

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In the spring of 2014, Mrs. Van Amelsvoort found a quiet, peaceful death after a brief period of palliative care treatment. I do not remember exactly how old she was: she must have been either 97 or 98. (Already fading, my memories of her.) Although she did not take much pride in her age – “eating well is all it takes, some vegetables, some fruit” – she was very disappointed in her body when she realised it was starting to wear out and wear her out. The last few weeks of her life, she hardly left her chair, hampered by her swollen arms and legs, heavy with accumulated fluids. Her pains worsened (although her moods did not) until finally, she went to sleep and did not wake up again.

Strictly speaking, my relation to Mrs. Van Amelsvoort was of a professional nature. I was a care assistant in the nursing home where she lived. I would bring her tea and we would have a talk. For months, this simple routine defined our encounters. Then, as her health began to fail her and the nurses were short on time for the care she increasingly required, I took on some of her care. I prepared her breakfast. I dressed her. She was wary of the clumsy motions

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of a young man, but she trusted me – she had no other choice. We attained a mode of intimacy known only by care workers, torn between affective proximity and professional distance.

When she died, I happened to be near her room. Her daughter came to me, in tears. I checked her pulse: nothing. I called the head nurse. Together, we washed her. We changed her underwear. Her body was heavy and soft. She was still quite warm, but her cheeks had began to droop and her eyes seemed glassy, empty. Mrs. Van Amelsvoort was right there, but already gone. Her presence faltered, but remained. Next to us, her children wept. Their mother had passed. But for me, Mrs. Van Amelsvoort had not quite left. And even if she had, she had not left me. Her loss was not my burden to carry.

I left the room to fetch tissues for her family. v

In the summer of 2014, a jet crashed on the Ukrainian countryside. It was not an accident: it had been shot down. 298 people were killed. There was outrage and there was grief, especially in my home country, the Netherlands, where many losses were counted. The prime minister announced a national day of mourning. Their losses are our losses, he seemed to suggest.

Although moved by the tragedy of the plane crash, I felt oddly distant from the discourse of mourning that quickly developed in its wake. I was suspicious of what I feared was an outburst of nationalist sentiments. Then the crash struck a personal note. I discovered that Professor Willem Witteveen had been amongst the deceased. Willem was a former teacher of mine. He had taught me politics and rhetoric when I was an undergraduate. He was brilliant and extremely kind. I was saddened but resigned: he was a figure of my past, with whom I had had a unilateral relationship. He had touched my life, but I had hardly scraped his. This was not my loss to bear.

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Weeks later, I received an e-mail from the dean of my undergraduate study

programme. She was preparing a memorial service for Willem, his wife and his daughter, and asked me to deliver a short speech on behalf of the programme’s alumni. I felt honoured and terrified. I was to speak on a public forum, expressing grief not wholly mine but felt by a community of which I was part. I was not to speak of my work of mourning, nor I was not sure that I had been carrying out this work in the first place.

The memorial service was beautiful and harrowing. Teachers and students spoke lovingly of a man they had admired. So did I, although I feared that I felt alienated from their emotive responses. Shame took hold of me. I had thought that I could not give a speech that was about my loss, since I could not claim Willem’s loss as mine. But as the service came to a close, and many of my peers had expressed their shock and sorrow, I wondered: could this loss also be my loss?

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Two deaths: two instances where I found myself refraining from mourning, because I did not consider the losses to be mine, or even to be loss at all – the ambiguity of absence hit me hard as I felt the warmth of Mrs. Van Amelsvoort’s dead body or watched old tapes of Willem’s spirited lectures. Yet in the wake of one of these deaths, I felt compelled to mourn; and in the wake of the other, I was impelled to mourn. How was I to mourn without loss? And what would this mourning entail? These questions form the inquisitive backbone of the

present essay.

Traditionally, mourning without loss carries the stamp of inauthenticity or impurity. Freud famously writes that the mourner whose sense of loss goes without an object, is not struck by grief but by melancholia, a persistent form of narcissism (“Mourning and

Melancholia” 244). He considers mourning to be a “healthy” response to loss, ending when the mourning subject substitutes the lost object with a new attachment; melancholia, to the contrary, is pathological and lasts indefinitely. Since Freud, the loss of a beloved one has been

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implicit in any conception of the work of mourning. Public discourses of mourning (such as surrounding the victims of the MH17 crash in the summer of 2014, which also took the life of my former professor) often come with accusations of hysteria or melancholia.1 Such cases exemplify the theoretical problem of mourning without personal loss as a collective endeavour.

Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia no longer goes unchallenged. In Precarious Life (2004), for instance, Judith Butler argues that substitution of the loving attachment does not put an end to mourning (21), pleading instead for what she calls “tarrying with grief” (30). Similarly, in their introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), David Eng and David Kazanjian attempt to rescue melancholia from its debauched

connotations. They see great political potential in “a continuous engagement with loss and its remains”, as they think our attachments to what is lost foster alternate representations and new significations (4). Moreover, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in their

introduction to Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2001), even contend that “we should perhaps not assume that we can ever identify with absolute certainty the object of our mourning”: “perhaps all our mournings are but iterations of the one death that can never be identified … so that what is mourned is a singularity that exceeds any proper name” (17). Yet these scholars still assume a private loss, and a concrete loss, generally in death, to be at the basis of loss. Loss, in other words, remains a prerequisite for grieving. My essay is a further intervention in the interrogation of the field of mourning, wondering: how am I to mourn without loss? I set out to delineate a mode of mourning otherwise.

Couldn’t capture death

If the overarching concept guiding this essay is the concept of mourning, its object will be Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (“Couldn’t Capture Death”), a 2007 multimedia installation by

1_{The most famous example of such accusations we probably find in the public response to the death of Princess}

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French artist Sophie Calle (born 1953). The work documents the death of Monique Sindler, Sophie Calle’s mother. It also forms a response from the artist to her mother’s passing away.

Sophie Calle first showed Pas Pu Saisir La Mort during the 2007 Venice Biennale in the exhibition Think with the senses, feel with the mind, art in the present tense, curated by American art historian Robert Storr.2 Calle was given two neighbouring rooms of the Italian Pavilion. The first of these rooms featured a luscious, impressionist oil painting depicting Monique Sindler’s in a frilly gown, as well as a text explaining the rationale of the work’s conception. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort was to create a possibility for Calle’s mother be present at the Biennale, in spite of her death a few months earlier: “When I told her about Venice, she said: ‘And to think that I won’t be there’. She is” (Calle). In addition, two prints displayed the last word Sindler supposedly uttered to her daughter: in a stark font type, the prints spell out “souci” (“worry”). Walking through the arch towards the second room would reveal a large projection on one of the white walls, on a continuous loop; for this projection, Calle selected a fragment of thirteen minutes out of the eighty hours of footage of her mother’s deathbed. Mozart’s breezy clarinet concerto gently filled the room with music. Adjacent to the

projection, more text was fastened to the wall: an exact copy of the obituary Calle published in a newspaper after the death of her mother.

Taken as a whole, the installation evokes the scene of a funeral. It presents us with a death, with a text commemorating this death, and an array of traces somehow linked to this death. Yet as I will show in the subsequent chapters, never does the work quite manage to crystallize its object of mourning, as it complicates our notions of death, encounters and the presence of others. Much like my personal experiences, the work stages a scene of mourning for the viewer, but one in which the object of mourning remains just out of grasp. In other words, I argue, the work asks us to mourn without loss. How does Pas Pu Saisir La Mort

2_{This exhibition took place in isolation from Prenez Soin De Vous (“Take Care of Yourself”), Calle’s}

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facilitate a work of mourning, in spite of denying us an object of mourning? How does it compel us to mourn? How does this work of mourning give rise to this collective “we” to begin with? And what are the ethical implications of mourning without loss? Such are the questions that will guide this essay.

Grievability and grieve-ability

While my analysis Pas Pu Saisir La Mort will propel and structure this essay, I

consider its scope to reach beyond insights of its own workings. As I will constantly show, the analysis has bearing on the assumptions of established theories of mourning, a field where philosophy and psychoanalysis conjoin. More specifically, I frame the essay as an

intervention in theories of mourning as outlined by Judith Butler, significantly in Precarious Life (2004). Each chapter partially functions as an interrogation of and elaboration on Butler’s thought. For this reason, I will here lay out my main reservations about her writing. They will inform much of what is to follow.

In Precarious Life, Butler presents a theory of mourning to compliment her notion of grievable life. She argues that grief – and allowing lives to be grieved – might foster the formation of a nonviolent political community, one that is premised on a mutual recognition of bodily vulnerability through the shared experience of loss. For this recognition to work, loss must become available as an experience that not only affects one dramatically but affects all of us dramatically, together. To do so, Butler proposes a model of subjectivity rooted in a radical dependency.3 Butler’s subject is relational, and loss of the other throws her in a crisis of self-understanding. Loss has subjects unravel (see chapter two). She seizes upon this moment of unraveling to argue for a sense of community based on our mutual dispossessions:

3_{For her theory of subjectivity, Butler is indebted in equal parts to Freudian psychoanalysis (as she has been}

since her first attempt at theorizing subjectivity in Gender Trouble (1990) and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. This links her thought very clearly to Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning, as I will briefly show in chapter two. The work of Butler and Derrida is indispensible for my own thinking in the present essay. However, fully mining their influences unfortunately goes beyond its scope. For a clear discussion of the coalescence of these strands of thought in Butler’s work, see Daniel McIvor (2012).

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the instance I realize my dependence on you is also the instance I start grasping my own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others around me (Precarious Life 30). For Butler, then, grief throws us in a void of self-erasure, a void that hopefully enables us to look beyond our often violent (because exclusionary) terms of self-identification.4

It seems to me that mourning for Butler begins when the subject loses someone whom she cared for. She writes, “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” (Precarious Life 24). The attachment lost after death – a loss that has me unravel – arose in a private, bodily encounter, and the work of mourning must in the first instance always be interior. I mourn for you, whom I loved, for in losing you I have lost myself. Less clear to me, however, is how this interlinked theory of mourning and subjectivity can account for a notion of grievable life where lives are mourned for collectively, by strangers. Can the death of a stranger impact me in the same way the death of a loved one might?

I am thus not convinced that Butler is careful enough when she transfers a model of mourning that favours interiorization to the public sphere, employing it to describe the collective endeavour that grievable life seems to require. To what extent can I mourn for strangers, others whom I have never encountered before their deaths? If grief is to point us to some fundamental tie, to what extent do we require a previous attachment to mourn? To what extent can all life be grievable as such, by me? Indeed, if our aim is to theorize a wider, more inclusive grievability of life, then what about our grieve-ability, our ability to grieve at all?

I reach out to Pas Pu Saisir La Mort for answering these questions because the work concretizes many of the salient problems of Butler’s theory I wish to address. I see the work

4_{Grief shakes up seemingly stable and enclosed identifications. In this way, grief is a catalyst of indignation,}

potentially bringing subjects to challenge the persistence of exclusionary human normativity; and at the same time, grief carries an ethical imperative, having us grasp the shared precariousness of all life and inducing us with a responsibility to care. In this way, as David W. McIvor points out, “[b]y bringing ourselves to grief, we resist the temptation towards violent foreclosures that a closed account of identity necessarily entails” (420).

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as a self-contained environment in which we can isolate and study the relationship between mourning and the image. I have it function as what Barbie Zelizer has in a different context called “a subjunctive space”: a space of the hypothetical in which the “what could be” trumps the “what is”, allowing its viewers to suspend belief in what they know to be true and call on their imagination to engage with the emotional weight of the work’s themes (318). Essential in my discussion of the work is thus the affective responsiveness of its audience, more so than the semiotic structure of the installation itself. It is about what the viewers can do with what they are given and about taking their contribution seriously. Here I follow Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator: I treat the viewers as “spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make their own story” (22). Pas Pu Saisir La Mort makes an appeal to mourn. My aim is to show how the spectator might make work of this appeal.

In chapter one, I will give a close reading of the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort and show how the work complicates our notions of death and loss. Here I will also start making a case for understanding grief as affect and distinguishing this from mourning as work. I further conceptualize this dichotomy in chapter two, where I will analyse Monique’s obituary to intervene in theories of mourning as work posed by Jacques Derrida. Finally, in chapter three, I will look at the effect of the affect of grief by aligning theory of mourning to theory of care. This time, the object of analysis is the twofold “souci” print. If all goes well, by the end of chapter three, my notion of grief as affect will allow us to formulate a mode of mourning otherwise.

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Chapter 1: criss-cross

The work of mourning starts with death. “Mourning is weeping at loss and lack and absence”, Sandra Gilbert remarks (245). If nothing is lost, there is nothing to mourn; such is the premise of grief. As I explained in the introduction, Sigmund Freud polices the work of mourning by distinguishing it from melancholia, the latter denoting a form of narcissism. “Good” mourning implies the loss of a beloved object and ends when the mourning subject substitutes the lost object with a new attachment. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler challenges this idea, stating that “I do not think that successful grieving implies that one has forgotten another person or that something else has come along to take its place, as if full substitutability were something for which we might strive” (21). To grieve deeply and to take one’s time to do so need not be a symptom of some narcissistic impulse. Yet even if Butler pleads for what she calls “tarrying with grief” (30), such grief still relies on the presence of death through its irrevocable absence; I would even say that such lingering mourning

intensifies and elongates the present absence of death, keeping the loss of death palpable and proximate. Death remains a prerequisite for grieving.

I propose to read Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as a text that tarries with grief in Butler’s sense. In its display of a scene of dying, the work makes an appeal to its audience: will you mourn for me? Will you mourn with me? Will you even mourn without me? At the same time, however, the representation of death in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort comes to problematize the possibility of grief itself. Couldn’t Capture Death. With its title, the work documents an inability. It circumscribes an impossibility. It admits to a failure. So first the work proclaims: I offer you an object of mourning. And then it tells us: my loss is not for you to see, live or feel. Death is all-too-present, yet barely there. The work of mourning the installation incites from the outset thus threatens to morph almost instantly into a melancholic attachment in Freud’s

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sense. If we cannot capture death, how can we secure an object of mourning? Indeed, how can we mourn in the absence of death?

In this first chapter, I will perform a close reading of the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort in order to assess in what ways the work does or does not live up to the

seemingly apologetic confession of its title. How does the work (fail to) represent death? Why is this failure of significance? And might it be possible to overcome it?

Life and death: criss-cross

The raw material for the video projection of Pa Pu Saisir La Mort was provided by over 80 hours of video footage documenting the final few days of Monique Sindler’s life. Calle explains:

It became almost an obsession. I wanted to be there when she died. I didn't want to miss her last word, her last smile. As I knew I had to shut my eyes to sleep, because the agony was very long, there were a risk I might not be there. I put a camera there, thinking if she gave a last jump or start, a last word, at least I'd have it on film. (Chrisafis)

The desire for witnessing the final moments of her mother’s life (or rather, perhaps, the fear of failing to witness these) thus brought Calle to tape everything; an obsession, she admits, “so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on each tape” (Chrisafis).

On the video projection, we find Monique Sindler lying on her bed, seemingly asleep. The camera is fixed on the upper half of her body, en profil. Her bedspread is decorated with images of flowers. On her side, a pot of flowers; on her chest, a small stuffed animal.

Occasionally, the tranquil image is interrupted. A woman treads in view and touches Monique’s neck, seemingly checking her pulse. A nurse tends to her body. All movement suggests that Monique, at some point in the preceding minutes, has passed away. As the

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sequence starts anew, we look more carefully for signs of life. We might observe a gentle swaying of Monique’s chest, indicating breathing. We might also perceive an eyelid

flickering briefly, or the mouth contorting itself into a grimace, if only for a second. And then the woman treads into the screen again, touching Monique’s neck, checking for a pulse (figure 1).

Monique has died, we deduce. Moments before, she was alive, or she might have been alive, but now she has died. At some point between that last wavering exhalation and the appearance of the woman, life slipped into death, although we are left in the dark as to when (“somewhere between 3:02 and 3:13”, Calle asserts almost playfully in the obituary) or how. But we know she has died. There is no other way: her death is implicit to the very existence of the project of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. What Pas Pu Saisir La Mort shows us, then, is the

Figure 1. A hand reaches for Monique’s neck. Sophie Calle, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (2007). Photo courtesy of Eloise Lambert. www.eloiselambert.com. Web. 15 June 2015.

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impossibility of locating the death event, what Emma Wilson calls “the almost complete lack of distinction at the boundaries between the living and the dead” (Love, Mortality 50). The work literally shows us the impossibility of capturing death on film, since we find ourselves incapable of locating the death event in a specific moment. The stillness of Monique’s body stretches from many moments before the death event to many moments after it. In a way, we cannot even speak of an event as such.

But there is another, more significant way in which the impossibility of the death event is made palpable by Pas Pu Saisir La Mort: it is the ambiguity of the premises by which the viewer is forced to approach Pas Pu Saisir La Mort that achieves the effect of capturing this impossibility. Entering the room of the projection, we are already aware of the fact that Monique Sindler has passed away. Yet we cannot help but look for signs of life in what we see. The video is put on loop, and at each successive instance of the film we catch ourselves believing that Monique is alive, watching her breathing, noting her pulse. We cannot quite speak of a suspension of disbelief, because it is true that Monique is alive, in that moment – it is captured on film. At the same time, however, we witness Monique’s death over and over, every time anew, continuously confirming what we already knew. For us viewers, Monique Sindler is always already dead. And yet, for minutes on end, every 13 minutes, we find that she is alive. By continuously restaging the death event, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort simultaneously seems to deny its occurrence. As Anneleen Masschelein observes, “[i]n this strange twilight zone the end can be perpetually postponed” (136).5

5_{This effect is intensified by the many showings the work has seen since its inception. After the 2007 Biennale,}

the work has been part of several retrospective exhibitions of Calle’s work, which oftentimes explicitly thematized the death of her mother. Each of these new virtual incarnationsthus endlessly restaged Sindler’s death once more, and by putting it on loop, simultaneously endlessly denied this death as well. Thus, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort postpones the death of its very subject: (the death of) Monique Sindler. The phrase Couldn’t Capture Death not only affirms the impossibility of representing the death event, but also refers to a reluctance of the work to capture the death event – Pas Voulu Saisir La Mort.

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So Calle’s hard work – 80 hours of taping – did not get her what she had set out to achieve. She did not capture death. What she found instead was a peculiar mode of temporality in which life and death exist not as opposites but side by side, circling around each other, opening up to one another before undoing one another once more. Her desire to witness some moment or some instant that would neatly wrap up the longest relationship of her life, the one with her mother, was one she saw herself forced to relinquish. Yet I wonder: whence this desire? Whence this need to pinpoint the moment of her mother’s death and to register it and testify to it?

“I didn't want to miss her last word, her last smile”, Calle asserted explaining the rationale of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (Chrisafis). She needed to see these final glimpses of her mother’s life, needed to be there to witness them. This witnessing is no doubt a form of care – making sure to be there, making sure she will not be alone, making sure those lasts few instances of her life will not go unnoticed, will be remembered, will be repeated in memory, again and again. But as the present slips into memory, and the other slips into death, these memories become more than just that; all that is left of the other now exists only in one’s memories, and each memory comes to be the matter through which the work of mourning is done (see chapter two). This desire to capture death, then, is closely linked to the desire to mourn: it is a means of solidifying or crystallizing an object of mourning. If this is so, surely the incapability of capturing death to which the title refers now surfaces as a problem. How does one capture death? And why did Calle not manage to do so?

Capturing life, capturing death

The apparent impossibility of depicting death haunts the representational arts. Simon Critchley writes that “[d]eath is radically resistant to the order of representation.

Representations of death are misrepresentations, or rather representations of an absence” (31). Clearly Pas Pu Saisir La Mort thematizes and further complicates the problem Critchley

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singles out: Monique’s deathly absence is always on the verge of sliding back into presence, and vice-versa. Presence proves to be as slippery an object of representation as its antonym. I have so far framed Calle’s failure to capture life and death as a consequence of the medium by which she documented this failure: film. Looping the same sequence of non-events time and time again creates the eerie effect of perennial dying and perennial reviving. Yet strangely, this looping gesture also has the effect of cancelling out the medium-specificity of film in the projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. By continuously repeating the same video fragment, the work compresses a sequence of moments into a single, endlessly repeated image, albeit one that is stretched out over time, like a photograph pulled and pinned on time’s axis. Amplifying this effect is the odd semblance of the film fragment to the tradition of static portraiture: since the thirteen minutes that comprise the film are, in spite of the grand event they supposedly aim to capture, actually quite uneventful, the image garners a stillness not unlike the stillness characteristic for traditional portraiture. Of course, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort is not a photograph. But I contend it is also no longer quite a video. My argument goes beyond Laura Mulvey’s in Death 24x a Second (2006), where she argues that the still frame, an exponent of digital technology, “restores to the moving image the heavy presence of passing time and of … mortality” that we traditionally ascribe to photography (66). Pas Pu Saisir La Mort’s game with presence and absence works not through the possibility of freezing the moving image, but rather through its unwillingness to stand completely still. It is thus the specificity of film as looped (or “loopable”) that has the work acquire the air of a photograph.

Photographic theory has long pondered the complexities of the relationship between representation and death. Not only has photography become the preferred medium to testify to the deaths of others; the medium of photography itself is thought to thematize or evoke death in a variety of ways. Susan Sontag writes that “[t]o catch a death actually happening and

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embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do” (59). Sontag is perhaps right in the sense that the temporal precision of a photograph is unparalleled by other modes of

representation. But as Sandra Gilbert points out in Death’s Door (2006), photographic realness creates a second effect (or perhaps we should say affect) that constantly threatens to thwart its representational accuracy. In photography, Gilbert argues, “the line between were and are begins to blur if we stare back hard enough” (217, emphasis in the original). The photographic image has the uncanny effect of rendering present what should really be absent. In this way, Gilbert shows, “[p]hotographs paradoxically both heal and exacerbate grief” (238). These observations are important because they suggest that the relentless shuttling between death and life in the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, to the point where each becomes indistinguishable from the other, is to a certain extent a problem that emerges with each instance of photography.

Yet these technologies that “represent the dead to us as “alive and busy” … and seeming, as it were, still to be here among us” (Gilbert 219) simultaneously carry with them an opposite effect. In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes declared that every photograph is burdened with the weight of death. For Barthes, every photograph is an “image which produces death while trying to preserve life” (92). The photograph does not even need to capture death; seeing a photo is an inevitable reminder of death that has come or death that will come. He writes, imagining looking at a photograph:

I read at the same time: This will be and This has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose … , the photograph tells me death in the future. … Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (96, emphasis in the original) Although we might tend to think that photography functions principally to capture and testify to the lives of the living, and, following Gilbert, even eerily prolong life beyond death,

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Barthes argues that looking at a photograph, we can only be reminded of their death, regardless of it having already taken place. Death is thus “captured” by virtue of this death-producing quality of the picture. In fact, Barthes tellingly refers to photographers as “agents in the capture of death” (92). But if Pas Pu Saisir La Mort capitalizes on tropes of photographic representation, it cannot but admit to come up short. Death did not let itself be captured; here the title impishly subverts the task Barthes ascribes to the photographer. Might we say that the work produces death, however? Are we to distinguish between these? How did Calle defy Barthes’ observations?

I find it instructive to introduce here a distinction between two conceptions of death: death as condition, a state of not-being-alive after having-been-alive, and death as event, as moment, as the instant that signals the beginning of the first kind of death. In his Mourning Diary (2010), Barthes himself alluded to this distinction when he drew a chronology of death, in which death turns from an event that “mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes” into a duration he calls “compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse” (50). If we follow Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the death produced by the camera is (at least) of the second kind: when the photograph shows “death in the future”, it shows the impending finality of deathness, of the non-being of being dead. Calle’s attempts at capturing death, however, seem more in line with the first. Calle summarized the rationale for making Pas Pu Saisir La Mort by stating “I wanted to be there when she died” (Chrisafis, emphasis mine). Thus Calle aligns her attempt to capture death with death as event: what she looked for was the moment of Monique’s death.

However, as we have seen above, the death not captured by Pas Pu Saisir La Mort is not exclusively the event of its occurrence, but also its duration, as Barthes would have it. It is at this point that we are reminded once more of the medium-specificity of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as film. Even if the loop carries itself as a photograph, stretching time like a panoramic

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shot might stretch space, its rhythm of repetition cannot help but uncover its photographic disguise. What so uncannily problematizes death through the looping gesture of the projection is not the fact that it produces death or fails to do so, or that it captures death or fails to do so, but rather that for the viewer, it does all of these things. When Monique, on the brink of death, is caught alive, time and time again, the work produces death in Barthes’ sense: through the pastness of living, it announces death. This is the “anterior future of which death is the stake” (96). Yet with the same gesture, the work denies death, each time annulling it, undoing it, to the point where not only is death not captured, but there seemingly remains nothing to capture in the first place.

Nestling itself between photography and film in this way, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort further unsettles the relationship between death and the image. Shocked into being reminded that we are dealing with a video rather than a photograph, the projection betrays our

expectation that a film will show us life. As Laura Mulvey points out, film bears a force of resurrection, rendering present and moving those we might have lost (18); here it sustains a certain hope, staging a momentary renunciation of death (Gilbert 209). The looped video projection cancels out this fleeting reprieve of loss since at any one point, Monique might be alive or dead: we cannot be sure. In the perpetuum mobile of Monique’s final 13 minutes, life and death cease to be meaningful points of demarcation, slipping in and out of each other’s embrace, sitting neatly in one another’s crevices. What we face is, as Jacques Derrida puts it, “[n]either life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (“The Deaths of Roland Barthes” 41).

About-to-die

If Pas Pu Saisir La Mort eludes life and death by managing to simultaneously fail and succeed in producing and capturing death, it at least manifests itself as an image in which someone is about to die. In About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (2010), Barbie

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Zelizer reflects on the prevalence of news photography that shows subjects in situations of near-death, which she refers to as about-to-die images.6 I take interest in her work because of

her focus on the effects about-to-die images engender with their audience.

In About To Die, Zelizer identifies what she calls a trope of about-to-die images characterized by a temporal suspension of the moment of death. Upon glancing at these images, the reader or viewer might logically infer or even know for certain that the person depicted or another person like the depicted has died, but the picture itself negates this deduction by means of depicting the subject as not-yet-dead. These images thus work “by coaxing people to suspend their disbelief, deferring knowledge of where the depiction leads long enough to respond to a scene that shows less information than is known” (24). In this way, the about-to-die image cannot show death; “Yet it is death”, Zelizer asserts, “and its realization beyond the frame of the camera, that makes the picture meaningful” (58).

Surely Zelizer’s description of the about-to-die image resonates with my analysis of the video projection in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. According to Zelizer, the about-to-die image “undercuts a reliance on reasoned information” (28). This observation helps me to understand why the video projection is able to defer death in the way it does. The “reasoned information” the viewer has is that Monique has died. Such is the premise of the work. Yet the about-to-die trope briefly suspends this truth, meaning that for me, Monique is alive, and dead, and

resurrected all in the same instance.

In this moment of pause where we might briefly suspend our disbelief and willingly overlook the truth we should know lies for Zelizer an opportunity for something resembling

6_{Zelizer’s study explicitly and exclusively deals with news images, which tend to be politically loaded or at least}

to depict suffering beyond the ordinary. Amongst the pictures she analyses we find pictures of the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War and the Congolese civil war, as well as of scenes of suicide and fatal illness. Zelizer seems to be less interested in images of what we might clumsily call ordinary suffering, that is, “regular” death or palliative care, as in the case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. Moreover, Zelizer’s analysis is not attuned to the phenomenon of domestic photography. In spite of these caveats, I take Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as awkwardly fitting in the genre of the about-to-die image. Because the work so boldly thematizes the paradoxical

simultaneity of endless futurity and pastness in about-to-die images, it almost comes to figure as a prototype, an about-to-die image distilled to its most essential nature.

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action. The trope provokes what she calls an “affective bonding”, by which she means that the trope’s “reliance on affect draws from the positioning of an overly emotive (fearing,

trembling, dreading) body in some kind of threatening situation, forcing a viewer’s powerful emotional response as a means of generating meaning, and possibly action” (63). The about-to-die trope engenders engagement and compassion: it works to create an imaginary,

imaginative space in which harm is not yet done and action might still garner results – one where hope is not yet out of place. Images drawing on the trope thus do not merely passively undergo meaning-making but actively invite for the creation of meaning by the viewer (315). Zelizer alerts us that this interpretive freedom comes with a risk: “[i]n obscuring death itself and leaving its sequencing up for grabs by the public, these images also make it possible … to deny, obscure, or challenge death because it is not shown” (312). The trope of about-to-die carries the politically troublesome effect of allowing the viewer to downright deny the occurrence of death, she warns. This would mean that even photographic “evidence” of the suffering of others might not plead any case for their grievability but in fact achieve the opposite effect, in spite of their blatant visibility. Yet surely the opposite is also true: the ambivalence of the about-to-die trope has us assume death, anticipating it even in absence of obvious indications. Here I agree with Barthes on the death-producing quality of the image. In this sense, my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort becomes a critique of Zelizer’s work when she writes that “[t]he decision to show an about-to-die image reflects a corresponding

decision not to show evidence of death” (28). As we have seen, any representation of death is haunted by its impossibility. If we approach the video projection, to speak of “evidence of death” is as meaningless as to speak of “evidence of life”. This is not to say that every image is an about-to-die image. The point is that the about-to-die trope keeps us guessing, overtly dramatizing (in fact capitalizing on) the ambiguity of life and death that every image stages in some way. As an image, it is not exceptional: yet as a trope, it is highly functional, steering us

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towards an affective bond because it so explicitly performs this ambiguity and offers a moment of reprieve from grim truths.

Grief as affect

It is this moment of hope and “affective bonding” that I want to use as a springboard to think about the affective appeal of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort on the viewer and about how it might engender a response of mourning, even in the absence of death. The psychoanalytic tradition of Freud tends to understand mourning as a private project. A discussion of affect might help us in beginning to understand grief as a shared undertaking in which personal loss ceases to be a requirement. As Ernst van Alphen points out, “affect is the opposite of

personal: it is social” (21).7 Van Alphen argues that even objects have the capacity to spark

affect in their beholders: works of art, for instance, might “generate and transmit affect or to engage a viewer in a particular, transformative way” (22). How might such an “affective operation” work in the case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort’s staging of about-to-die?

My starting point in this fleshing out of Zelizer’s suggestion is Sara Ahmed’s notion of the social character of emotions and her related concept of affective economies. Ahmed writes that “while emotions do not positively reside in a subject or figure, they still work to bind subjects together. Indeed, to put it more strongly, the nonresidence of emotions is what makes them “binding”” (“Affective Economies” 119). For Ahmed, then, what is crucial about affects is their itinerant nature: rather than being attached to objects or subjects, they travel between them in the process of meaning-making, thereby constantly shaping new forms of attachment and relationality.

7_{Van Alphen chooses to distinguish between affect and emotion, following the work of scholars such as Brian}

Massumi. For Massumi, affect is direct and impersonal, while emotion is “qualified intensity”: “the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (88). Affect turns into emotion when a subject registers it, evaluating it and putting it into words. In my discussion of affect, I follow Sara Ahmed and do not strictly separate affect from emotion. As she points out, “this model creates a distinction between conscious recognition and “direct” feeling, which itself negates how that which is not consciously experienced may itself be mediated by past experiences” (Cultural Politics 40). In other words, we have to see that even “direct” affects of which we are not conscious reach us because of past encounters and experiences and in this way depend on mediation.

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As we have seen, Zelizer defined the key to the moment of affective bonding enabled by the about-to-die image in terms of the image’s representation of an “overly emotive body” that shocks the viewer into response (63). Yet Pas Pu Saisir La Mort’s projection hardly shows us bodies that are “overtly emotive”. The stillness that gives the projection the air of a photograph also threatens to nullify the instant affective appeal Zelizer envisions her

archetypal about-to-die image to make. Ahmed’s conception of emotion, on the other hand, helps me to reframe the moment of interaction between the viewer and the image as one of which the pattern is less certain but also more creative. It allows for an exchange in which it is not necessarily explicit content of the image that initiates or engenders attachment. As Jill Bennett reminds us, even if affect is “autonomic”, we cannot conceive of the image as “a mechanistic trigger or stimulus” where a particular content produces a particular affect (11). So if Ahmed contends that “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation” (“Affective Economies” 120), my task will be to describe how Pas Pu Saisir La Mort establishes an affective circuit in which the viewer becomes another link.

I find Ahmed’s attention to the historicity of affect to be particularly helpful in uncovering this circuit. Ahmed points out that while affect seemingly manifests itself spontaneously and intuitively, such understandings of affect only serve to conceal that the particular effects of the encounters between bodies (affects) are just as well historically determined. In other words, while affects are not fixed to subjects, their pattern of emergence is partially dependent on past encounters too (“Affective Economies” 127).

I suspect that in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the terms of affective bonding are spelled out by the familiarity of its subject matter: death as domestic, peaceful, “safe”. Here the response is not one of dread, compassion or anguish but rather one of resigned sadness and solemnity. The affective bond takes the shape of a retroactive inclination towards care or an imminent

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mourning. It relies on a history of encounters, one in which the peaceful death of others is all too familiar: affect jumps from us or at us as we see in the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort a scene that reminds us of other losses, other deaths of others whom we have encountered before. The effect would be similar to cases where a communal expression of grief for a public figure is seen to stand in for private losses that had gone unmourned.8 If we can speak of an affective economy of grief, it is one in which empathy is bought cheaply.

We must note, however, that the video projection fails to capture death. Since it draws from the about-to-die trope it relies on a suspension of death. It is exactly this suspension that provides the conditions for Zelizer’s affective bonding in the first place. Yet as I have shown, this suspension goes both ways. In the about-to-die image we observe both life and death. The moment of hope I identified above is thus simultaneously a moment of despair. Monique is alive, Monique has died. Our response is necessarily ambivalent: as Monique criss-crosses between life and death, so our response might oscillate between care and grief (and love, sadness, horror, surprise, and so on). I want to make two observations here. First, we witness the degree to which this affective response partly foregoes a clear, predetermined pattern because the work continuously questions the suitability of our affects, which are always coming both too early and too late. Second, we see how our response works precisely through the stillness of the image, the ambiguity of its representational content. In this sense I

challenge Zelizer’s assertion that the about-to-die trope relies on the display of bodies in distress to carry out its function. In Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, Monique’s expressionless, motionless body makes an affective appeal because it so expertly fails to stage a death. It is the lack of unequivocal content that stirs me as a viewer.

Where will an analysis along these lines bring us? I find myself oddly close to Butler’s point of departure in her theory of grievability – the supposed universality of loss. “Despite

8_{See, for instance, Sandra Gilbert’s extensive analysis of the public response to the death of Princess Diana in}

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our differences in location and history”, she writes, “my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire” (Precarious Life 20, emphasis mine). By the ground I have covered so far, I am indeed in a position to argue for the idea that grief might be felt as affect even if the encounter that compels us towards affect effaces, denies or otherwise problematizes the occurrence of death. More concretely, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort might make us mourn for Monique not because the work shows us death, but because it triggers a chain of significations and associations that brings us back to our own hard-lived, worn through losses. This would indeed mean to make a case for a universal grievability in Butler’s sense.

At the same time, however, I find that my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort in terms of an affective bonding at this point forces me to ask more questions. I have so far

consistently referred to mourning as work. I choose to define mourning as an activity. It is a process, though not one that necessarily finds a clear-cut conclusion. If this is so, then I cannot be satisfied with understanding grief as a mere operation of affective attachment. Rather, affective attachment should be only one condition for the possibility of imminent mourning. I thus need to ask myself: how is mourning more than an emotion or affect? What constitutes the “work” of mourning?

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Chapter 2: meet

I ended the previous chapter with a set of questions about the nature of grief. I

tentatively demarcated an affect we could call grief, noting that this conception of grief might divert from or even stand in opposition to the notion of mourning as work. This notion we first find in Freud and subsequently in a range of authors drawing from the tradition of psychoanalysis, including Judith Butler. It aims for closure through recollection, through working through memory of the lost object (“Mourning and Melancholia” 255). Such a work of mourning is geared towards the relinquishment of an attachment that has been lost. It thus requires in its most elementary form the possibility of some attachment. However, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort has us face a non-death or not-quite-death of a stranger to whom we are not attached and maybe cannot even be attached due to the endless wavering back-and-forth between life and death of this not-quite-death. Still, as we have seen, the work begs us to mourn. A range of questions emerges: how can we mourn for a stranger to whom we are not attached? How might an attachment take shape after death, in the absence of death? How can we conceive of an attachment that is not preceded by a bodily encounter? What is the role of affect in these proceedings? And how does Pas Pu Saisir La Mort facilitate these, if at all? In short, how might the affect of grief allow for a work of mourning?

Approaching encounter

Pas Pu Saisir La Mort forces its viewers to look out a window on a stranger. The video projection has us witness an intimate domestic scene, both heart-warming in its banal familiarity and gut-wrenching in its merciless finality. No doubt there is an uneasy sense of voyeurism in catching a person being swallowed by this intensely significant depth – death. Yet in its constant loop, the projection refuses to give us something or someone to hold on to. The stranger (whom we also know – her name is Monique) is always already slipping away, turning her back to us as we begin to approach her; and as soon as we have regrettably

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relinquished our hopes of getting closer to her, she comes back again, teasing us with her oscillating not-quite-presence. It seems like we cannot meet Monique, like she remains unavailable to us, in spite of a clear determination to stick with us and be there for us. As death ends up being a moment of not-quite, so the work dispels the threat of voyeurism: we have witnessed nothing.

So even if Calle asserts us on the plaque we see upon entering Pas Pu Saisir La Mort that the work is a way of having her mother present at the Biennale in spite of her death, Monique never manages to completely fill this presence. But scattered around the video projection we find traces of this stranger Monique, hinting at the presence the projection does not quite let her become. We find an oil painting in hues of pale blues and whites, depicting Monique in a snazzy evening dress. We find a series of ink prints spelling out the word “souci”, which Calle professed was her mother’s last. And fastened to the wall across from the projection, we find Monique’s obituary reaching out to us, inviting us to learn about Monique, to meet her.

Monique wanted to see the sea one last time. On Tuesday, January 31, we went to Cabourg. Last journey.

The next day, “to leave with pretty feet”: last pedicure. She read Ravel, by Jean Echenoz. Last book.

A man she had admired for a long time, without knowing him, came to her bedside. Last encounter.

She organized the funeral ceremony: her last party.

Final preparations: she chose her funeral dress, - navy blue with a white pattern -, a photograph showing her making a face for the tombstone, and her epitaph, “I'm getting bored already!”

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She wrote a last poem, for her funeral.

She kept Montparnasse cemetery as her definitive address.

She didn't want to die. She said this was the first time in her life she didn't mind waiting.

Her last tears were shed.

The days before her death, she kept repeating: “It's odd. It's stupid.”

She listened to Concerto for Clarinet in A Major, Mozart’s K. 622. For the last time. Her last wish: to leave with, in music.

Last volition: ‘Don’t you worry.’

Worry…, her last word. On March 15, 2006 at 3 P.M., last smile. The last breath, somewhere between 3:02 and 3:13.

Impossible to capture. (Calle, translation mine)

Can we hope to meet Monique through our encounter with her obituary? And what kind of attachment might we develop by means of such an encounter?

The text that makes up the obituary takes the shape of a narrative, one of which we already know in advance how it will end. “Monique wanted to see the sea one last time”: so the obituary spells out living, breathing desire, still located in an identifiable subject,

Monique. It is the only time we read her name. From now on, Monique is either “she” or part of an unidentified “we”. This “we” only appears once as well, seemingly asserting the

presence of the narrator and then immediately rendering her absent again, as if some part of her already departed with Monique in the prospect of the latter’s death. Only implicitly does the narrator remain part of the story as the subject of address, Monique’s partner of

conversation. The text thus performs a constant oscillation between voices and pronouns, suggesting that the steadiness of the subjects it narrates has started to unravel. We learn of Monique’s little idiosyncrasies: “making a face for the tombstone”, “I’m getting bored

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already!” We are getting to know her, who is no longer her, and is no longer. “It’s odd. It’s stupid.” Here Monique speaks to us, and speaks for us, filling the gap between what we feel but dare not think, the terrible banality of a death that will never come to us but has already come to us. “She” makes place for “it”, becoming more and more undefined, until finally, we no longer encounter other subjects as the words fail to evoke persons, objects or even agency. “[L]ast smile … the last breath … impossible to capture”. Whose smile? Whose breath? What impossibility? Whose impossibility? It seems that, just as with the video projection, the obituary has Monique collapse under the weight of mediation the moment she is introduced to us. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort could not capture death, and seemingly not Monique, either.

In Strange Encounters (2000), Sara Ahmed writes about her desire to “meet” the women she reads and whom she reads about. Her desire coalesces with that of the viewer of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, who witnesses a major non-moment in the video projection and looks to cling onto any trace that might help coming to terms with this awkward voyeurism. Ahmed writes: “[m]y encounter with this text is mediated; it could only take place given the staging of other encounters, impossible to grasp in the present” (147). For Ahmed, the mediated nature of the “textual encounter” is not exceptional but rather symptomatic for the very notion of the encounter itself. Just like the text is a product of past encounters unknown to me, so each encounter with an other is preceded and determined by a chain of previous encounters of which I can have no recollection. “This encounter is mediated; it presupposes other faces, other encounters of facing, other bodies, other spaces, and other times” (7). Thinking about the encounter as a process of mediation brings Ahmed to argue that the category of the encounter exceeds the narrow notion of face-to-face meetings: “a meeting suggests a coming together of at least two elements” (7, emphasis Ahmed). This encounter, moreover, is a constitutive moment for Ahmed. I cannot quite be myself before I have met you. “[T]he

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encounter itself is ontologically prior to the question of ontology (the question of the being who encounters”, she contends (7).9

How can we encounter the other if she approaches us ambivalently, in fragments, through description and representation? And how might such an encounter be mutually constitutive? According to Ahmed, only by recognising “the finite and particular

circumstances in which I am called to respond to others” (147). Meeting the other through texts thus seems to entail an awareness of the bounds within which the occasion of the encounter emerges. In Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the obituary’s narrator weaves a pattern of memory traces through the fabric of the text. As we read, an impression of a person slowly begins to unfold and manifest itself. The text shares with its reader brief glimpses into what we assume to be some of the final scenes of intersubjective intimacy that predated Monique’s death. Monique picks a dress; picks a stone; poses for a picture. Each time the narrator allocates agency to Monique (“she”), as if asserting her utter liveliness in the face of the irreducible fact of her death. Yet as Monique gradually emerges from the sentences that circumscribe her presence in the obituary, so she yields to the increasingly impersonal grammar that takes over towards the end of the story. How can we speak of an encounter if there is no one left to be met?

It seems as though the obituary proffered some hope for an encounter, before leaving us empty-handed once more. Monique begins to disintegrate at the very moment the text sets us up to meet her. This will be no encounter; there will be no attachment. But perhaps

Monique’s apparent unavailability is symptomatic for the affective operations of grief. If we have not quite lost Monique, she at least torments us with a partial absence, an absence that

9_{Donna Haraway puts it succinctly in When Species Meet (2008) when she writes that “[t]he partners do not}

precede the meeting” (4). This notion of the encounter as a constitutive moment in the emergence of subjectivity has become a truism of sorts. Indeed, even in the models of subjectivity proposed by Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida the relational nature of the subject is key, although their focus lies less specifically on the encounter. Here their indebtedness to the work of Emmanuel Levinas is apparent. My aim here is to show how this “law” of the encounter plays out in the specific case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort.

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seems constantly on the verge of turning into presence once more. How might this shuttling between absence and presence help us in better understanding grief as affect?

Subjects unravel

To explore this possibility and better understand the workings of Monique’s

unravelling, I turn to Judith Butler, for whom the fragile constitution of the subject is essential to her theory of mourning. For Butler, at the root of subjectivity lies a moment of loss. The loss of the other throws the subject into a crisis of its own constitution. The harrowing

experience of grief exposes the subject to the insight that the understanding of herself existed as an effect of her tie to the other; loss of the other disrupted this sense of self-conception. Subjectivity, in other words, begins with an attachment to the other. Butler writes:

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. (Precarious Life 22, emphasis Butler) Thus, as I lose you and am made overcome by grief, I become aware of my fundamental dependence on you, as I could never have been there without you in the first place. “What grief displays … is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we

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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” (Precarious Life 23). In this sense, Butler argues, grief proffers not necessarily a theory of a fundamental relationality at the root of the constitution of the subject, but rather one that recognizes the instability of any subject as she is continuously dispossessed by the encounter with others (Precarious Life 24). Grief, when “I” respond to “my” loss of “you”, is thus a moment in which I come to understand the construct of this “I” as borne from the presence of “you” and also the moment where this “I” starts to unravel as an autonomous subject.

In my analysis of the obituary, the text seems to simulate or even perform such a process of unravelling. Subjects start dissolving as the moment of death draws closer. As we read through the obituary and the steady subjectivities of its protagonists slowly start to quaver, we get a sense of the dismantling, disfiguring effects of grief that Butler attempts to put into words – the very words that the experience of grief make available for us to use (“I”, “you”). Not only does the text manage to evoke this experience to the reader, I argue that the text also enables transference of the affect of this unravelling to its reader. We meet Monique when we read her name (the first word) and we learn about her desires and her sense of humour. But when we read “Monique”, this first word of the obituary, it is also the last time we encounter her name, and with each succeeding sentence, her coherence and stability increasingly come to collapse. So does the narrator’s, who disappears after that first, tenuous “we”, and then finally towards the end all persons make place for absence and elision. “Impossible to capture”: impossible to capture death, surely, but also to capture Monique, to capture the narrator, and ultimately to capture ourselves as steady entities: as subjectivities in the text unravel, how can we not but do so too by the imperative to respond to the figure we encounter? This effect is amplified by the insistent breaking down of language itself

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throughout the obituary: sentences grow shorter and words disappear, to the point where language arrives to us only in fragments (no subjects, no articles, no verbs). As language starts to fail us, so does the possibility of making sense of ourselves and of accounting for our experience. We are thrown in a void of signification: the vacuity of loss. I thus think a form of transference is operative in this obituary, one that affectively channels the shattering

subjectivity of the narrator’s grief to her readers. It is here that we can first circumscribe a feeling of grief: grief as affect.

As we have seen, this gradual dissolution of the subject – which the reader comes to mimic in an “affective transaction” (Van Alphen 22) – problematizes the possibility of an encounter and of an attachment of which I spoke before. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort dramatizes the impossibility of the encounter in the face of death. Monique’s momentary reappearances (once every time the video loops, once every time we read the obituary anew) only serve to hammer down this point, as they reawaken our desire to be with Monique before

disappointing us once more. In Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the mediation of pieces and parts of Monique through the projection and the text gives us the promise of an encounter, but then goes to work actively against its taking place. Here it stunts Ahmed optimism, because the process of mediation, which for Ahmed is as much as a condition for the occurrence of an encounter, here leaves the viewer empty-handed. Surely grief must be situated somewhere on this crossroads between the promise of love and attachment and the devastation of death and loss. It is grieving not just what has been but what could have been. In a sense we cannot speak of loss as such, but only of the loss of loss: the impossibility of losing, simply because there was nothing to lose. It seems as Ahmed writes: “for the object to be lost, it must already have existed within the subject” (Cultural Politics 160, emphasis Ahmed). But while Ahmed (following Freud) argues that such an absence of loss renders mourning impossible, I believe it is precisely this condition that sparks the affect of grief.

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The affect of grief thus capitalizes on Monique’s constantly wavering, not-quite-absence. As we sense Monique’s dissolution, so does the work make us feel our own. Yet unlike Butler’s, this sensation of unravelling is not interior, private or existential. To the contrary, I think the struggle to have Monique crystallize fully or coherently amounts to a certain openness that is crucial to the communal mode of grieving Pas Pu Saisir La Mort sets out to facilitate. It beckons for imagination and creativity in the same way the about-to-die picture did in Barbie Zelizer’s analysis (see chapter one). Monique needs the viewer to fill in the many blanks. What we see, then, is that the failure of not having captured Monique served to reproduce the limit conditions of the encounter – an openness to change, to letting the encounter shape yourself anew – but this time, the encounter was nonreciprocal. Monique touches me, but I cannot impinge on her anymore. All that remains of Monique now resides in me, in mnemonic fragments. This is what the not-quite-encounter brought me. If the

encounter ceases to be a mutually constitutive one, how might the grief I now feel still bear a transformative force?

Memory work

To address this question I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida, whose work on the work of mourning explicitly links the faculty of memory to the transformative effects of mourning. Like Butler, Derrida sees the moment of loss of the other as a moment of subjectivation and simultaneous self-erasure: death grants us a syntax for speaking about oneself and about another.Only in bereavement do I understand that “I” could not be, could not have been, if it were not for “you”, who is now gone. In Mémoires: for Paul De Man (1989), he writes: “The “me” or the “us” of which we speak then arise and are delimited in the way that they are only through this experience of the other, and of the other as other who can die, leaving in me or in us this memory of the other. This terrible solitude which is mine

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or ours at the death of the other is what constitutes that relationship to self we call “me,” “us,” “between us,” “subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory”” (33).10

When a loved one dies, then, we are faced with the fact that the other from now on will only live in us. “[F]or it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and because we live this or that in his memory, in memory of him”, Derrida asserts (31). In this way, death has us question our sense of self by exposing the fundamental tie to the (now lost) other that was required for this sense of self. The lost other now only lives “in me”, in bereaved memory, and it is in

bereaved memory where Derrida locates the transformative force of mourning.

So what is the importance of memory for Derrida’s theory? Derrida argues that it is not the other as such that comes “to us” or “in us” after death, but rather the traces of this other, “in the form of (…) images or mnesic representations which are only lacunary

fragments, detached and dispersed – only “parts” of the departed other” (37). These traces of the other enter us in a memory as a kind of metonymy for the deceased other, “where the part stands for the whole and for more than the whole that it exceeds” (37, emphasis Derrida). It is this chain of traces of the other that installs in us the capability of upholding what Joan

Kirkby calls an “ongoing conversation” (467) or “creative encounter” (469) with the deceased other. “It speaks the other and makes the other speak, but it does so in order to let the other speak, for the other will have spoken first. It has no choice but to let the other speak, since it cannot make the other speak without the other having already spoken, without this trace of speech which comes from the other”, Derrida notes (Mémoires 38, emphasis Derrida). In this way, mourning is emphatically linked to writing and speaking, denoting a focus not on the narcissistic interiorization of the other, but on a respectful, productive exteriorization of the memory of the other. By making the other speak in bereaved memory, we allow the other to

10_{Clearly Derrida’s thinking on death as the source of our vocabulary for intersubjectivity resembles Butler’s}

cited above. Commonalities between the theories of mourning of Butler and Derrida are manifold, but discussing them in detail goes beyond the scope of the present essay.

Mourning Without Loss: The Affective Life of Grief