Refusal to Mourn
US National Melancholia and its Prophetic Precursors
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v1i1.9Keywords:
civil religion, biblical prophetic texts, Mourning and MelancholiaAbstract
In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.
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—‘Love, Guilt and Reparation [1937]’, in Melanie Klein, 306-43.
—Melanie Klein: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–45 (New York: Dell, 1975).
—‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States [1940]’, in Melanie Klein, 344-69.
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Published
2005-04-28
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Runions, E. (2005). Refusal to Mourn: US National Melancholia and its Prophetic Precursors. Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, 1(1), 9-45. https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v1i1.9
