Mourning

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (15)

1. #01

   Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

   <span id="Chapter1.htm_page14"></span>‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

   Theoretical move: Fisher deploys Derrida's hauntology as a diagnostic concept for late capitalist cultural pathology, distinguishing two temporal vectors (the no-longer and the not-yet) and arguing that hauntological music's melancholia constitutes a political refusal to accept capitalist realism's closure of futurity.

   This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work.

2. #02

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.37

   **m**

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical case from Margaret Little to argue that ego-to-ego interpretation — premised on hic et nunc intentionality and projective reciprocity — is structurally indistinguishable from projection and therefore generates errors prior to truth and falsity; genuine interpretation of defences requires at minimum a third term beyond the dyadic ego-relation, and resistance must be understood in Freud's broader sense as anything that interrupts analytic work, not merely as psychical obstacle to interpretation.

   his state of confusion was linked to the backlash of his reactions to mourning, which he had only been able to overcome by inverting them.

3. #03

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.45

   BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

   Theoretical move: By tracing Hamlet's two modes of identification—with the specular image i(a) and with the lost object a—Lacan distinguishes the imaginary register from a remainder that escapes specularization, using the cross-cap topology to show that minus-phi (the phallus as lack) and objet petit a share a status irreducible to the specular image, thereby framing anxiety as the privileged passageway between cosmism and the object of desire.

   we can see being played out in Shakespeare in all its nakedness the same identification with the object that Freud designated for us as the mainspring of the function of mourning

4. #04

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.121

   BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *passage à l'acte* is constituted by the subject's absolute identification with *objet a* — her reduction to and ejection from the scene as that object — and that this structural logic, rather than tactlessness or countertransference, explains why Freud himself enacts a *dropping* (passage à l'acte in reverse) when he terminates the treatment of the young homosexual woman. The topology of *a* in the mirror of the Other is shown to illuminate both hypnosis and obsessional doubt as different modalities of the object's structural invisibility to the subject.

   Freud's famous note on mourning, about the identification with the object as that upon which bears what he expressed as a vengeance on the part of the griever, is not sufficient.

5. #05

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.211

   **x** > **xv**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "men's business" designates a structural asymmetry in desire: what lacks for the man is (-φ), primary castration as something he must actively mourn and detach from narcissism, whereas for the woman lack is pre-castratively constituted through demand and the object a in its relation to the mother — this asymmetry reframes the debate on female phallicism and reorganizes the clinical vignette of Lucia Tower's countertransference around the distinction between the Other and the object a.

   He has to mourn ever being able to find in his partner…his own lack, (-φ), primary castration…Once he'd mourned it, everything went well, Lucia Tower tells us.

6. #06

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.345

   **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and jouissance are structurally disjoint—separated by a central gap—and that the object *a* as the irreducible remainder is the cause of desire, not a brute forced fact; it then uses the inhibition-symptom-anxiety grid at the scopic level to reframe mourning as the labour of restoring the link to the masked object *a*, distinguishing Lacan's account from Freud's while following the same trajectory.

   the work of mourning strikes us… as a labour that is carried out to maintain and sustain all these painstaking links with the aim of restoring the bond with the true object of relation, the masked object, the object a.

7. #07

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.361

   **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

   Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from Seminar X (Anxiety), listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

   mourning 36, 111, 117, 140-1, 143, 198-9, 3326

8. #08

   Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.150

   the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

   Theoretical move: By introducing the concept of acting-out via the Kris case and the English etymology of 'to act out', Lacan argues that acting-out is a response to an inadequate or failed analytic intervention—specifically, a deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act itself—thereby linking the structure of acting-out to the inexact position of the analytic act relative to repression and the symptom.

   the limited, moderate, temperate in any case, character, as one might say, that the affect (affection) of mourning takes on in it. The sign of genital maturity being that when this object is realised in the spouse... one should be able to mourn this object, within a time-span that we will call decent.

9. #09

   Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.337

   OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

   Theoretical move: Lacan maps three successive stages of Hamlet's relation to the object (Ophelia) — estrangement, rejection/externalization, and mourning/reconquest — arguing that Ophelia functions structurally as the phallus that the subject externalizes and rejects, and that the fantasy formula ($◇a) tilts toward ($◇φ) in a movement that illuminates das Unheimliche and the modern hero's constitutive displacement onto the other's time.

   The object is reconquered here only at the price of mourning and death.

10. #10

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.354

    PHALLOPHANIES

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a structural comparison of Hamlet and Oedipus to argue that mourning's disrupted rituals expose the same fundamental gap as the phallic signifier/castration, and that Hamlet stages a 'barred Other' [S(Ⱥ)] at its very outset rather than discovering it through the hero's deed—making Hamlet's Oedipal drama a specifically modern, 'distorted' form of the Untergang of the Oedipus complex in which the subject is paralysed by an unatonable debt rather than enacting the lustral rebirth of the law.

    Rituals serve a mediating function with regard to the gap opened up by [the loss of a loved one, leading to] mourning. More accurately speaking, mourning coincides with an essential gap, the major symbolic gap, the symbolic lack.

11. #11

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.350

    MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's identification with the "foil" (the mortal phallus) as the structural key to his desire, and then pivots to argue that mourning—illustrated by the cemetery scene—produces a hole in the Real that is the strict converse of Foreclosure: what is lost in reality irrupts as an absolute (impossible) object, and this opens onto a rearticulation of mourning via the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real rather than mere object-relations.

    mourning, which involves a veritable, intolerable loss to human beings, gives rise in them to a hole in reality [réel]. The relationship in question is the converse of the one that I proposed with the term Verwerfung

12. #12

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.302

    THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the graveyard scene in Hamlet to argue that mourning is the condition for the constitution of the object (objet petit a), and that Hamlet's sudden reactivation of desire occurs through a narcissistic identification with Laertes's grief — a mechanism that dissolves the distinction between hysterical and obsessional desire, pointing instead to a more fundamental structure of desire as such.

    it is by means of mourning that we see the object come into view... in order for it to be introjected, there is perhaps a prior condition - namely, that it be constituted as an object.

13. #13

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.369

    PHALLOPHANIES

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a structural account of the phallus in Hamlet to show that the subject's radical position—at the level of deprivation—is to *not be* the phallus, and that the phallus, even when empirically real (Claudius), remains a shadow that cannot be struck without the total sacrifice of narcissistic attachment; this leads Lacan to coin "phallophanies" as the lightning-fast appearances of the phallus that momentarily expose the subject's desire in its truth.

    the object - disappearing and vanishing step by step by some pathway, the major one being the pathway of mourning - exposes the true nature of what corresponds to it in the subject for a while

14. #14

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.316

    **XXIII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the Oedipus complex's decline and superego formation by distinguishing three registers of the father (real/castrating, imaginary/privating, symbolic/dead) and the corresponding mourning work, arguing that the superego ultimately expresses hatred toward the imaginary father-God who "handled things badly," while the paternal function is always and only the Name-of-the-Father — the dead father as myth — and desire is constituted through a necessary crossing of limits.

    in connection with what the child experiences as privation, that the mourning for the imaginary father is forged? - that is a mourning for someone who would really be someone.

15. #15

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.409

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.

    mourning consists in authenticating the real loss little by little, piece by piece, sign by sign, element capital I by element capital I, until they are all exhausted. When that is done, the mourning is done.