is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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Undone.

Undone.

I just read this essay by J--- Butler called "Violence, Mourning, Politics." It's about how a community or society deals with losses it undergoes, in particular a loss as huge as the 9/11 attacks. It has some profound points to make about the ways in which the U.S. failed to mourn its losses and instead turned directly to revenge and violence as a way of coping (or failing to cope) with its own vulnerability. The problem with failing to admit one's own vulnerability, of course, is that there is no way to stop being vulnerable as long as we are human beings. So neglecting to see the frailty of all things human fails to take account of the human condition.

Anyway, in the middle of the chapter she goes into a long discussion of what mourning is, and the chapter somehow becomes a meditation on loss in general, in a way that goes beyond the political ramifications and into the personal ramifications of loss and vulnerability. Her work here is very beautiful. She discusses the difference between melancholia (mourning that does not admit its loss) and mourning, and then she writes: "Perhaps one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which one cannot know in advance." In other words, loss can make us admit that we are not fully the masters of ourselves. When we lose someone whom we care about, we lose some part of ourselves, so that even in trying to say what "I" feel about loss, "I" am no longer so very certain about who the "I" is, because part of it has been lost. The stories we all tell ourselves about who we are get interrupted by these forced moments wherein we must admit that we are not only ourselves, or at least that ourselves are made up by others in ways which are undeniable. Then she writes, "Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. This seems so clearly the case with grief, but it can only be so because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact." This isn't only a story about loss and death. It is also about love, and loss, and the ways in which vulnerability is what opens us to harm, but also is what makes possible the loves and attachments without which life would not be meaningful.

But when we live in a society that fears grieving, our impulse is to get through the grieving quickly rather than accept the transformation that it will make of us. Instead of undergoing grief as something no one would have chosen but which has to be undergone nonetheless, we try to assert a power to restore the loss. But it cannot be restored. (This is the challenge to the will that made Nietzsche write about the eternal recurrence of the same. A will that does not recognize the limits of what it could have willed becomes an ineffective will drunk with a power it cannot possess and thus doomed to destroy itself. It would take a long time to explain what eternal recurrence really means, and if you want to know what I think, here's a link.) We cannot restore the lives lost on 9/11, just like we can't restore the parts of ourselves lost when we lose people we care about to death, or when our hearts are broken in other ways. Butler argues something like: we could have used the grief we felt at the 9/11 losses to realize that we are vulnerable, just as less powerful nations are. And we could have begun to think differently about what it means to be a superpower, and what kinds of actions superpowers ought and ought not to undertake. Reacting to violence with more violence does nothing to prove that violence is the wrong tactic. It just sinks into a cycle of revenge that seems like a form of mastery--after all, when we strike back we are doing something in return, and showing our power. But, as Nietzsche also pointed out, revenge is the will wanting to do what it cannot do: change the past. Only the future can be different. And I for one am not sure that a war against terror will produce anything but a future that has not been freed of the past.

I guess I really did just do three entries in one day.

11:48 p.m. - November 23, 2004

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