'Most theorists agree that the work of mourning involves mental processes that ultimately enable a person to separate from this object they have lost, and this involves the paradoxical experience of focussing on the loss in order to finally disinvest in and detach from it. But even Freud, as Clewell argues in her article "Mourning and Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis of Loss", "explicitly acknowledged that mourning might not be as straightforward a business of severance and redemptive replacement as he earlier surmised" (58).' (Introduction)
Epigraph:
Yes the signature always has the knack or art of speaking to us of death; that is its secret, it seals everything that is said with this monumental epitaph. —Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning
My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it suddenly appeared between me, as I speak,and the being I address ... —Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire