The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film

The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the crisis of contemporary culture with respect to the problem of mourning. In an age grown sceptical of history, lacking a sense of memory’s urgency, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace. The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust and Freud’s successor Lacan. Freud’s idea of sorrow work and Proust’s concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.