Mourning

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Introduction to Overthink podcast

1:00Hello and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I am David Peña Guzman.

Internet technologies and mourning

1:30Mourning is something that countless humans over the course of millennia have engaged in. But the internet has changed the way we relate to it in significant ways. I couldn't agree more, Ellie. And I have a quote here from the sociologist Julie Aleph Dilmash, who writes about this. And Dilmash says, Death traditionally involves a clear temporal and spatial separation. The dead are not with us anymore. They have left this world.

2:02We live much of our lives online, constantly accessible and present to others. The permanence of the internet disrupts this dynamic of separation, of moving on, producing both new forms of mourning and challenges to the grief process. Yeah, this is really interesting. I mean, no longer is somebody interred or cremated, you know, scattered to the winds, but is also still present with us, right? And I guess you could say, I guess you could say, you know, that existed with photographs

2:35or portraits or letters. So it's not as though there was necessarily like no image or representation, let alone trace of the loved ones. Of course, there are always traces of loved ones after they pass. But I think there's something unique about being able to listen to another's voice, look at another's image, see their entire Instagram profile after they've passed, right? And also there is, you know, now more and more technology that is creating digital avatars

3:07of loved ones after they've passed. Yeah, no, that's right. And I think you could even push it further back than just photographs or paintings, say, of the disease. And so like you could make the argument that even just the existence of memory is already the creation of a kind of vault for the protection of the dead that keeps them alive, right? Like we often speak in that way. We say they are still alive in our minds, in our memories, in the way in which we remember them either individually or collectively. But nonetheless, I do think that new technologies put pressure on how we experience the remembering

3:42of those who have passed. And aside from the ones that you mentioned, like Facebook or avatars. I didn't mention Facebook, but. Yeah, yeah, you did, no? Instagram, it's fine. Oh, sorry, same thing from my very millennial perspective. But I'm also thinking here about holograms, for example, that go beyond and actually recreate sort of like that 3D body of the person who is no longer here and who is no longer of this world in order to introduce them into this world, into our time and into our space.

4:13And even more recently, the development of AI voice technology, which is hyper realistic and allows you to not only hear the voice of the dead, but to hear them saying things that would suggest that they are here and now because they are saying things that they have never said, but they're doing so in their own voice, mimicked, of course, or hallucinated by AI. Yes, it's not just previous recordings. It's literally having a conversation with them now. Yeah, no, no, that's right. Yeah.

4:44And the Hi-Fi Nation episode gets into some really interesting technology around that too that's emerging. Yeah, and I think you use the term afterlives, like the afterlife of grief. Yeah, so like people can have after death many different kinds of afterlives that are mediated and facilitated by all these technologies. And aside from this, Dilmash argues that social media and the Internet in general, they structurally foreground joy and euphoria and play and stimulation such that it's just not the right forum for

5:15the seriousness of the work of mourning. So everything about the information superhighway is saturated with images, with screens, with sensory activation. And the speed of that sensorial sort of overwhelming of the subject is very much at odds with the slow pace of mourning. So there is a temporal gap here. They also point to a gap at the level of language in terms of how we talk about death, grieving and mourning,

5:45because on the Internet, and I think this is right, we are expected to speak in certain ways. We are expected to convey positive affect, we give likes, we share emojis. Again, there is this idea that we talk about things in a light way when we are online, largely because of the limits of these platforms. But that's not at all how we talk about death in real life. Even if you send somebody who just loved their parents, for example, a sad emoji, think about

6:16how inappropriate that is. And the point here that I want to underscore is that according to DealMash, this ultimately leaves us feeling very uneasy around death whenever we have to deal with it in online spaces. We are on edge around the topic. You know, it's always hard to know what to say to a friend who's grieving, because grieving and mourning are such individual processes, even when you're going through them collectively in the company of others, you know, and especially if it's not also your loss, but it's the other

6:50person's loss. It can be just so, so hard to know what to say. And I think when something is written down because it's like coming in a message or something like that, it feels like the stakes are higher, too, because then, you know, there's a record of that rather than just like something you said in conversation. Plus, you can't have the emotional valences of like, give me a hug or I'm so sorry, this is happening. It's just like reduced to the words. And so, yeah, like it's hard to know what to say, especially when the form of social media or even like text messaging, I would say, isn't really made for that kind of nuance or

Defining mourning and philosophy

7:25even that kind of seriousness. Today, we are talking about mourning. How does culture shape our relationship to mortality and death? And what effects can the passing of time have on the process of mourning?

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Freud on mourning and melancholia

10:03A lot of studies of mourning focus either on cultural rituals of mourning, as this is studied by anthropologists, or on individual strategies for coping with the loss of a loved one. And this is what you get from psychology. We're going to touch upon rituals a little bit later in the episode. But I want to start right off the bat by stating that, as a philosophy podcast, we're going to be primarily taking a theoretical angle to the question of mourning. Totally.

10:33And I think that expression of, like, the narrowness of the scope here is really important. While we're in the space of such statements, I should also mention that we decided to have this be an episode about mourning rather than about grief. And that also narrows our scope, right, relative to the various approaches that we could take. There's a lot of really important research on grief, including within philosophy. But a focus on mourning allows us to get into some of the specific texts that we want to consider today. And I was thinking about it in preparation for this episode.

11:05Like, what's the distinction between mourning and grief, you know, at least within philosophy? And I feel like to some extent, the distinction is really just geographical. There's something very continental European about a focus on mourning rather than on grief. Like, mourning feels like a very French and German concept, whereas grief, perhaps more an American one. Yeah, well, and it really changes by region and nationality because in Spanish, we use the term, for example, for sorrow, which is pena. But it's actually a combination of mourning, grief, and also shame.

11:37So, you know, like it really changes based on what tradition you're using. And we'll get into some of this when we talk about the Mexican philosopher that I want to bring into this discussion later in the episode, who is responding to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's work on death and mortality. But I do think that you're right, that the distinction between grief and mourning seems somewhat arbitrary. Not necessarily arbitrary, just geographical, right? Which I guess you could say is arbitrary. It's not conceptually driven, but I don't know that I would go that far because I do think like the mourning tradition is very important in Freudian psychoanalysis and the

12:12way that that then translates into French philosophy. So I should say when I'm talking about French and German language philosophy, not just literal French and German, since, of course, Freud was Austrian. But I think, you know, this focus on mourning is fitting for us, given that we have a background in continental European philosophy. And so I'm super excited to talk about this. I know you are always excited to talk about Freud. We're going to focus this part of the discussion on Freud's essay, Mourning and Melancholia. Yeah. Written 1915, published 1917 in the context of war.

12:45And in this essay, which is not that long, I highly recommend our listeners and viewers to listen to it, to read it on their own. But Freud is trying to make sense of this distinction between mourning and melancholia, which is a difference between a healthy way of dealing with and coping with the death of a love object and a way of dealing with that loss that is pathological and that gets in the way of the self living a full, flourishing life. Yeah. And this is the way that the distinction between mourning and melancholy in the Freudian tradition is made.

13:18That is between mourning, which is non-pathological, and melancholy, which is pathological. So where do you want to start here? Do you want to go through the features of mourning and then talk about like when it kind of transforms into melancholy? That seems like a pretty good place to start. I think that's that's good. So let's think about mourning for a second. Mourning has a structure, according to Freud. Somebody dies, you lose that love object. And when that happens, you are confronted by the reality principle, what Freud calls the reality principle.

13:51That is to say, you look around desiring to see them. But reality tells you they're not here anymore, right? Like they're not in the room. You're not going to see them anymore. And that conflict between your desire, because you're still effectively attached to that person, you still want to see them. You project yourself in a relationship with them versus the reality of their absence creates what Freud refers to as an inner conflict that requires you to then re-channel and rearrange your libidinal investments, like what you care about, what you love.

14:24Your attachments. Exactly, your attachments. And that can be really hard to do. But according to Freud, in the work of mourning, when we go through the process of reattaching ourselves based on the reality principle, using it as our guide, we eventually succeed in reconstructing our psychic economy in order to accept and adapt to a new reality. And that's when he says the ego becomes free and uninhibited again, right? Like you become healthy, even if it takes a while to undergo that process of mourning.

14:56And it does take a while because he says that we never freely give up objects that will be null energy, right? Like our attachments, we have to pry our attachments from our cold dead hands, or in this case, the cold living hands that have to let go of the dead ones. Sorry, that was a little macabre. And I think, you know, the temporal aspects of this process are essential. Freud says we detach the libido bit by bit from the lost object, and that, of course, takes time.

15:26However, what's important here in the process of mourning is that nothing is hindering that process. It has a temporality of its own, but it's just kind of like chugging along, right? Um, the unfolding of the mourning process is happening of its own accord, and then it naturally reaches an end point. He doesn't define what that end point is, as opposed to like the DSM-5, which has like very weird ways of distinguishing mourning from more pathological conditions. We're going to leave that aside now because that's not the main focus here. Um, but yeah, I just want to point that out as well as like there's a kind of unfolding of the process of mourning.

16:02Well, and I do think that he tells us what that end point is loosely, which is a self that can function again in the world without being taken down by the feelings of sadness and grief and mourning that come with it. Yeah, the ego is free again, as you mentioned. Yeah, and uninhibited, as Freud says. And the point here is that that process does unfold and should unfold of its own accord. But there are some cases where the process sort of goes off the rails and it becomes pathological.

16:37And that's what Freud is trying to understand in this essay. How is it that in some instances we get stuck in a position of a kind of mourning that is sick and that locks the subject in a complex? And that's what he calls the complex of melancholia. And he says there are three factors that are associated with melancholia. And of course, we have to talk about those because those are what differentiate melancholia from mourning. So the first one is the loss of the object. So in both cases, you lose something that you love.

17:07The second factor is what Freud calls ambivalence. And that is that in the case of melancholia, we actually have a really ambivalent relationship to the thing or the object that we have lost. Like maybe we have conflicted feelings. Maybe we love that person, but we also resented them or even hated them. And so when you have that ambivalent libidinal attachment to an object, you are more likely to be thrown into a complex of melancholia. The third and final feature of melancholia is that there is what he calls a regression of libido to the ego.

17:43This is a really important concept. What ends up happening in melancholia is that my negative feelings toward the object that I've lost were never resolved because I was ambivalent. I had an ambivalent relationship. And so I sort of project them onto myself and I start relating to myself in the way I used to relate to that object. So I supplant my ego for the object. And so in drawing this analogy between mourning and melancholy, Freud says there are certain similarities, right? They both involve this work that unfolds over time, but they have really different effects and really different features.

18:22And in particular, this idea that mourning has a natural endpoint is not found in melancholy. In melancholia, Freud says, the path is blocked. So there's a hindrance in the process of detaching the libido bit by bit. And the hindrance of that process results in not the withdrawing of the libido from the object, but in the kind of incorporation of the lost object into oneself. So one of the things that you find behaviorally in cases of melancholy is an absence of self-regard that can take the form of self-denigrating behavior and statements like I'm worthless.

19:00You know, I have no purpose in this life and so on and so forth. With even like self-harming or suicidal tendencies, it can also take the form of like not taking care of oneself, just like withdrawing from one's obligations in the world, as well as the requirements of, you know, like daily life maintenance. Yeah. Like you don't eat, you don't bathe, that sort of thing. Yeah. And he says that absence of self-regard should really be taken seriously as a core phenomenon of melancholy. He says this idea that I am worthless, that people with melancholy expressed, should be taken literally.

19:35Not because they really speak to like the actual worthlessness of the person who's uttering them, but rather because they are speaking some kind of truth. So Freud says it would be fruitless to contradict a patient who brings these accusations against his ego. He must surely be right in some way and be describing something that is as it seems to him to be. And so what does it mean then to take seriously the melancholic's claim that they're worthless? Freud thinks when the analyst really listens to this patient, what they find is that that accusation of worthlessness is really being directed to the internalized object of the other, right, rather than to themselves.

20:18And so that ambivalence that they had to the lost and loved object manifests as a self-hatred because what they're actually hating is the other within the self. Yeah. And so just to use maybe a concrete example, let's say that my father dies and I had really mixed feelings about my father. Maybe I loved him because he raised me, but I also recognized that he was a bad friend and a manipulator and so on and so forth. When he dies, it might be that I transpose or transfer my dislike of my father onto me because I can't express myself that way of a dead person.

20:55And maybe, says Freud, because I wasn't even fully conscious of the extent to which I dislike my father, because that's an important aspect of melancholia for Freud, that the ambivalence that I feel toward the object of my love need not be conscious. Totally. I may not be aware of it. And that's another differentiating factor between mourning and melancholia. You might be like, my father was my best friend. You know, I was like obsessed with him, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But deep down, there is unresolved tension. And so in mourning, I know what I lost. In melancholia, I'm not sure. And there's a lot of unconscious content creeping under the surface.

21:31And so in those cases, when my father dies and I have the unresolved issues, I start thinking of myself as a piece of crap, as unworthy of love. But in reality, I'm speaking about my father. And that's the substitution that Freud thinks is absolutely essential for the analysts to spot. But they cannot spot it if they don't take seriously the testimony and the discourse and the expressions of their patient. And that's ultimately the fundamental difference, I would say, between mourning and melancholia.

22:01That in mourning, I feel like I lost something external to myself. That other person disappeared. Melancholia manifests itself in a narcissistic structure where I feel like a part of me is dislikable and I must express loathe toward it. And that's something that Freud says with a quote that that really stood out to me. He says, in grief or mourning, the world becomes poor and empty. In melancholia, it is the ego itself.

22:32Yes, yes. And that manifests in things like profoundly painful dejection, he mentions, like a lack of interest in the outside world, as well as the other things that we talked about, those consequences of a lack of self-regard. And, you know, you might be wondering, like, what led to this ambivalence? Like, why do you kind of low-key hate your father, even though you also love your father and think you love him? I love that you chose the example of a father because you, like, actually don't know your father. So you could, you know, you can, like, get away with that.

23:05I don't think any of us who do know our fathers could get away with using that as a real example. Maybe Freud would say everybody can get away with that because it's probably true based on the Oedipus complex. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, but so what led you to this ambivalence, hypothetically speaking? The first is that you had this object choice. You were attached to that person, right? And then second, you experience a real slight or a disappointment coming from this loved person, right, that then shatters your relationship with them.

23:40The result of that shattering of the relationship is strange for Freud. Because usually when there's a withdrawal of libidinal energy, that libido gets directed elsewhere. But that's not what happens here. The free libido in this case was not displaced onto another object, but it was withdrawn into the ego. And I have to say, like, when he's describing this, it kind of sounds to me like it could also be construed as something that happened while the person was still alive.

24:11I don't know if you have thoughts on that, because this is presented as a kind of reconstruction of the process that led them to melancholy. So, I mean, but melancholy develops in the process of mourning or in the process of coping with the death. So not necessarily when they were alive, but even when you're going through the process of trying to adapt to a new reality. But it's really important to note precisely what you said, that when the libido is withdrawn into the self, I really like the way Freud talks about it. He says, it stays there like an open wound.

24:42So instead of scarring over so that I can then move on with my life, melancholia is when I experience the loss of the love object as an open wound that keeps hurting me. And I can't make progress. I can't get on with my life. And that's what blocks the process. And so in that regard, it does happen sort of after you lose them once they die. But Freud also is very clear that loss is a very broad concept. And we lose things, not just in terms of death.

25:14You lose somebody when they move away. You lose a partner when they dump you. And he even says we can experience melancholia in relation to things that are not people. We can experience it in relation to like ideals or values. The loss of a country, he mentions. Yeah, like the loss of a fatherland or the loss of my sense of security. And I think that's really helpful, actually, for thinking about psychopathologies at a political level, where it's not just about me as an individual in my personal relationships, but also in terms of my political beliefs and worldviews.

25:47Totally. And there's been, I think, a lot of good work on that, too. You're going to talk about collective mourning a little bit later anyway, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, OK, so, yeah, I now feel like my question was really silly, which is like, does it have to happen after they die? It seems like no, because obviously the answer is no, it doesn't have to happen after they die. Freud literally defines mourning as a response to a loss and therefore also melancholy as a response to a loss. He doesn't say that loss has to be limited to death. OK, that seems now, in retrospect, very obvious to me. I feel kind of like silly for thinking about that, especially because I do think that, you know, for so many of us, mourning is very clearly not confined, even if we're just limiting it to personal losses to people who die.

26:30Right. Like you mentioned, moving away or loss of a friendship, a lot of the Freud, for me, I think about in terms of one of the most well-known responses to Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholy, which is Derrida's troubling of this distinction. So Derrida writes about mourning in a bunch of different texts, but in his work on mourning, he suggests that Freud's neat distinction between the pathological work of melancholy and the normal work of mourning is tenuous at best.

27:03In fact, all mourning involves some kind of melancholy. I'm curious what you think about this. Do you think the distinction between mourning and melancholy is valuable or do you think it is worth deconstructing? So I do think there is value in deconstructing it because our relationship to objects is always ambivalent, right? To all objects. We never have an object of desire or libidinal investment that is just like explicitly good or explicitly bad. And so if that's a defining feature of melancholia, that our relationship is ambivalent, then show me a meaningful personal relationship that doesn't have at least a little bit of it.

27:40And similarly, I think identification works in such a way that we often incorporate or internalize aspects of the other into the self. And so when we lose them, we also lose a part of ourselves and how we relate to them. And so at least in that sense, I think, yeah, that it can be challenged and problematized. Nonetheless, on a practical level, I think we all recognize that there are pathological experiences of loss where clearly something is blocked.

28:11There is an open wound. And most of us would say that even though, quote unquote, normal grief is devastating, and when you live it from within, it feels like the world is ending. Nobody would say that it's a pathological reaction to loss. We recognize that it's normal to grieve the death of someone. I will say, though, the incorporating of the other into the self, at least when Derrick is reading, and he's influenced here by a couple of other psychoanalysts, Abraham and Turok, that incorporation is actually characteristic of mourning. What's characteristic of melancholy is that the other is not incorporated into the ego, but is introjected into the ego and is alienated from the ego.

28:51And that in rereading the Freud doesn't really come out explicitly because I think Freud is talking about the way that in mourning, there's a withdrawal of libido from the object because the object is gone. Whereas in melancholy, the object is within, Derrick wants to draw a distinction between two ways that the other can be drawn within, either by being incorporated into the self, which I think happens after the loss of any relationship that's important to us. I'm really fascinated by the way that this happens after breakups. You know, you kind of incorporate what you learn from the other person into your own experience.

29:25But there can also be this other weird way of bringing the other in, which is introjection, where the other is kind of there, not digested, just like alienated. And Freud gets at that a bit with talking about how in melancholy, there's an opposition that forms between one's conscience and one's ego. The ego becomes a forsaken object that the conscience is judging, right? So that like absence of self-regard, that self-hatred, that sense of like I'm worth nothing, that's the conscience talking about the forsaken ego.

29:59Well, and that difference between incorporation and interjection, sometimes the language that is used in psychoanalytic circles to talk about this is almost as like the creation of a vault within. The crypt. It's almost as if like the crypt. That's Abraham and Torak stuff. That is exactly right. And so like I keep the other inside me in this protected space that prevents me from digesting and thereby from moving on with my life. Because in order to move on, the reality principle has to kick in to tell me this this crypt is not there anymore, right?

30:31Like it only exists in this introjected form. And so there is this tension between the creation of the crypt and the reality principle that leaves that wound still open, still bleeding. And as a subject, Freud would say I become unfree and inhibited. And that's that's the condition of melancholia.

Digital afterlives and AI companions

30:50So I want to ask you now how we might think about this in relation to the digital afterlives that we mentioned earlier in the episode, because it seems to me that having a photo or even a digital archive of your loved one through seeing their Instagram isn't going to inhibit the work of mourning. But having an AI companion that is talking like them could arguably, you know, get in the way and then lead us to melancholy, at least if we're taking this Freudian distinction seriously and sort of leaving aside Derrida's troubling of it.

31:22Do you think that having an AI companion of your loved one who has passed or is gone? Maybe, yeah, maybe they just you just broke up with them. Right. And you kind of like continue to have this, quote unquote, relationship with the person. But it's like with a quote unquote person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think that might lead more to melancholy? I think so. And I think the answer here has to be grounded in Freud's concept of ambivalence, because when you are less sure of what you've lost, you're more likely to slip into melancholy.

31:53If I make, let's say, an AI avatar slash copy slash personal assistant of my partner, Rabi, and I continue to have chats with this AI avatar in the morning and they continue to ask me how my day was, if they continue to have the sorts of discussions that I have with my partner while they were alive. What have I lost exactly? Would it be fair to say that I just lost the body of my partner, but their mind is still here?

32:24That sounds grotesque. Yeah, but like, again, the point here is not that there is an answer one way or the other, but that the technology problematizes my lived experience of the loss and prevents me from conceptualizing what has been lost. And that already puts me on a path to this open wound.

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Changing rituals of grief

34:08Since the turn of the 21st century, people have been turning away from engaging in traditional grief rituals and towards creating their own personal grief rituals. This is at least the argument defended by the scholars Karina Sass and Alina Coleman. And they suggest in a piece that they published in the journal Death Studies in 2016 that rather than turning to traditional rituals, we've seen a trend toward designing and adopting new rituals emphasizing pragmatism, playfulness, and creativity to ensure meaning-making of self-relevant events.

34:46I mean, I think it's really interesting to think about in relation to what we were discussing with mourning, this idea that in order to move past a loss, it's helpful for people to have an eye to the practical, the playful, and the creative to make things their own. Yeah, although the question here for me is to what extent is a playful, personalized ritual for dealing with death rather than a traditional one really a ritual, at least in an anthropological sense, because one of the core features of rituals is that they are collective and somewhat inflexible, right?

35:19It does remind me of something that I stumbled upon in my research, which is that nowadays it's quite common for funeral homes to offer all sorts of personalization services so that people can grieve, quote unquote, on their own terms, like with their own signature, in their own personalized style. So I was just like browsing some funeral home websites and things like that, and I found that you can, for example, be offered things like a personalized grief journal, where they'll like give you a journal and then you'll write your personal thoughts over the course of grieving.

35:52You can buy custom-made wind chimes that remind you of the loved one in some way, that you can make the funeral home make you little like keepsakes for you to give to people, but that like have a signature either of you or of the person who has died. You also can now inject the ashes of the dead into your skin by putting it in tattoo ink. Yeah. Such that, you know, you have a tattoo and it's like, oh, that's my mother or that's my uncle or whatever. Yeah, the authors talk about those cremation tattoos.

36:26Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, but so the point here is that there is now this shift toward choice, individual consumer choice over how to mourn so that you don't even have to choose a traditional funeral. And like all of the examples I gave were of like a quote unquote traditional funeral with a personal twist, but you can even choose like an entirely different way of mourning as well, right? Like you can go for a hike or you can go on a vacation to mourn. Yeah. You can spread the ashes or not, et cetera. Like there's just so much variation that is taking us potentially away from the centralized ritual that previously used to be collective and agreed upon.

37:04Yeah, I think for people who aren't religious, especially there are a lot of questions around what sort of celebration of life would I want and how do I want others to mourn me collectively, right? Because there is so much utility to having a collective process of mourning, but also, you know, that can feel really removed from the life of the person who actually passed. If it's just like some ritual, especially a religious ritual that really didn't have much to do with their everyday lives. I think most of us have probably been to a funeral where somebody who, you know, never went to church suddenly gets this like church funeral.

37:39And you're just sort of like, what is going on here? This doesn't feel authentic to who they were at all. Yeah. And so there are questions here about our personal relationship to the ritual, like the role of religion here, also the role of culture. But in general, I am maybe a little bit suspicious of the claim with which we began this discussion, which is that now we're moving toward individual choice rather than collective rituals. And I think that claim is just highly culturally specific because as somebody who grew up in Mexico, I'm thinking that doesn't seem right, at least of my Mexican culture, because in Mexico, we still have a very strong tradition of collective and public mourning that is anchored in very clear, tightly followed ritualistic practices that are not really up for individual choice.

38:27I think overall in Mexico, the very idea that mourning is something that you could do in the privacy of your family alone or just like in the privacy of your selfhood would be nonsensical because it's inherently public and collective. It has to be ritualistically framed. Yeah, I think this is true in a lot of places, but certainly not, at least not to the same extent here in the U.S. I think death is often something that we keep private within the space of the family and close friends, sure, but not something that is actually publicly put on display and mourned.

Mexican existentialism and death

39:04Well, and that also points to just different cultural conceptions of death, right? Like just how different cultures not just perform certain rituals, but understand the very notion of life and death. And this is a common theme in the writings of a lot of Mexican existentialist philosophers from the 20th century who are wrestling with this question of how Mexican people, specifically in light of our history, in light of our experience, in light of our politics, how we experience death and how we think about it and how we relate to it.

39:36And one figure who writes about this is the philosopher Emilio Uranga, who wrote this really important text called Analysis of Mexican Being, where he essentially suggests that Mexicans do, in fact, relate to death differently and that philosophy would benefit from understanding this concept of death rather than the concept of death and mortality that we get in European philosophers like Sartre or Heidegger. Yeah, where death is really conceived of as individualizing.

40:10Yeah, as individualizing and also as in the future. That's a really important point, but I'll come back to that in a hot second. But basically, Uranga develops this whole existential ontology about the Mexican being where he says, look, ontologically speaking, there are three things. There is being, there is nothingness, and in between them is what he calls the accident. Accident is how being and nothingness interact.

40:42And the human condition unfolds at the level of the accident. We are not nothing as humans, so we're more than nothing, but we're not full self-sufficient being either. So we live in the space of the accidental. And then he makes this claim, about which I have mixed feelings, honestly, where he says, Mexican people inhabit the accidental more than anybody else. So there's a kind of cultural exceptionalism here. It's just that it happens to be Mexicans rather than French or German who are placed at the center.

41:13So I kind of like it, but I'm also like, I don't know about that. The best of the Mexican is to be living an accident. Yeah, so it's a Mexican universalism of sorts. And he says, the Mexican people inhabit the accidental because we have a different relationship to death, where we don't see death as something that is to come. We see it as something that is always already there with us. So we are not being toward death, as Heidegger would say, we are being with death. And you see this in a lot of aspects of Mexican culture, Mexican folklore, Mexican history.

41:51And the way he puts it in this text analysis of Mexican being is that for the Mexican, death is not something that follows afterlife. So it's not like a sequential, like first and second, but rather they are a dynamic duo that are always interpenetrating one another. So this is a quote from Uranga. Death is, for the Mexican, a symbol of his own life, since the parameters with which we delineate life are the same parameters that allow us to delineate death.

42:25And so the way I read this is that for him to say that death is to come, as Heidegger would say, is as incoherent as saying that life is to come or that we are toward life. We are already always in it. And life and death are inseparable terms. And you see this appreciation for the duality and commingling of those terms in Mexican traditions, like Día de los Muertos, where the day are among us. Yeah, yeah. In certain morning rituals, like what we call la novena or el novenario, which is basically after somebody dies, there is a nine day period of consecutive nightly prayer following the funeral.

43:06And on the ninth day, all this morning turns into an affirmation of life. So it becomes a party and people bring like tamales and they bring mole and hot chocolate. And so we celebrate death as celebrating life, as celebrating death. Yeah. And I want to go back to Heidegger here because I think Heidegger's claim that death is individualizing and in the future, like not something that we have access to right now is actually pretty convincing. Because Heidegger's claim is that essentially, yes, death in the common sense way of understanding it is all around us all the time.

43:44We're reading obituaries and newspapers. We're going to people's funerals and so on and so forth. But our own death is not something that we have access to. Right. And it's not something that anybody else will ever have access to. And so the reason that death is individualizing is because only I can die my death for me, even if somebody else sacrifices themselves. For me, they're dying their own death. Right. In that case. And so to say that I am being toward death is to say that I'm individualized in virtue of my death.

44:17It's also to say a few other things, which I won't go into in detail here. But I think that's really important. So Heidegger is not saying that like death isn't around us. It's just that there is a kind of individualization to it, as well as a futurity. Because the truth is, even if I am necessarily being toward death, I'm not currently experiencing my death. Like death, as Heidegger puts it, is the utmost possibility of my own impossibility. OK, so good, because this is where Uranga has beef with Heidegger, where he says for the Mexican person, the right term to understand death is not impossibility.

44:54It's actually possibility. So our recognition of mortality, that death is life and life is death and that the two are co-occurring is not a limit that that represents the horizon of what I can be. It's actually the ground from which I undertake all of my possibilities. I think Heidegger would say the same thing. Heidegger explicitly says, like, death is not a limit in the sense that the fruit has ripened and now is dying or something like that. It's a possibility of my own impossibility.

45:26Yeah, but it's the possibility of the impossibility. We're going to get super technical here, but I think for Uranga, the point here is that death, when conceived about being in the future, separates us from it. And even your claim that, like, right now I am alive, you know, and like I am toward death, Uranga would say, no, we are dying and we are death already, at least from a Mexican cultural historical perspective. But those are two different claims. Separation just doesn't work. If we're dying, I think you can also be dying but living, right? Obviously, if you're dying, you're still alive. You're not dead yet.

46:00But we're not death, right? Use a death or we could say we're not dead. If we were dead, then we wouldn't be living. Yeah, and so maybe also another way of articulating the claim is that because of the cultural history of Mexico, like the mythology, the politics, so on and so forth, the Mexican is more comfortable living in proximity to death than the European, according to Uranga, because we already recognize that we live at the edge of being in nothingness, which is the accident.

46:31He then points to a bunch of things like how Mexican people experience emotions like mourning and grief or the way they talk about luck and randomness and things that are accidental. That suggests that for the Mexican, it's not as if we are living in a position of security that will end, but that the ground is always already shaking, always already broken. Yeah. And that's the space of the accident and what he calls insufficiency, the insufficiency of being, which is a space between to be and not to be.

47:03I just think that's more compatible with Heidegger maybe than Uranga thinks it is, not to be the person being like, it's already in Heidegger. However, what is definitely not already in Heidegger is an emphasis on the collective mourning rituals and the experience of death around us. He just kind of like vaguely gestures toward it. And so very early on in Overthink's history, I asked you if we could do an episode on this concept, Sosobra, which is associated with the work of Uranga and other Mexican philosophers.

47:33And you were like, I don't know, that seems maybe a little specific for an episode, but we wanted to touch on it at some point. So here we are doing that. So I'm really fascinated by this concept, but I haven't studied it at length. So tell us about this. Tell me in one or two sentences just like what you've heard about the concept. That it is a Mexican concept, a Spanish word, obviously, a Mexican concept of collective mourning that has something to do with mourning a sad political situation.

48:03OK, so yeah. So Sosobra is the name of a festival in Santa Fe where it's very similar to Burning Man when it's collective and mourning and you burn like an effigy and all of that. But it's also the term for an emotion in Spanish. It's a state of extreme unrest and incertitude, which is why it's so appealing to Uranga, the philosopher of the accident or the accidental. And so in Sosobra, you recognize that you are living in a space where anything can happen any second.

48:34There is no safety. There are no guardrails. And that's part of the intimacy that he wants to posit between the being of the Mexican and the being of the accident. Interestingly, I didn't know this, but I researched it. The term actually comes from like ships and maritime practices. And it refers to the moment when a captain loses complete control of the ship when they are at sea because the waves are too strong for them to control it.

49:05And so it's at that moment when you become completely at the mercy of the impersonal will of the ocean. Oh, my God. Oh, that's so evocative. Yeah. And so the idea here is that that maritime experience captures this emotional state that is, in fact, the existential condition of the Mexican people. And so it's not that we experience Sosobra when we go on a cruise, right, or when we get on a boat. I mean, hopefully not. Yeah, but that we are actually in a kind of perpetual condition of Sosobra and that that's why our being is more authentic, according to Uranga, than the being of Europeans who are sort of fooling themselves into thinking that they are in a place of safety and sufficiency and that they are closer to being rather than nothingness.

49:57Yeah. This move of a certain exceptionalism is always an interesting one. And I mean, you know, better, better from the mouth of Uranga than from Heidegger, who thought that the German people, you know, were where it's at. But I find there are a number of philosophers who will respond to the frequent European exceptionalism we see by being like, actually, you guys just got the people wrong. We're the ones who have the most truth or who have the destiny of history at our fingertips. Du Bois does this as well as Uranga here.

50:29Well, and Vasco Suelos does to another very important Mexican philosopher whom we touched upon in our episode on mestizaje, where the idea is that like the brown people are like the perfect blend racially of all things. Totally. Which is like racist in its own way. Yeah. But I do remember hearing it might have been the philosopher Francisco Gallegos who talked or wrote about this because he works a lot on the on Uranga. But hearing about how Sosobara seems to be a more generalizable condition in recent decades, especially post-election of Trump in the U.S.

51:02And in the wake of COVID. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And I mean, the condition of living under COVID is precisely that, that death is around us, like it might already be like in us. We might already have contracted the virus. And so any sense of like, oh, we might die in some indefinite future gets challenged by the sense of urgency of that which cannot be controlled. All right. So we talked about Freud.

51:32We talked about Uranga.

Roland Barthes and Mourning Diary

51:33We talked a little bit about Derrida. I want to talk about a French philosopher here who wrote a book called Mourning Diary. That is a very lyrical, lovely account of mourning the death of his mother. And that is Roland Barthes. And I realized upon reading this book, through doing a little background research, because I was like, oh, dude, this this guy was really close to his mom. That Barthes actually lived with his mother for most of his life until her death at the age of 84 in 1977.

52:06And then very sadly, Barthes himself died just a few years later after his mother's death when he was killed by a van while walking home from lunch. I did not know this. Oh, yeah, I knew that. It was a laundry van, actually, carrying dirty laundry in Paris. OK, brutal. Really? Yeah. And posthumously, the journal that Barthes wrote after his mom's passing, which he jotted down on these small quarter sheets of paper in the years between their two deaths, were published as a book. And that book is Mourning Diary.

52:36And it seems likely that Barthes himself eventually did want to publish a book based on this journal, but he just never had the chance. So it's kind of like an unfinished work. And because these were written on small sheets, the quarter sheets of paper, the entries are short. They're even fragmentary. And sometimes he'd grab a quarter sheet and jot something down while he was otherwise like working on one of his books. And I felt this book quite beautiful for depicting the intensity of grief after someone has died. You know, we talked especially with Freud about mourning in pretty abstract terms.

53:09Barthes writes with such pathos. And he, you know, it's especially close to him because it's a loved one who lived with him or whom he lived with. Um, in fact, he was called a mama's boy, even even for a French guy. He was a mama's boy. I was gonna say we talked earlier about father issues. It seems like mommy issues. We have episodes on both of those topics. We do indeed. But the New York Times review of this book in 2010 was called Wallowing in Grief Over Maman. In the French. Yeah, for our listeners who don't know, maman is like mommy.

53:41Yeah, it's very infantilizing. So there are some really interesting themes in this journal that I think deepen some of what we've already discussed. And so I want to hear your thoughts on them as I recount some of the things that Barthes says here. So one of the main themes in this morning diary is the way that mourning transforms the relation between self and world. He says things about his own self-transformation after the passing of his mom, some of which sound kind of Freudian.

54:12He says things like, henceforth and forever, I am my own mother. But I also think we can read that in a non-Freudian sense, right? He says that after her passing, he tries to live every day according to her values and to reproduce something of her household order and her nourishment of him for himself. And he feels really devastated by the fact that he falls short of this. He feels he doesn't actually live up to her values. And so there's a way that, you know, this transformation between self and world has to do with the adoption of her and her values into him.

54:48But then it also has to do with the fact, and I think, you know, it's fair to say there might have been a little guilt around this. And I think I was sensing that from how he was writing about this, about how his mother's passing means that he could fulfill some of the desires that he couldn't before then when he was taking care of her. But the weird part is, even though he can fulfill those desires right now, he has the time to do those things that he couldn't before. I no longer desire what I used to desire. Her death has so transformed his value system that he just doesn't even have the same desires at all.

55:22One thing that comes to the foreground for me is precisely the question of value, how your values change in the wake of the loss of a loved one, especially somebody who is really close. Because those values only meant anything to you in a world in which that person was alive. And when that world is transformed in that way, some of those values can seem shallow and inconsequential in retrospect. At the same time, there can be, I'll say, a reconfiguration of value in relation to the to the person who died.

55:52Right. In this case, he says, like, oh, I'm not good enough for her. She was too good for me. And I think that's an example of when the guilt that we often feel for not having been better toward the people who died transforms itself into hagiography, like into like treating other people as if they were saints. And I think that's the sort of thing that sometimes maybe, well, it's not something that worried Freud, but that maybe we could say feeds the sense of ambivalence of like, oh, that person was so unequivocally, unquestionably good that we don't allow ourselves the space to process our complex feelings toward them.

56:29You know, I've been talking a little bit about the transformation of self that happens with mourning for Bart. And I think related to this is also the transformation of world. And both of these have to do with the transformation of values. I think that that's kind of like the umbrella here. He suggests that the world becomes unreal to him and depressing to him after his mother's death, which I think is, you know, kind of a standard thing to hear in a mourning account. But one of the points that really provided a glimpse of something different and I think quite unique is the fact that he recounts bursting into tears while listening to a song that he previously thought was totally cheesy and bourgeois.

57:09A song by Suze. I don't know the context there, to be honest, but he's like, yeah, I thought this song was just like really bourgeois. And yeah, whatever. We can elaborate from there. It would it would be like what would be a good example here? Oh, OK, bless him. But Josh Groban, You Raise Me Up, a song that is often played at funerals. Is that song sentimental as heck? Yes. Does that song hit so hard when one is mourning? Also, yes. So the idea that grief hits you randomly, I think, is a really important point because it coheres with accounts of grief.

57:46Like anybody who has lost a loved one will tell you that the feelings will come out of the blue in the most unexpected places. And I think that also helps us complicate the view of grief and mourning that we get from Freud, where it's almost too linear and too neat of a process when it unfolds in its natural, you know, following its natural trajectory when it's not pathological. Freud seems to say like, oh, the reality principle helps us realize that they're not here anymore. And over time, we just like get fixed, quote unquote. But there are very competing accounts, very different accounts of grief.

58:18And I'm here thinking in dialogue with Bart, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, where she's reflecting on her life during the year after the passing of her husband and also her daughter. And she also echoes this sentiment that minute things would suddenly engulf her existence as reminders that came out of the blue. And I think if we want to make a meta point, that fragmentary quality of the process of mourning is productively reflected in the way Bart wrote this text, right?

58:55Totally. How else would you write about mourning if not in shreds of paper that are not unified into a linear account? I think that's wonderful. And I think what you say, David, is really insightful, too, because it also coheres with Bart's main contestation of Freud in this book. He rejects the psychoanalytic concept of mourning that we get in Freud largely because he doesn't think it makes sense to think about mourning as a process that has a natural endpoint. He says that mourning itself is immobile, and he describes instead going about one's daily life and then kind of occasionally being plunged back into that mourning state.

59:35And whether it's happening two days after his mother's passing or two years after his mother's passing, that actual state feels the same to him. So he says mourning is immobile. What really happens over time is not that the mourning process comes to an end, but just the increase, the sheer increase of a lapse of time when he's been able to live without his mother. But the mourning itself is not subject to time or wearing out.

1:00:06It is as fresh as it was on the first day whenever it reemerges. So that's really good. And this allows us to think about the work of mourning or like the event of mourning. Maybe work makes it seem too linear and temporally unfolding. But the event of mourning is similar to trauma, where there is a reenactment that transcends the loss of time, you know, like a flashback or like a reenactment of a traumatic event. But it also underscores the limit of concepts for capturing the truth of the event, right?

1:00:40Like what words do you use to capture these things that freeze you in time and take you out of time and violate the order of time? And one thing that I think trauma theorists have said about trauma that's really useful and that can be used to think about mourning is that trauma is that which escapes conceptual capture. You can't talk about it. You cannot exhaust it. Yeah, something else that comes up in this book that I found provocative is the idea that mourning itself is not an emotion or even like a complex of emotions, but rather it's a susceptibility to emotion.

1:01:17So he describes it not as a specific feeling itself, but rather as a susceptibility to being moved, a painful availability awaiting the onset of a sense of life is how he describes it. What do you think about this? So I actually don't like that very much because it makes it seem as if mourning is just a form of reactivity or irritability when I just like I'm quick to an emotion. And I think that just folds mourning too much into the biological category of irritation or irritability, which is a property of muscles.

1:01:54You know, if you take like if you rub a muscle for a long enough period of time, it will get irritated. And so for me, that's that's almost too biological of a concept. And also it's too broad because there are a lot of conditions that make me irritable, but that have nothing to do with mourning. Right. I'm very quick to emotionality when I'm angry, when I'm frustrated. Honestly, when I'm hungry, I'm like a classic case of a hangry person. And I would not want to confuse those with the seriousness of mourning.

1:02:27So for me, we need a more nuanced account of mourning that is not just quickness to feeling. OK, fair. I hear that. And I do think also you might mention the fact that when you're mourning, you're much more susceptible to certain emotions than others. Right. You're much more susceptible to sadness rather than to delight. Although Bart also does suggest that he's torn between a profound mourning and a certain lightness. And toward the end of the text, he suggests that there's a difference between the lightness that he feels immediately after his death, what we might call like the unbearable lightness,

1:03:02and which he later comes to realize is a kind of false freedom that is the freedom from caregiving and so on and so forth. That is very different, according to Bart, from the freedom he eventually comes to have, which he calls a desolate liberty. We might think here, even though he's rejecting the Freudian idea of mourning as a process that comes to an end point, is this realization of a kind of desolate liberty not, in fact, a return to that uninhibited ego that Freud talks about?

1:03:32I think Bart would say, no, it's not, because the ego is now desolate, right? The freedom is not just like the same old freedom that one had. But nonetheless, you might still see a kind of process at work there.

Podcast credits and outro

1:03:46We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our sub stack for extended ad-free episodes, community chats, and additional Overthink content. To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one-time tax-deductible donations, go to overthinkpodcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube, as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor Aaron Morgan, production assistants Ila Asagov and Xavier Callen, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music.

1:04:17And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.

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