Mourning and Melancholy, Pitfalls and Political Potential

Wait, a radical politics of melancholy? Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t sadness tend to be politically unproductive, reactionary even.

Cut off from the world, cut off from others, the melancholic person fixates on pain, loss, and defeat. Isn’t this why we say that sadness is often self-indulgent? Isn’t this why we use words like ‘wallow’? Attachment to a lost object, an expired past, leads to damage to the ego, a debilitating loss of agency, a type of paralysis, and an inability to generate new desires. Wounded, the self retreats into its own world. Paradoxically, this loss of self is also narcissistic. As interpersonal relationships and the external world fade from view, the self folds in upon itself and sinks into the swamps of solipsism.

Isn’t this how the story goes? Isn’t this how melancholy works? This account doesn’t seem to leave much room for radical politics.

It does, however, leave room for reactionary politics. Nostalgia for a lost past, more imagined than real, is a central trope of fascist discourse, past and present. In contraposition to the fullness of the past, the present day is defined by absence, loss, and lack, which can only be redeemed through a restoration, a return to past glory, and the elimination of the scapegoat. For the fascist, the future is not really about the future at all. It is little more than the past, the continuation of past power relations, parading around as the future. Fascism does not move forward towards the hitherto unattained but backwards towards the already consummated.

Just when we were starting to think that such an ideology had become an anachronism, in all its logical incoherence, its historical inaccuracy, its simplistic Manichaeism, its irrationality, and its potential for cruelty, just when we started to let our guard down, MAGA came along to prove us wrong. Not just MAGA, of course, but the whole authoritarian turn, the historical moment that we’ve been living since neoliberal democracy buckled under the weight of its own contradictions, its inability to provide solutions to the problems it created, and consequently washed up on the shores of a reimagined autocracy.

Progressive politics, in contrast, leans towards the future, as the name itself indicates. How much more so radical politics, with its visions of an end to capitalism, of a world without exploitation, of the advent of a society whose institutions are rooted in cooperation, justice, and the common good? Wasn’t it Marx himself who instructed us to let the dead bury the dead?

So, on one hand, we have a political reaction and a melancholic fixation on the past. On the other, radical politics and a concern for the future.

But is this a really good way to frame the problem? Does our debt to the past necessarily preclude a concern for the future? Are the political valences of an orientation to one or the other set in stone? Are there contexts in which a commitment to the past doesn’t constitute a step backward but a step forward? Are there certain sociohistorical conditions in which mourning and even melancholy become politically operative on the left?

Idelbar Avelar addressed precisely this question in his book The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999). Here, he argues that, in the wake of the dictatorship that marked the better part of the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America presented precisely such a set of sociohistorical conditions.

The return to democracy was framed as a re-foundational moment for the Latin American nation-state, a proverbial wiping the slate clean. All that unfortunate business of clandestine detention centers, torture, night flights, and forced disappearance was behind us now. It was time to move on to better and brighter things, namely to the perceived fullness of the triumphant neoliberal present and to its promises of future cornucopias. In this sense, for Avelar, the function of dictatorship was two-fold. There was of course the political dimension, the highly publicized objective of eradicating any traces of socialism in the region. At the same time, there were other interests involved, less openly discussed, economic in nature. There was the elimination of any resistance to the implementation of neoliberalism, which Avelar characterizes as “the epochal transition from State to Market.” Latin American dictatorships strove to undo the restrictions on global capital put in place by the populism of the thirties, forties, and fifties. In a move that restored the old alliance between local elites and global capital, Latin America went back to its subaltern position in the system of global capitalism as a producer of raw materials, a provider of cheap labor, and a consumer of goods manufactured in the metropolitan centers.

To be sure, this inability to separate the economic from the political is a feature of all liberalism, old and new, classical and neo. The individual freedoms, civil rights, and rule of law commonly associated with liberalism are inextricably intertwined with the individual’s function in the market, as a buyer and seller of goods, including her own labor. The fact that the necessities of production impinge on the freedoms of the individual has always been a blind spot for liberal theory. Furthermore, it betrays a conflict, seemingly impossible to resolve between the material machinations of capitalism and the political liberties from which they purportedly stem, a contradiction between what used to be called base and superstructure. When the arrangements of the economic base are threatened, liberalism has proven itself willing, time and again, to sacrifice the high ideals of its political superstructure. In a way that is as eloquent as it is tragic, the Latin American dictatorships capture this dynamic, that is, liberalism’s subterranean penchant for violence and its willingness to resort to totalitarian measures to conserve the functioning of its economic structures and protect the interests bound up in capital accumulation. One of the ironies of history, of course, lies in the fact that much of Latin American Marxism has been an attempt to hold liberalism accountable for precisely this discrepancy between its lofty political aspirations and lowly material dealings.

For Avelar, then, there is a dead body buried in the foundations of the newly restored Latin American liberal democracies, the secret of how they came into being, a story of violence and State terror. If on the one hand the State is willing to refrain from killings its own population and systematically violating the civil rights of its populace, on the other hand it is notably unwilling to be held accountable for its recent lapses into lawlessness and barbarity. This uncomfortable situation necessitates that the State adopt a policy of silence regarding its past crimes and impunity for the perpetrators of those crimes.

It is within this specific context of silence, impunity, and erasure that mourning becomes “an affirmative practice with clear political consequences,” in the words of Avelar. In the sociohistorical context of post-dictatorship, then, culture acquired new function. More precisely, it became the repository of memory, a site for resistance to official accounts, and a vehicle for collective interpretations and significations that contest those accounts. Culture, and in particular literature became imbued with a “memory value.” It was the site where subaltern views of history and proscribed worldviews could circuit and thrive. It was the site where the monolithic violence of capitalist dictatorship could be confronted, and the work of mourning could begin.

A few years later, in 2007, in Actos melancólicos: Formas de resistencia en la posdictadura Argentina, Christian Gundermann took issue with Avelar’s account. In a predictably postmodern move, he critiqued the closure implied by Avelar’s cultural politics. The contention rests on the Freudian theory of the “work of mourning” as an “affirmative process” that leads to closure and the creation of new desires and attachments. In an article published in 1917, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud analyzed the differences between two conditions of attachment to a libidinal object. Faced with loss, the subject engages in “the work of mourning” through which the attachment to the lost object is gradually overcome, setting the ego free to create of new desires and to attach to new objects. In mourning, this is largely a conscious process in which the causes of psychological distress are readily attributed to the experience of loss. In melancholia, however, the subject is unable or unwilling to renounce its attachment to the lost object.

Avelar envisioned a type of “affirmative mourning” that would eventually lead to the creation of new desires and a new Latin American political subjectivity. Gundermann, for his part, sees political potential in intentionally holding on to the past, in a non-negotiable attachment to the lost object, which in the context of post-dictatorship remits to the revolutionary politics of the sixties and seventies. He advocates for a politicized melancholic attachment to Latin America’s militant past.

In this polemic, Gundermann takes his argument one step further and accuses Avelar of betraying the past. “To insist on mourning,” he argues, “to exhort a process geared towards the acceptance of loss is little less than a vote in favor of erasure and impunity.” He advocates, instead, for a combative melancholy that clings to the revolutionary past as a refusal to accept defeat and as a form of resistance to State policies of silence, impunity, and forgetting. To be sure, Gundermann is not advocating for a return to the past but rather a particular use of the past to confront the post-dictatorial present. If State politics and mainstream culture tend to suppress and negate the past, then a “melancholic” Latin American left serves to negate that negation. This operation contests the interpretation of the return to democracy as a “clean slate” and strives to establish a continuity between the revolutionary left of sixties and seventies and the postdictatorial left of the nineties and two thousands.

The problem, of course, with Gundermann’s proposal is that it castrates Freud’s theory of melancholia. Conveniently, it overlooks half of the story: to conserve its attachment to the lost object, the melancholic renounces her own well-being and agency. If mourning, for Freud, is a process in which the causes of loss are readily identifiable to the mourner, the melancholic, in contrast, is unconscious of what afflicts her. The unnegotiability of the melancholic’s attachment causes it to identify with the subject position of the lost object and consequently see itself as an object. This unconscious strategy for dealing with loss comes at a high price, “draining the ego to the point of complete impoverishment,” as Freud so dramatically puts it. In the end, self-sabotage is an ineluctable feature of the condition of melancholia, as the following characterization makes clear: “Melancholia is mentally characterized by a profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance and reduction in the sense of self, expressed in self-recrimination and self-directed insults, intensifying into the delusionary expectation of punishment.” Even in a propitious sociohistorical context, it is difficult to see how founding a political project on these grounds could be productive or even viable in the long term.

In this sense, the Latin American left was running a risk by turning trauma into the foundation of a post-dictatorship political identity. The danger of intentionally fixating on a lost past is that it can damage the sense of agency and protagonism necessary to respond to an ever-changing present and to construct alternative futures. Furthermore, there is a point at which the struggle to advocate for victims can give way to a fixation with victimhood, the sacralization of the traumatic episode, the sentimentalization of defeat, and the mystification of the militant past. The irony, of course, is that such tendencies undermine the political subjectivity of militants, casting them as angels and saints instead of mere mortals and historical subjects. The attempt to conserve the historical past, then, ends up emptying it of its content. The desire for closeness banishes it from reach.

How much more so when the State and mass media appropriate memory discourse? Isn’t this what happened in The Southern Cone in the first decade of the new century? The human rights measures advocated by the grassroots social movements of the nineties became the political platforms of the two thousands and, ultimately, State policy. In mass media as well, memory went mainstream. The memory boom, as it became known, was a cultural moment. And, as the term suggests, it involved the commercialization of all types of cultural products within a specialized market, a memory culture industry of sorts. The political gains of memory politics, it seems, came at the price of the banalization of memory discourse.

In this context, what happens to the memory value identified by Avelar? What happens to the special political function of artists and intellectuals in conserving a threatened past when the State and media have appropriated that task? Who, then, is Gundermann’s combative melancholy actually combatting? What happens to the Latin American left, who built a political identity around being the sole guardians of a threatened past?

The proverbial ground on which the left was standing, its cause, was suddenly taken out from under its feet. It lost its political, social, and cultural function as guardian of the past. One would think that this might provoke an identity crisis. One might think that this would become an opportunity to change strategies and forge a new relationship to the historical past. For the most part, however, this is not what happened. The sociohistorical context changed but the region’s left didn't seem to be willing to change with it. By repeating the same slogans, its discourse became anachronistic, redundant, which damaged its credibility.

In the end, though, it didn’t matter much that the left was unable to update its strategies for the simple reason that the right updated theirs, ushering in a new epoch. Milei broke the truce, respected even by Macri, to respect the State’s human rights policies. He did not stop, however, with noncompliance of past conventions. Milei took it a step further, publicly legitimizing negationist discourses, defending dictatorship, and openly advocating for political violence. This hostility, unthinkable only a few years ago, only proves the left right for not trusting the State and mass media with the conservation of the collective past and the defense of human rights.

What is clear, at this point, is that the historical gains of memory politics are once again under threat. What is less clear is what to do from here? The left, it seems, is at a crossroads. Do we return to the left melancholy of the past decades, or do we update our strategies and respond with new forms of struggle? Does shifting the attention away from past pain necessarily imply betraying victims of State terror? Does the left’s obligation to its past have to come at the price of its present and its future?

Here are some conclusions of the experience of post-dictatorship left. The Latin American left has an engagement with its past that cannot be obviated. It has an ongoing obligation to work for justice for the victims of the State’s crimes during the dictatorships. This implies vigorously defending the gains of the historic social movements for memory, truth, and justice. It can also imply engaging with past militants as political subjects and taking their concerns seriously, their strategies for changing the world and all the assumptions upon which they rested, so very different from our own. This does not necessarily imply, however, fixating on victimhood, sentimentalizing defeat, using trauma to found a political identity, romanticizing revolutionary subjects, or mystifying revolutionary practices.

At the same time, the Latin American left has an obligation to the present that, equally, cannot be obviated. Its discourses, its practices, and its traditions are under attack. The region’s right has resuscitated an apologetics of dictatorship and is openly advocating for political violence against its enemies. In this sense, with the threat of violence hovering over us, we are perhaps closer to the revolutionary generation of the sixties and seventies than we have been in decades. And, just as they addressed their respective present times, we must turn to face ours. In fact, this is the type of present that future memory movements will have to dedicate their energies to overcoming. Memory is what happens when the fight is over, and this fight, unfortunately, is just beginning.

We have spent enough time facing backwards, reveling in past catastrophes, identifying the origins of our afflictions, cataloguing mistakes, dressing wounds. Today’s left must be bi-directional. Leaning into its past traditions, learning from its mistakes, honoring those it lost to State terror, it must at the same time respond to the specific demands of the present with tailor-made strategies. Without forsaking the past, it’s time to dry our tears and roll up our sleeves. There is work to do.

Diana Dowek, "Ensayo sobre el mal."