Mourning Without Loss:
The Affective Life of Grief
Simon van der Weele | 10611177
Master Thesis
Research Master Cultural Analysis
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. M.D. Rosello
Second reader: Dr. J.V. Sturm
15 June 2015
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Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my
mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion.
But all my life haven’t I been just that: moved?
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (43)
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Table of contents
Introduction: mourning without loss
4
Couldn’t capture death ........................................................................................................... 7
Grievability and grieve-ability ............................................................................................... 9
Chapter 1: criss-cross
12
Life and death: criss-cross .................................................................................................... 13
Capturing life, capturing death ............................................................................................. 16
About-to-die ......................................................................................................................... 20
Grief as affect ....................................................................................................................... 23
Chapter 2: meet
27
Approaching encounter ........................................................................................................ 27
Subjects unravel ................................................................................................................... 32
Memory work ....................................................................................................................... 35
Chapter 3: worry
40
Worry: as relations unravel .................................................................................................. 41
Grief as palliative: care in excess ......................................................................................... 46
They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black: conclusion
Works Cited 58
52
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Introduction: mourning without loss
To write on mourning means to be in mourning. Jacques Derrida writes that “[o]ne
cannot hold a discourse on the “work of mourning” without taking part in it, without
announcing or partaking in death” (“By Force of Mourning” 142). Derrida makes this
observation in “By Force of Mourning”, a reflection on the work of mourning and an ode to a
lost friend written in the wake of the death of his fellow academic Louis Marin. For me, too,
writing this essay was a process of coming to terms with loss. But those I lost were not
friends, nor were they my peers. In a sense, I cannot claim the losses were mine. Coming to
terms with these deaths has proven both the catalyst and the outcome of writing the present
essay. Before I continue this introduction, I wish to pay respect to these deaths by briefly
narrating both of them.
v
In the spring of 2014, Mrs. Van Amelsvoort found a quiet, peaceful death after a brief
period of palliative care treatment. I do not remember exactly how old she was: she must have
been either 97 or 98. (Already fading, my memories of her.) Although she did not take much
pride in her age – “eating well is all it takes, some vegetables, some fruit” – she was very
disappointed in her body when she realised it was starting to wear out and wear her out. The
last few weeks of her life, she hardly left her chair, hampered by her swollen arms and legs,
heavy with accumulated fluids. Her pains worsened (although her moods did not) until
finally, she went to sleep and did not wake up again.
Strictly speaking, my relation to Mrs. Van Amelsvoort was of a professional nature. I
was a care assistant in the nursing home where she lived. I would bring her tea and we would
have a talk. For months, this simple routine defined our encounters. Then, as her health began
to fail her and the nurses were short on time for the care she increasingly required, I took on
some of her care. I prepared her breakfast. I dressed her. She was wary of the clumsy motions
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of a young man, but she trusted me – she had no other choice. We attained a mode of
intimacy known only by care workers, torn between affective proximity and professional
distance.
When she died, I happened to be near her room. Her daughter came to me, in tears. I
checked her pulse: nothing. I called the head nurse. Together, we washed her. We changed
her underwear. Her body was heavy and soft. She was still quite warm, but her cheeks had
began to droop and her eyes seemed glassy, empty. Mrs. Van Amelsvoort was right there, but
already gone. Her presence faltered, but remained. Next to us, her children wept. Their
mother had passed. But for me, Mrs. Van Amelsvoort had not quite left. And even if she had,
she had not left me. Her loss was not my burden to carry.
I left the room to fetch tissues for her family.
v
In the summer of 2014, a jet crashed on the Ukrainian countryside. It was not an
accident: it had been shot down. 298 people were killed. There was outrage and there was
grief, especially in my home country, the Netherlands, where many losses were counted. The
prime minister announced a national day of mourning. Their losses are our losses, he seemed
to suggest.
Although moved by the tragedy of the plane crash, I felt oddly distant from the
discourse of mourning that quickly developed in its wake. I was suspicious of what I feared
was an outburst of nationalist sentiments. Then the crash struck a personal note. I discovered
that Professor Willem Witteveen had been amongst the deceased. Willem was a former
teacher of mine. He had taught me politics and rhetoric when I was an undergraduate. He was
brilliant and extremely kind. I was saddened but resigned: he was a figure of my past, with
whom I had had a unilateral relationship. He had touched my life, but I had hardly scraped
his. This was not my loss to bear.
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Weeks later, I received an e-mail from the dean of my undergraduate study
programme. She was preparing a memorial service for Willem, his wife and his daughter, and
asked me to deliver a short speech on behalf of the programme’s alumni. I felt honoured and
terrified. I was to speak on a public forum, expressing grief not wholly mine but felt by a
community of which I was part. I was not to speak of my work of mourning, nor I was not
sure that I had been carrying out this work in the first place.
The memorial service was beautiful and harrowing. Teachers and students spoke
lovingly of a man they had admired. So did I, although I feared that I felt alienated from their
emotive responses. Shame took hold of me. I had thought that I could not give a speech that
was about my loss, since I could not claim Willem’s loss as mine. But as the service came to a
close, and many of my peers had expressed their shock and sorrow, I wondered: could this
loss also be my loss?
v
Two deaths: two instances where I found myself refraining from mourning, because I
did not consider the losses to be mine, or even to be loss at all – the ambiguity of absence hit
me hard as I felt the warmth of Mrs. Van Amelsvoort’s dead body or watched old tapes of
Willem’s spirited lectures. Yet in the wake of one of these deaths, I felt compelled to mourn;
and in the wake of the other, I was impelled to mourn. How was I to mourn without loss? And
what would this mourning entail? These questions form the inquisitive backbone of the
present essay.
Traditionally, mourning without loss carries the stamp of inauthenticity or impurity.
Freud famously writes that the mourner whose sense of loss goes without an object, is not
struck by grief but by melancholia, a persistent form of narcissism (“Mourning and
Melancholia” 244). He considers mourning to be a “healthy” response to loss, ending when
the mourning subject substitutes the lost object with a new attachment; melancholia, to the
contrary, is pathological and lasts indefinitely. Since Freud, the loss of a beloved one has been
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implicit in any conception of the work of mourning. Public discourses of mourning (such as
surrounding the victims of the MH17 crash in the summer of 2014, which also took the life of
my former professor) often come with accusations of hysteria or melancholia.1 Such cases
exemplify the theoretical problem of mourning without personal loss as a collective
endeavour.
Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia no longer goes unchallenged.
In Precarious Life (2004), for instance, Judith Butler argues that substitution of the loving
attachment does not put an end to mourning (21), pleading instead for what she calls “tarrying
with grief” (30). Similarly, in their introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003),
David Eng and David Kazanjian attempt to rescue melancholia from its debauched
connotations. They see great political potential in “a continuous engagement with loss and its
remains”, as they think our attachments to what is lost foster alternate representations and
new significations (4). Moreover, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in their
introduction to Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2001), even contend that “we should
perhaps not assume that we can ever identify with absolute certainty the object of our
mourning”: “perhaps all our mournings are but iterations of the one death that can never be
identified … so that what is mourned is a singularity that exceeds any proper name” (17). Yet
these scholars still assume a private loss, and a concrete loss, generally in death, to be at the
basis of loss. Loss, in other words, remains a prerequisite for grieving. My essay is a further
intervention in the interrogation of the field of mourning, wondering: how am I to mourn
without loss? I set out to delineate a mode of mourning otherwise.
Couldn’t capture death
If the overarching concept guiding this essay is the concept of mourning, its object
will be Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (“Couldn’t Capture Death”), a 2007 multimedia installation by
1
The most famous example of such accusations we probably find in the public response to the death of Princess
Diana in 1997. See for instance the work of Sara Ahmed (Cultural Politics 9) or Sandra Gilbert (275-9).
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French artist Sophie Calle (born 1953). The work documents the death of Monique Sindler,
Sophie Calle’s mother. It also forms a response from the artist to her mother’s passing away.
Sophie Calle first showed Pas Pu Saisir La Mort during the 2007 Venice Biennale in
the exhibition Think with the senses, feel with the mind, art in the present tense, curated by
American art historian Robert Storr.2 Calle was given two neighbouring rooms of the Italian
Pavilion. The first of these rooms featured a luscious, impressionist oil painting depicting
Monique Sindler’s in a frilly gown, as well as a text explaining the rationale of the work’s
conception. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort was to create a possibility for Calle’s mother be present at
the Biennale, in spite of her death a few months earlier: “When I told her about Venice, she
said: ‘And to think that I won’t be there’. She is” (Calle). In addition, two prints displayed the
last word Sindler supposedly uttered to her daughter: in a stark font type, the prints spell out
“souci” (“worry”). Walking through the arch towards the second room would reveal a large
projection on one of the white walls, on a continuous loop; for this projection, Calle selected a
fragment of thirteen minutes out of the eighty hours of footage of her mother’s deathbed.
Mozart’s breezy clarinet concerto gently filled the room with music. Adjacent to the
projection, more text was fastened to the wall: an exact copy of the obituary Calle published
in a newspaper after the death of her mother.
Taken as a whole, the installation evokes the scene of a funeral. It presents us with a
death, with a text commemorating this death, and an array of traces somehow linked to this
death. Yet as I will show in the subsequent chapters, never does the work quite manage to
crystallize its object of mourning, as it complicates our notions of death, encounters and the
presence of others. Much like my personal experiences, the work stages a scene of mourning
for the viewer, but one in which the object of mourning remains just out of grasp. In other
words, I argue, the work asks us to mourn without loss. How does Pas Pu Saisir La Mort
2
This exhibition took place in isolation from Prenez Soin De Vous (“Take Care of Yourself”), Calle’s
presentation for the French pavilion of the Venice Biennale in the same year.
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facilitate a work of mourning, in spite of denying us an object of mourning? How does it
compel us to mourn? How does this work of mourning give rise to this collective “we” to
begin with? And what are the ethical implications of mourning without loss? Such are the
questions that will guide this essay.
Grievability and grieve-ability
While my analysis Pas Pu Saisir La Mort will propel and structure this essay, I
consider its scope to reach beyond insights of its own workings. As I will constantly show, the
analysis has bearing on the assumptions of established theories of mourning, a field where
philosophy and psychoanalysis conjoin. More specifically, I frame the essay as an
intervention in theories of mourning as outlined by Judith Butler, significantly in Precarious
Life (2004). Each chapter partially functions as an interrogation of and elaboration on Butler’s
thought. For this reason, I will here lay out my main reservations about her writing. They will
inform much of what is to follow.
In Precarious Life, Butler presents a theory of mourning to compliment her notion of
grievable life. She argues that grief – and allowing lives to be grieved – might foster the
formation of a nonviolent political community, one that is premised on a mutual recognition
of bodily vulnerability through the shared experience of loss. For this recognition to work,
loss must become available as an experience that not only affects one dramatically but affects
all of us dramatically, together. To do so, Butler proposes a model of subjectivity rooted in a
radical dependency.3 Butler’s subject is relational, and loss of the other throws her in a crisis
of self-understanding. Loss has subjects unravel (see chapter two). She seizes upon this
moment of unraveling to argue for a sense of community based on our mutual dispossessions:
3
For her theory of subjectivity, Butler is indebted in equal parts to Freudian psychoanalysis (as she has been
since her first attempt at theorizing subjectivity in Gender Trouble (1990) and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas.
This links her thought very clearly to Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning, as I will briefly show in chapter two.
The work of Butler and Derrida is indispensible for my own thinking in the present essay. However, fully mining
their influences unfortunately goes beyond its scope. For a clear discussion of the coalescence of these strands of
thought in Butler’s work, see Daniel McIvor (2012).
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the instance I realize my dependence on you is also the instance I start grasping my own
vulnerability and the vulnerability of others around me (Precarious Life 30). For Butler, then,
grief throws us in a void of self-erasure, a void that hopefully enables us to look beyond our
often violent (because exclusionary) terms of self-identification.4
It seems to me that mourning for Butler begins when the subject loses someone whom
she cared for. She writes, “one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent,
by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel” (Precarious Life 24). The
attachment lost after death – a loss that has me unravel – arose in a private, bodily encounter,
and the work of mourning must in the first instance always be interior. I mourn for you,
whom I loved, for in losing you I have lost myself. Less clear to me, however, is how this
interlinked theory of mourning and subjectivity can account for a notion of grievable life
where lives are mourned for collectively, by strangers. Can the death of a stranger impact me
in the same way the death of a loved one might?
I am thus not convinced that Butler is careful enough when she transfers a model of
mourning that favours interiorization to the public sphere, employing it to describe the
collective endeavour that grievable life seems to require. To what extent can I mourn for
strangers, others whom I have never encountered before their deaths? If grief is to point us to
some fundamental tie, to what extent do we require a previous attachment to mourn? To what
extent can all life be grievable as such, by me? Indeed, if our aim is to theorize a wider, more
inclusive grievability of life, then what about our grieve-ability, our ability to grieve at all?
I reach out to Pas Pu Saisir La Mort for answering these questions because the work
concretizes many of the salient problems of Butler’s theory I wish to address. I see the work
4
Grief shakes up seemingly stable and enclosed identifications. In this way, grief is a catalyst of indignation,
potentially bringing subjects to challenge the persistence of exclusionary human normativity; and at the same
time, grief carries an ethical imperative, having us grasp the shared precariousness of all life and inducing us
with a responsibility to care. In this way, as David W. McIvor points out, “[b]y bringing ourselves to grief, we
resist the temptation towards violent foreclosures that a closed account of identity necessarily entails” (420).
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as a self-contained environment in which we can isolate and study the relationship between
mourning and the image. I have it function as what Barbie Zelizer has in a different context
called “a subjunctive space”: a space of the hypothetical in which the “what could be” trumps
the “what is”, allowing its viewers to suspend belief in what they know to be true and call on
their imagination to engage with the emotional weight of the work’s themes (318). Essential
in my discussion of the work is thus the affective responsiveness of its audience, more so than
the semiotic structure of the installation itself. It is about what the viewers can do with what
they are given and about taking their contribution seriously. Here I follow Jacques Rancière’s
notion of the emancipated spectator: I treat the viewers as “spectators who play the role of
active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and
make their own story” (22). Pas Pu Saisir La Mort makes an appeal to mourn. My aim is to
show how the spectator might make work of this appeal.
In chapter one, I will give a close reading of the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort and show how the work complicates our notions of death and loss. Here I will also start
making a case for understanding grief as affect and distinguishing this from mourning as
work. I further conceptualize this dichotomy in chapter two, where I will analyse Monique’s
obituary to intervene in theories of mourning as work posed by Jacques Derrida. Finally, in
chapter three, I will look at the effect of the affect of grief by aligning theory of mourning to
theory of care. This time, the object of analysis is the twofold “souci” print. If all goes well,
by the end of chapter three, my notion of grief as affect will allow us to formulate a mode of
mourning otherwise.
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Chapter 1: criss-cross
The work of mourning starts with death. “Mourning is weeping at loss and lack and
absence”, Sandra Gilbert remarks (245). If nothing is lost, there is nothing to mourn; such is
the premise of grief. As I explained in the introduction, Sigmund Freud polices the work of
mourning by distinguishing it from melancholia, the latter denoting a form of narcissism.
“Good” mourning implies the loss of a beloved object and ends when the mourning subject
substitutes the lost object with a new attachment. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler
challenges this idea, stating that “I do not think that successful grieving implies that one has
forgotten another person or that something else has come along to take its place, as if full
substitutability were something for which we might strive” (21). To grieve deeply and to take
one’s time to do so need not be a symptom of some narcissistic impulse. Yet even if Butler
pleads for what she calls “tarrying with grief” (30), such grief still relies on the presence of
death through its irrevocable absence; I would even say that such lingering mourning
intensifies and elongates the present absence of death, keeping the loss of death palpable and
proximate. Death remains a prerequisite for grieving.
I propose to read Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as a text that tarries with grief in Butler’s
sense. In its display of a scene of dying, the work makes an appeal to its audience: will you
mourn for me? Will you mourn with me? Will you even mourn without me? At the same
time, however, the representation of death in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort comes to problematize
the possibility of grief itself. Couldn’t Capture Death. With its title, the work documents an
inability. It circumscribes an impossibility. It admits to a failure. So first the work proclaims: I
offer you an object of mourning. And then it tells us: my loss is not for you to see, live or feel.
Death is all-too-present, yet barely there. The work of mourning the installation incites from
the outset thus threatens to morph almost instantly into a melancholic attachment in Freud’s
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sense. If we cannot capture death, how can we secure an object of mourning? Indeed, how can
we mourn in the absence of death?
In this first chapter, I will perform a close reading of the video projection of Pas Pu
Saisir La Mort in order to assess in what ways the work does or does not live up to the
seemingly apologetic confession of its title. How does the work (fail to) represent death? Why
is this failure of significance? And might it be possible to overcome it?
Life and death: criss-cross
The raw material for the video projection of Pa Pu Saisir La Mort was provided by
over 80 hours of video footage documenting the final few days of Monique Sindler’s life.
Calle explains:
It became almost an obsession. I wanted to be there when she died. I didn't want to
miss her last word, her last smile. As I knew I had to shut my eyes to sleep, because
the agony was very long, there were a risk I might not be there. I put a camera there,
thinking if she gave a last jump or start, a last word, at least I'd have it on film.
(Chrisafis)
The desire for witnessing the final moments of her mother’s life (or rather, perhaps, the fear
of failing to witness these) thus brought Calle to tape everything; an obsession, she admits,
“so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on
each tape” (Chrisafis).
On the video projection, we find Monique Sindler lying on her bed, seemingly asleep.
The camera is fixed on the upper half of her body, en profil. Her bedspread is decorated with
images of flowers. On her side, a pot of flowers; on her chest, a small stuffed animal.
Occasionally, the tranquil image is interrupted. A woman treads in view and touches
Monique’s neck, seemingly checking her pulse. A nurse tends to her body. All movement
suggests that Monique, at some point in the preceding minutes, has passed away. As the
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sequence starts anew, we look more carefully for signs of life. We might observe a gentle
swaying of Monique’s chest, indicating breathing. We might also perceive an eyelid
flickering briefly, or the mouth contorting itself into a grimace, if only for a second. And then
the woman treads into the screen again, touching Monique’s neck, checking for a pulse
(figure 1).
Figure 1. A hand reaches for Monique’s neck. Sophie Calle, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (2007).
Photo courtesy of Eloise Lambert. www.eloiselambert.com. Web. 15 June 2015.
Monique has died, we deduce. Moments before, she was alive, or she might have been
alive, but now she has died. At some point between that last wavering exhalation and the
appearance of the woman, life slipped into death, although we are left in the dark as to when
(“somewhere between 3:02 and 3:13”, Calle asserts almost playfully in the obituary) or how.
But we know she has died. There is no other way: her death is implicit to the very existence of
the project of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. What Pas Pu Saisir La Mort shows us, then, is the
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impossibility of locating the death event, what Emma Wilson calls “the almost complete lack
of distinction at the boundaries between the living and the dead” (Love, Mortality 50). The
work literally shows us the impossibility of capturing death on film, since we find ourselves
incapable of locating the death event in a specific moment. The stillness of Monique’s body
stretches from many moments before the death event to many moments after it. In a way, we
cannot even speak of an event as such.
But there is another, more significant way in which the impossibility of the death
event is made palpable by Pas Pu Saisir La Mort: it is the ambiguity of the premises by which
the viewer is forced to approach Pas Pu Saisir La Mort that achieves the effect of capturing
this impossibility. Entering the room of the projection, we are already aware of the fact that
Monique Sindler has passed away. Yet we cannot help but look for signs of life in what we
see. The video is put on loop, and at each successive instance of the film we catch ourselves
believing that Monique is alive, watching her breathing, noting her pulse. We cannot quite
speak of a suspension of disbelief, because it is true that Monique is alive, in that moment – it
is captured on film. At the same time, however, we witness Monique’s death over and over,
every time anew, continuously confirming what we already knew. For us viewers, Monique
Sindler is always already dead. And yet, for minutes on end, every 13 minutes, we find that
she is alive. By continuously restaging the death event, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort simultaneously
seems to deny its occurrence. As Anneleen Masschelein observes, “[i]n this strange twilight
zone the end can be perpetually postponed” (136).5
5
This effect is intensified by the many showings the work has seen since its inception. After the 2007 Biennale,
the work has been part of several retrospective exhibitions of Calle’s work, which oftentimes explicitly
thematized the death of her mother. Each of these new virtual incarnations thus endlessly restaged Sindler’s
death once more, and by putting it on loop, simultaneously endlessly denied this death as well. Thus, Pas Pu
Saisir La Mort postpones the death of its very subject: (the death of) Monique Sindler. The phrase Couldn’t
Capture Death not only affirms the impossibility of representing the death event, but also refers to a reluctance
of the work to capture the death event – Pas Voulu Saisir La Mort.
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So Calle’s hard work – 80 hours of taping – did not get her what she had set out to
achieve. She did not capture death. What she found instead was a peculiar mode of
temporality in which life and death exist not as opposites but side by side, circling around
each other, opening up to one another before undoing one another once more. Her desire to
witness some moment or some instant that would neatly wrap up the longest relationship of
her life, the one with her mother, was one she saw herself forced to relinquish. Yet I wonder:
whence this desire? Whence this need to pinpoint the moment of her mother’s death and to
register it and testify to it?
“I didn't want to miss her last word, her last smile”, Calle asserted explaining the
rationale of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (Chrisafis). She needed to see these final glimpses of her
mother’s life, needed to be there to witness them. This witnessing is no doubt a form of care –
making sure to be there, making sure she will not be alone, making sure those lasts few
instances of her life will not go unnoticed, will be remembered, will be repeated in memory,
again and again. But as the present slips into memory, and the other slips into death, these
memories become more than just that; all that is left of the other now exists only in one’s
memories, and each memory comes to be the matter through which the work of mourning is
done (see chapter two). This desire to capture death, then, is closely linked to the desire to
mourn: it is a means of solidifying or crystallizing an object of mourning. If this is so, surely
the incapability of capturing death to which the title refers now surfaces as a problem. How
does one capture death? And why did Calle not manage to do so?
Capturing life, capturing death
The apparent impossibility of depicting death haunts the representational arts. Simon
Critchley writes that “[d]eath is radically resistant to the order of representation.
Representations of death are misrepresentations, or rather representations of an absence” (31).
Clearly Pas Pu Saisir La Mort thematizes and further complicates the problem Critchley
Van der Weele 17
singles out: Monique’s deathly absence is always on the verge of sliding back into presence,
and vice-versa. Presence proves to be as slippery an object of representation as its antonym.
I have so far framed Calle’s failure to capture life and death as a consequence of the
medium by which she documented this failure: film. Looping the same sequence of nonevents time and time again creates the eerie effect of perennial dying and perennial reviving.
Yet strangely, this looping gesture also has the effect of cancelling out the medium-specificity
of film in the projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. By continuously repeating the same video
fragment, the work compresses a sequence of moments into a single, endlessly repeated
image, albeit one that is stretched out over time, like a photograph pulled and pinned on
time’s axis. Amplifying this effect is the odd semblance of the film fragment to the tradition
of static portraiture: since the thirteen minutes that comprise the film are, in spite of the grand
event they supposedly aim to capture, actually quite uneventful, the image garners a stillness
not unlike the stillness characteristic for traditional portraiture. Of course, Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort is not a photograph. But I contend it is also no longer quite a video. My argument goes
beyond Laura Mulvey’s in Death 24x a Second (2006), where she argues that the still frame,
an exponent of digital technology, “restores to the moving image the heavy presence of
passing time and of … mortality” that we traditionally ascribe to photography (66). Pas Pu
Saisir La Mort’s game with presence and absence works not through the possibility of
freezing the moving image, but rather through its unwillingness to stand completely still. It is
thus the specificity of film as looped (or “loopable”) that has the work acquire the air of a
photograph.
Photographic theory has long pondered the complexities of the relationship between
representation and death. Not only has photography become the preferred medium to testify to
the deaths of others; the medium of photography itself is thought to thematize or evoke death
in a variety of ways. Susan Sontag writes that “[t]o catch a death actually happening and
Van der Weele 18
embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do” (59). Sontag is perhaps right in the
sense that the temporal precision of a photograph is unparalleled by other modes of
representation. But as Sandra Gilbert points out in Death’s Door (2006), photographic
realness creates a second effect (or perhaps we should say affect) that constantly threatens to
thwart its representational accuracy. In photography, Gilbert argues, “the line between were
and are begins to blur if we stare back hard enough” (217, emphasis in the original). The
photographic image has the uncanny effect of rendering present what should really be absent.
In this way, Gilbert shows, “[p]hotographs paradoxically both heal and exacerbate grief”
(238). These observations are important because they suggest that the relentless shuttling
between death and life in the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, to the point where
each becomes indistinguishable from the other, is to a certain extent a problem that emerges
with each instance of photography.
Yet these technologies that “represent the dead to us as “alive and busy” … and
seeming, as it were, still to be here among us” (Gilbert 219) simultaneously carry with them
an opposite effect. In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes declared that every photograph
is burdened with the weight of death. For Barthes, every photograph is an “image which
produces death while trying to preserve life” (92). The photograph does not even need to
capture death; seeing a photo is an inevitable reminder of death that has come or death that
will come. He writes, imagining looking at a photograph:
I read at the same time: This will be and This has been; I observe with horror an
anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose
… , the photograph tells me death in the future. … Whether or not the subject is
already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (96, emphasis in the original)
Although we might tend to think that photography functions principally to capture and
testify to the lives of the living, and, following Gilbert, even eerily prolong life beyond death,
Van der Weele 19
Barthes argues that looking at a photograph, we can only be reminded of their death,
regardless of it having already taken place. Death is thus “captured” by virtue of this deathproducing quality of the picture. In fact, Barthes tellingly refers to photographers as “agents in
the capture of death” (92). But if Pas Pu Saisir La Mort capitalizes on tropes of photographic
representation, it cannot but admit to come up short. Death did not let itself be captured; here
the title impishly subverts the task Barthes ascribes to the photographer. Might we say that the
work produces death, however? Are we to distinguish between these? How did Calle defy
Barthes’ observations?
I find it instructive to introduce here a distinction between two conceptions of death:
death as condition, a state of not-being-alive after having-been-alive, and death as event, as
moment, as the instant that signals the beginning of the first kind of death. In his Mourning
Diary (2010), Barthes himself alluded to this distinction when he drew a chronology of death,
in which death turns from an event that “mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes” into a
duration he calls “compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse” (50). If we
follow Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the death produced by the camera is (at least) of the second
kind: when the photograph shows “death in the future”, it shows the impending finality of
deathness, of the non-being of being dead. Calle’s attempts at capturing death, however, seem
more in line with the first. Calle summarized the rationale for making Pas Pu Saisir La Mort
by stating “I wanted to be there when she died” (Chrisafis, emphasis mine). Thus Calle aligns
her attempt to capture death with death as event: what she looked for was the moment of
Monique’s death.
However, as we have seen above, the death not captured by Pas Pu Saisir La Mort is
not exclusively the event of its occurrence, but also its duration, as Barthes would have it. It is
at this point that we are reminded once more of the medium-specificity of Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort as film. Even if the loop carries itself as a photograph, stretching time like a panoramic
Van der Weele 20
shot might stretch space, its rhythm of repetition cannot help but uncover its photographic
disguise. What so uncannily problematizes death through the looping gesture of the projection
is not the fact that it produces death or fails to do so, or that it captures death or fails to do so,
but rather that for the viewer, it does all of these things. When Monique, on the brink of death,
is caught alive, time and time again, the work produces death in Barthes’ sense: through the
pastness of living, it announces death. This is the “anterior future of which death is the stake”
(96). Yet with the same gesture, the work denies death, each time annulling it, undoing it, to
the point where not only is death not captured, but there seemingly remains nothing to capture
in the first place.
Nestling itself between photography and film in this way, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort
further unsettles the relationship between death and the image. Shocked into being reminded
that we are dealing with a video rather than a photograph, the projection betrays our
expectation that a film will show us life. As Laura Mulvey points out, film bears a force of
resurrection, rendering present and moving those we might have lost (18); here it sustains a
certain hope, staging a momentary renunciation of death (Gilbert 209). The looped video
projection cancels out this fleeting reprieve of loss since at any one point, Monique might be
alive or dead: we cannot be sure. In the perpetuum mobile of Monique’s final 13 minutes, life
and death cease to be meaningful points of demarcation, slipping in and out of each other’s
embrace, sitting neatly in one another’s crevices. What we face is, as Jacques Derrida puts it,
“[n]either life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (“The Deaths of Roland
Barthes” 41).
About-to-die
If Pas Pu Saisir La Mort eludes life and death by managing to simultaneously fail and
succeed in producing and capturing death, it at least manifests itself as an image in which
someone is about to die. In About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (2010), Barbie
Van der Weele 21
Zelizer reflects on the prevalence of news photography that shows subjects in situations of
near-death, which she refers to as about-to-die images.6 I take interest in her work because of
her focus on the effects about-to-die images engender with their audience.
In About To Die, Zelizer identifies what she calls a trope of about-to-die images
characterized by a temporal suspension of the moment of death. Upon glancing at these
images, the reader or viewer might logically infer or even know for certain that the person
depicted or another person like the depicted has died, but the picture itself negates this
deduction by means of depicting the subject as not-yet-dead. These images thus work “by
coaxing people to suspend their disbelief, deferring knowledge of where the depiction leads
long enough to respond to a scene that shows less information than is known” (24). In this
way, the about-to-die image cannot show death; “Yet it is death”, Zelizer asserts, “and its
realization beyond the frame of the camera, that makes the picture meaningful” (58).
Surely Zelizer’s description of the about-to-die image resonates with my analysis of
the video projection in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. According to Zelizer, the about-to-die image
“undercuts a reliance on reasoned information” (28). This observation helps me to understand
why the video projection is able to defer death in the way it does. The “reasoned information”
the viewer has is that Monique has died. Such is the premise of the work. Yet the about-to-die
trope briefly suspends this truth, meaning that for me, Monique is alive, and dead, and
resurrected all in the same instance.
In this moment of pause where we might briefly suspend our disbelief and willingly
overlook the truth we should know lies for Zelizer an opportunity for something resembling
6
Zelizer’s study explicitly and exclusively deals with news images, which tend to be politically loaded or at least
to depict suffering beyond the ordinary. Amongst the pictures she analyses we find pictures of the Kennedy
assassination, the Vietnam War and the Congolese civil war, as well as of scenes of suicide and fatal illness.
Zelizer seems to be less interested in images of what we might clumsily call ordinary suffering, that is, “regular”
death or palliative care, as in the case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. Moreover, Zelizer’s analysis is not attuned to
the phenomenon of domestic photography. In spite of these caveats, I take Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as awkwardly
fitting in the genre of the about-to-die image. Because the work so boldly thematizes the paradoxical
simultaneity of endless futurity and pastness in about-to-die images, it almost comes to figure as a prototype, an
about-to-die image distilled to its most essential nature.
Van der Weele 22
action. The trope provokes what she calls an “affective bonding”, by which she means that the
trope’s “reliance on affect draws from the positioning of an overly emotive (fearing,
trembling, dreading) body in some kind of threatening situation, forcing a viewer’s powerful
emotional response as a means of generating meaning, and possibly action” (63). The aboutto-die trope engenders engagement and compassion: it works to create an imaginary,
imaginative space in which harm is not yet done and action might still garner results – one
where hope is not yet out of place. Images drawing on the trope thus do not merely passively
undergo meaning-making but actively invite for the creation of meaning by the viewer (315).
Zelizer alerts us that this interpretive freedom comes with a risk: “[i]n obscuring death
itself and leaving its sequencing up for grabs by the public, these images also make it possible
… to deny, obscure, or challenge death because it is not shown” (312). The trope of about-todie carries the politically troublesome effect of allowing the viewer to downright deny the
occurrence of death, she warns. This would mean that even photographic “evidence” of the
suffering of others might not plead any case for their grievability but in fact achieve the
opposite effect, in spite of their blatant visibility. Yet surely the opposite is also true: the
ambivalence of the about-to-die trope has us assume death, anticipating it even in absence of
obvious indications. Here I agree with Barthes on the death-producing quality of the image. In
this sense, my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort becomes a critique of Zelizer’s work when
she writes that “[t]he decision to show an about-to-die image reflects a corresponding
decision not to show evidence of death” (28). As we have seen, any representation of death is
haunted by its impossibility. If we approach the video projection, to speak of “evidence of
death” is as meaningless as to speak of “evidence of life”. This is not to say that every image
is an about-to-die image. The point is that the about-to-die trope keeps us guessing, overtly
dramatizing (in fact capitalizing on) the ambiguity of life and death that every image stages in
some way. As an image, it is not exceptional: yet as a trope, it is highly functional, steering us
Van der Weele 23
towards an affective bond because it so explicitly performs this ambiguity and offers a
moment of reprieve from grim truths.
Grief as affect
It is this moment of hope and “affective bonding” that I want to use as a springboard
to think about the affective appeal of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort on the viewer and about how it
might engender a response of mourning, even in the absence of death. The psychoanalytic
tradition of Freud tends to understand mourning as a private project. A discussion of affect
might help us in beginning to understand grief as a shared undertaking in which personal loss
ceases to be a requirement. As Ernst van Alphen points out, “affect is the opposite of
personal: it is social” (21).7 Van Alphen argues that even objects have the capacity to spark
affect in their beholders: works of art, for instance, might “generate and transmit affect or to
engage a viewer in a particular, transformative way” (22). How might such an “affective
operation” work in the case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort’s staging of about-to-die?
My starting point in this fleshing out of Zelizer’s suggestion is Sara Ahmed’s notion
of the social character of emotions and her related concept of affective economies. Ahmed
writes that “while emotions do not positively reside in a subject or figure, they still work to
bind subjects together. Indeed, to put it more strongly, the nonresidence of emotions is what
makes them “binding”” (“Affective Economies” 119). For Ahmed, then, what is crucial about
affects is their itinerant nature: rather than being attached to objects or subjects, they travel
between them in the process of meaning-making, thereby constantly shaping new forms of
attachment and relationality.
7
Van Alphen chooses to distinguish between affect and emotion, following the work of scholars such as Brian
Massumi. For Massumi, affect is direct and impersonal, while emotion is “qualified intensity”: “the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (88). Affect
turns into emotion when a subject registers it, evaluating it and putting it into words. In my discussion of affect, I
follow Sara Ahmed and do not strictly separate affect from emotion. As she points out, “this model creates a
distinction between conscious recognition and “direct” feeling, which itself negates how that which is not
consciously experienced may itself be mediated by past experiences” (Cultural Politics 40). In other words, we
have to see that even “direct” affects of which we are not conscious reach us because of past encounters and
experiences and in this way depend on mediation.
Van der Weele 24
As we have seen, Zelizer defined the key to the moment of affective bonding enabled
by the about-to-die image in terms of the image’s representation of an “overly emotive body”
that shocks the viewer into response (63). Yet Pas Pu Saisir La Mort’s projection hardly
shows us bodies that are “overtly emotive”. The stillness that gives the projection the air of a
photograph also threatens to nullify the instant affective appeal Zelizer envisions her
archetypal about-to-die image to make. Ahmed’s conception of emotion, on the other hand,
helps me to reframe the moment of interaction between the viewer and the image as one of
which the pattern is less certain but also more creative. It allows for an exchange in which it is
not necessarily explicit content of the image that initiates or engenders attachment. As Jill
Bennett reminds us, even if affect is “autonomic”, we cannot conceive of the image as “a
mechanistic trigger or stimulus” where a particular content produces a particular affect (11).
So if Ahmed contends that “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside
positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation”
(“Affective Economies” 120), my task will be to describe how Pas Pu Saisir La Mort
establishes an affective circuit in which the viewer becomes another link.
I find Ahmed’s attention to the historicity of affect to be particularly helpful in
uncovering this circuit. Ahmed points out that while affect seemingly manifests itself
spontaneously and intuitively, such understandings of affect only serve to conceal that the
particular effects of the encounters between bodies (affects) are just as well historically
determined. In other words, while affects are not fixed to subjects, their pattern of emergence
is partially dependent on past encounters too (“Affective Economies” 127).
I suspect that in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the terms of affective bonding are spelled out
by the familiarity of its subject matter: death as domestic, peaceful, “safe”. Here the response
is not one of dread, compassion or anguish but rather one of resigned sadness and solemnity.
The affective bond takes the shape of a retroactive inclination towards care or an imminent
Van der Weele 25
mourning. It relies on a history of encounters, one in which the peaceful death of others is all
too familiar: affect jumps from us or at us as we see in the video projection of Pas Pu Saisir
La Mort a scene that reminds us of other losses, other deaths of others whom we have
encountered before. The effect would be similar to cases where a communal expression of
grief for a public figure is seen to stand in for private losses that had gone unmourned.8 If we
can speak of an affective economy of grief, it is one in which empathy is bought cheaply.
We must note, however, that the video projection fails to capture death. Since it draws
from the about-to-die trope it relies on a suspension of death. It is exactly this suspension that
provides the conditions for Zelizer’s affective bonding in the first place. Yet as I have shown,
this suspension goes both ways. In the about-to-die image we observe both life and death. The
moment of hope I identified above is thus simultaneously a moment of despair. Monique is
alive, Monique has died. Our response is necessarily ambivalent: as Monique criss-crosses
between life and death, so our response might oscillate between care and grief (and love,
sadness, horror, surprise, and so on). I want to make two observations here. First, we witness
the degree to which this affective response partly foregoes a clear, predetermined pattern
because the work continuously questions the suitability of our affects, which are always
coming both too early and too late. Second, we see how our response works precisely through
the stillness of the image, the ambiguity of its representational content. In this sense I
challenge Zelizer’s assertion that the about-to-die trope relies on the display of bodies in
distress to carry out its function. In Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, Monique’s expressionless,
motionless body makes an affective appeal because it so expertly fails to stage a death. It is
the lack of unequivocal content that stirs me as a viewer.
Where will an analysis along these lines bring us? I find myself oddly close to Butler’s
point of departure in her theory of grievability – the supposed universality of loss. “Despite
8
See, for instance, Sandra Gilbert’s extensive analysis of the public response to the death of Princess Diana in
Death’s Door (275-9).
Van der Weele 26
our differences in location and history”, she writes, “my guess is that it is possible to appeal to
a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a
tenuous “we” of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have
desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire” (Precarious
Life 20, emphasis mine). By the ground I have covered so far, I am indeed in a position to
argue for the idea that grief might be felt as affect even if the encounter that compels us
towards affect effaces, denies or otherwise problematizes the occurrence of death. More
concretely, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort might make us mourn for Monique not because the work
shows us death, but because it triggers a chain of significations and associations that brings us
back to our own hard-lived, worn through losses. This would indeed mean to make a case for
a universal grievability in Butler’s sense.
At the same time, however, I find that my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort in terms
of an affective bonding at this point forces me to ask more questions. I have so far
consistently referred to mourning as work. I choose to define mourning as an activity. It is a
process, though not one that necessarily finds a clear-cut conclusion. If this is so, then I
cannot be satisfied with understanding grief as a mere operation of affective attachment.
Rather, affective attachment should be only one condition for the possibility of imminent
mourning. I thus need to ask myself: how is mourning more than an emotion or affect? What
constitutes the “work” of mourning?
Van der Weele 27
Chapter 2: meet
I ended the previous chapter with a set of questions about the nature of grief. I
tentatively demarcated an affect we could call grief, noting that this conception of grief might
divert from or even stand in opposition to the notion of mourning as work. This notion we
first find in Freud and subsequently in a range of authors drawing from the tradition of
psychoanalysis, including Judith Butler. It aims for closure through recollection, through
working through memory of the lost object (“Mourning and Melancholia” 255). Such a work
of mourning is geared towards the relinquishment of an attachment that has been lost. It thus
requires in its most elementary form the possibility of some attachment. However, Pas Pu
Saisir La Mort has us face a non-death or not-quite-death of a stranger to whom we are not
attached and maybe cannot even be attached due to the endless wavering back-and-forth
between life and death of this not-quite-death. Still, as we have seen, the work begs us to
mourn. A range of questions emerges: how can we mourn for a stranger to whom we are not
attached? How might an attachment take shape after death, in the absence of death? How can
we conceive of an attachment that is not preceded by a bodily encounter? What is the role of
affect in these proceedings? And how does Pas Pu Saisir La Mort facilitate these, if at all? In
short, how might the affect of grief allow for a work of mourning?
Approaching encounter
Pas Pu Saisir La Mort forces its viewers to look out a window on a stranger. The
video projection has us witness an intimate domestic scene, both heart-warming in its banal
familiarity and gut-wrenching in its merciless finality. No doubt there is an uneasy sense of
voyeurism in catching a person being swallowed by this intensely significant depth – death.
Yet in its constant loop, the projection refuses to give us something or someone to hold on to.
The stranger (whom we also know – her name is Monique) is always already slipping away,
turning her back to us as we begin to approach her; and as soon as we have regrettably
Van der Weele 28
relinquished our hopes of getting closer to her, she comes back again, teasing us with her
oscillating not-quite-presence. It seems like we cannot meet Monique, like she remains
unavailable to us, in spite of a clear determination to stick with us and be there for us. As
death ends up being a moment of not-quite, so the work dispels the threat of voyeurism: we
have witnessed nothing.
So even if Calle asserts us on the plaque we see upon entering Pas Pu Saisir La Mort
that the work is a way of having her mother present at the Biennale in spite of her death,
Monique never manages to completely fill this presence. But scattered around the video
projection we find traces of this stranger Monique, hinting at the presence the projection does
not quite let her become. We find an oil painting in hues of pale blues and whites, depicting
Monique in a snazzy evening dress. We find a series of ink prints spelling out the word
“souci”, which Calle professed was her mother’s last. And fastened to the wall across from
the projection, we find Monique’s obituary reaching out to us, inviting us to learn about
Monique, to meet her.
Monique wanted to see the sea one last time.
On Tuesday, January 31, we went to Cabourg.
Last journey.
The next day, “to leave with pretty feet”: last pedicure.
She read Ravel, by Jean Echenoz. Last book.
A man she had admired for a long time, without knowing him, came to her bedside.
Last encounter.
She organized the funeral ceremony: her last party.
Final preparations: she chose her funeral dress, - navy blue with a white pattern -, a
photograph showing her making a face for the tombstone, and her epitaph, “I'm getting
bored already!”
Van der Weele 29
She wrote a last poem, for her funeral.
She kept Montparnasse cemetery as her definitive address.
She didn't want to die. She said this was the first time in her life she didn't mind
waiting.
Her last tears were shed.
The days before her death, she kept repeating: “It's odd. It's stupid.”
She listened to Concerto for Clarinet in A Major, Mozart’s K. 622. For the last time.
Her last wish: to leave with, in music.
Last volition: ‘Don’t you worry.’
Worry…, her last word. On March 15, 2006 at 3 P.M., last smile.
The last breath, somewhere between 3:02 and 3:13.
Impossible to capture. (Calle, translation mine)
Can we hope to meet Monique through our encounter with her obituary? And what kind of
attachment might we develop by means of such an encounter?
The text that makes up the obituary takes the shape of a narrative, one of which we
already know in advance how it will end. “Monique wanted to see the sea one last time”: so
the obituary spells out living, breathing desire, still located in an identifiable subject,
Monique. It is the only time we read her name. From now on, Monique is either “she” or part
of an unidentified “we”. This “we” only appears once as well, seemingly asserting the
presence of the narrator and then immediately rendering her absent again, as if some part of
her already departed with Monique in the prospect of the latter’s death. Only implicitly does
the narrator remain part of the story as the subject of address, Monique’s partner of
conversation. The text thus performs a constant oscillation between voices and pronouns,
suggesting that the steadiness of the subjects it narrates has started to unravel. We learn of
Monique’s little idiosyncrasies: “making a face for the tombstone”, “I’m getting bored
Van der Weele 30
already!” We are getting to know her, who is no longer her, and is no longer. “It’s odd. It’s
stupid.” Here Monique speaks to us, and speaks for us, filling the gap between what we feel
but dare not think, the terrible banality of a death that will never come to us but has already
come to us. “She” makes place for “it”, becoming more and more undefined, until finally, we
no longer encounter other subjects as the words fail to evoke persons, objects or even agency.
“[L]ast smile … the last breath … impossible to capture”. Whose smile? Whose breath? What
impossibility? Whose impossibility? It seems that, just as with the video projection, the
obituary has Monique collapse under the weight of mediation the moment she is introduced to
us. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort could not capture death, and seemingly not Monique, either.
In Strange Encounters (2000), Sara Ahmed writes about her desire to “meet” the
women she reads and whom she reads about. Her desire coalesces with that of the viewer of
Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, who witnesses a major non-moment in the video projection and looks
to cling onto any trace that might help coming to terms with this awkward voyeurism. Ahmed
writes: “[m]y encounter with this text is mediated; it could only take place given the staging
of other encounters, impossible to grasp in the present” (147). For Ahmed, the mediated
nature of the “textual encounter” is not exceptional but rather symptomatic for the very notion
of the encounter itself. Just like the text is a product of past encounters unknown to me, so
each encounter with an other is preceded and determined by a chain of previous encounters of
which I can have no recollection. “This encounter is mediated; it presupposes other faces,
other encounters of facing, other bodies, other spaces, and other times” (7). Thinking about
the encounter as a process of mediation brings Ahmed to argue that the category of the
encounter exceeds the narrow notion of face-to-face meetings: “a meeting suggests a coming
together of at least two elements” (7, emphasis Ahmed). This encounter, moreover, is a
constitutive moment for Ahmed. I cannot quite be myself before I have met you. “[T]he
Van der Weele 31
encounter itself is ontologically prior to the question of ontology (the question of the being
who encounters”, she contends (7).9
How can we encounter the other if she approaches us ambivalently, in fragments,
through description and representation? And how might such an encounter be mutually
constitutive? According to Ahmed, only by recognising “the finite and particular
circumstances in which I am called to respond to others” (147). Meeting the other through
texts thus seems to entail an awareness of the bounds within which the occasion of the
encounter emerges. In Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the obituary’s narrator weaves a pattern of
memory traces through the fabric of the text. As we read, an impression of a person slowly
begins to unfold and manifest itself. The text shares with its reader brief glimpses into what
we assume to be some of the final scenes of intersubjective intimacy that predated Monique’s
death. Monique picks a dress; picks a stone; poses for a picture. Each time the narrator
allocates agency to Monique (“she”), as if asserting her utter liveliness in the face of the
irreducible fact of her death. Yet as Monique gradually emerges from the sentences that
circumscribe her presence in the obituary, so she yields to the increasingly impersonal
grammar that takes over towards the end of the story. How can we speak of an encounter if
there is no one left to be met?
It seems as though the obituary proffered some hope for an encounter, before leaving
us empty-handed once more. Monique begins to disintegrate at the very moment the text sets
us up to meet her. This will be no encounter; there will be no attachment. But perhaps
Monique’s apparent unavailability is symptomatic for the affective operations of grief. If we
have not quite lost Monique, she at least torments us with a partial absence, an absence that
9
Donna Haraway puts it succinctly in When Species Meet (2008) when she writes that “[t]he partners do not
precede the meeting” (4). This notion of the encounter as a constitutive moment in the emergence of subjectivity
has become a truism of sorts. Indeed, even in the models of subjectivity proposed by Judith Butler and Jacques
Derrida the relational nature of the subject is key, although their focus lies less specifically on the encounter.
Here their indebtedness to the work of Emmanuel Levinas is apparent. My aim here is to show how this “law” of
the encounter plays out in the specific case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort.
Van der Weele 32
seems constantly on the verge of turning into presence once more. How might this shuttling
between absence and presence help us in better understanding grief as affect?
Subjects unravel
To explore this possibility and better understand the workings of Monique’s
unravelling, I turn to Judith Butler, for whom the fragile constitution of the subject is essential
to her theory of mourning. For Butler, at the root of subjectivity lies a moment of loss. The
loss of the other throws the subject into a crisis of its own constitution. The harrowing
experience of grief exposes the subject to the insight that the understanding of herself existed
as an effect of her tie to the other; loss of the other disrupted this sense of self-conception.
Subjectivity, in other words, begins with an attachment to the other. Butler writes:
But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed,
something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties
constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists
independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the
attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these
conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who
“am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted,
we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only
to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have
lost “in" you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is
composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by
which those terms are differentiated and related. (Precarious Life 22, emphasis Butler)
Thus, as I lose you and am made overcome by grief, I become aware of my fundamental
dependence on you, as I could never have been there without you in the first place. “What
grief displays … is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we
Van der Weele 33
cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of
ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as
autonomous and in control” (Precarious Life 23). In this sense, Butler argues, grief proffers
not necessarily a theory of a fundamental relationality at the root of the constitution of the
subject, but rather one that recognizes the instability of any subject as she is continuously
dispossessed by the encounter with others (Precarious Life 24). Grief, when “I” respond to
“my” loss of “you”, is thus a moment in which I come to understand the construct of this “I”
as borne from the presence of “you” and also the moment where this “I” starts to unravel as
an autonomous subject.
In my analysis of the obituary, the text seems to simulate or even perform such a
process of unravelling. Subjects start dissolving as the moment of death draws closer. As we
read through the obituary and the steady subjectivities of its protagonists slowly start to
quaver, we get a sense of the dismantling, disfiguring effects of grief that Butler attempts to
put into words – the very words that the experience of grief make available for us to use (“I”,
“you”). Not only does the text manage to evoke this experience to the reader, I argue that the
text also enables transference of the affect of this unravelling to its reader. We meet Monique
when we read her name (the first word) and we learn about her desires and her sense of
humour. But when we read “Monique”, this first word of the obituary, it is also the last time
we encounter her name, and with each succeeding sentence, her coherence and stability
increasingly come to collapse. So does the narrator’s, who disappears after that first, tenuous
“we”, and then finally towards the end all persons make place for absence and elision.
“Impossible to capture”: impossible to capture death, surely, but also to capture Monique, to
capture the narrator, and ultimately to capture ourselves as steady entities: as subjectivities in
the text unravel, how can we not but do so too by the imperative to respond to the figure we
encounter? This effect is amplified by the insistent breaking down of language itself
Van der Weele 34
throughout the obituary: sentences grow shorter and words disappear, to the point where
language arrives to us only in fragments (no subjects, no articles, no verbs). As language
starts to fail us, so does the possibility of making sense of ourselves and of accounting for our
experience. We are thrown in a void of signification: the vacuity of loss. I thus think a form of
transference is operative in this obituary, one that affectively channels the shattering
subjectivity of the narrator’s grief to her readers. It is here that we can first circumscribe a
feeling of grief: grief as affect.
As we have seen, this gradual dissolution of the subject – which the reader comes to
mimic in an “affective transaction” (Van Alphen 22) – problematizes the possibility of an
encounter and of an attachment of which I spoke before. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort dramatizes
the impossibility of the encounter in the face of death. Monique’s momentary reappearances
(once every time the video loops, once every time we read the obituary anew) only serve to
hammer down this point, as they reawaken our desire to be with Monique before
disappointing us once more. In Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the mediation of pieces and parts of
Monique through the projection and the text gives us the promise of an encounter, but then
goes to work actively against its taking place. Here it stunts Ahmed optimism, because the
process of mediation, which for Ahmed is as much as a condition for the occurrence of an
encounter, here leaves the viewer empty-handed. Surely grief must be situated somewhere on
this crossroads between the promise of love and attachment and the devastation of death and
loss. It is grieving not just what has been but what could have been. In a sense we cannot
speak of loss as such, but only of the loss of loss: the impossibility of losing, simply because
there was nothing to lose. It seems as Ahmed writes: “for the object to be lost, it must already
have existed within the subject” (Cultural Politics 160, emphasis Ahmed). But while Ahmed
(following Freud) argues that such an absence of loss renders mourning impossible, I believe
it is precisely this condition that sparks the affect of grief.
Van der Weele 35
The affect of grief thus capitalizes on Monique’s constantly wavering, not-quiteabsence. As we sense Monique’s dissolution, so does the work make us feel our own. Yet
unlike Butler’s, this sensation of unravelling is not interior, private or existential. To the
contrary, I think the struggle to have Monique crystallize fully or coherently amounts to a
certain openness that is crucial to the communal mode of grieving Pas Pu Saisir La Mort sets
out to facilitate. It beckons for imagination and creativity in the same way the about-to-die
picture did in Barbie Zelizer’s analysis (see chapter one). Monique needs the viewer to fill in
the many blanks. What we see, then, is that the failure of not having captured Monique served
to reproduce the limit conditions of the encounter – an openness to change, to letting the
encounter shape yourself anew – but this time, the encounter was nonreciprocal. Monique
touches me, but I cannot impinge on her anymore. All that remains of Monique now resides in
me, in mnemonic fragments. This is what the not-quite-encounter brought me. If the
encounter ceases to be a mutually constitutive one, how might the grief I now feel still bear a
transformative force?
Memory work
To address this question I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida, whose work on the
work of mourning explicitly links the faculty of memory to the transformative effects of
mourning. Like Butler, Derrida sees the moment of loss of the other as a moment of
subjectivation and simultaneous self-erasure: death grants us a syntax for speaking about
oneself and about another. Only in bereavement do I understand that “I” could not be, could
not have been, if it were not for “you”, who is now gone. In Mémoires: for Paul De Man
(1989), he writes: “The “me” or the “us” of which we speak then arise and are delimited in
the way that they are only through this experience of the other, and of the other as other who
can die, leaving in me or in us this memory of the other. This terrible solitude which is mine
Van der Weele 36
or ours at the death of the other is what constitutes that relationship to self we call “me,” “us,”
“between us,” “subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory”” (33).10
When a loved one dies, then, we are faced with the fact that the other from now on
will only live in us. “[F]or it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the
other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and because we live this or that in
his memory, in memory of him”, Derrida asserts (31). In this way, death has us question our
sense of self by exposing the fundamental tie to the (now lost) other that was required for this
sense of self. The lost other now only lives “in me”, in bereaved memory, and it is in
bereaved memory where Derrida locates the transformative force of mourning.
So what is the importance of memory for Derrida’s theory? Derrida argues that it is
not the other as such that comes “to us” or “in us” after death, but rather the traces of this
other, “in the form of (…) images or mnesic representations which are only lacunary
fragments, detached and dispersed – only “parts” of the departed other” (37). These traces of
the other enter us in a memory as a kind of metonymy for the deceased other, “where the part
stands for the whole and for more than the whole that it exceeds” (37, emphasis Derrida). It is
this chain of traces of the other that installs in us the capability of upholding what Joan
Kirkby calls an “ongoing conversation” (467) or “creative encounter” (469) with the deceased
other. “It speaks the other and makes the other speak, but it does so in order to let the other
speak, for the other will have spoken first. It has no choice but to let the other speak, since it
cannot make the other speak without the other having already spoken, without this trace of
speech which comes from the other”, Derrida notes (Mémoires 38, emphasis Derrida). In this
way, mourning is emphatically linked to writing and speaking, denoting a focus not on the
narcissistic interiorization of the other, but on a respectful, productive exteriorization of the
memory of the other. By making the other speak in bereaved memory, we allow the other to
10
Clearly Derrida’s thinking on death as the source of our vocabulary for intersubjectivity resembles Butler’s
cited above. Commonalities between the theories of mourning of Butler and Derrida are manifold, but discussing
them in detail goes beyond the scope of the present essay.
Van der Weele 37
have bearing on this world as herself, in spite of the other being beyond this world. This act of
making-speak lies at the heart of the work of mourning: it is a gesture that transforms the
subject and her world.
Following Derrida, we might frame Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as the outcome of a work
of mourning, the exteriorization of Monique’s memory via Sophie Calle. In the work of
mourning, disparate memories of the other form a chain of traces that metonymically comes
to stand for the other. This “hallucinating metonymy”, which both stands before me and is a
part of me, is what is left of the other “in me” (Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” 54).
Pas Pu Saisir La Mort forms precisely such a chain of traces of the life and death of Monique.
In this sense the work is what Emma Wilson calls a “shifting monument”, keeping the
deceased other with us in what she considers “living, ongoing love relations” (Love, Mortality
14). Yet if for Wilson such monuments work as palliatives – that is to provide “some
moderation, relief, or pursued contact” (14) – Pas Pu Saisir La Mort provides no real solace
from the shattering force of grief to me, the viewer. It fails to conjure up Monique’s memory
in any full sense and thus to facilitate the beginnings of an attachment to Monique.
I think, however, that grief as affect allows for a drastically different mode of
mourning – one based not on the exteriorization of private memories, but rather on the taking
in or interiorization of memories of an other, collectively. The obituary offers a sliver of
personality, a series of mnemonic snippets of Monique that installs some sense of who
Monique was “in me”. The fragments of Monique call on us to imagine Monique as the work
itself never yields her fully. In this way, for the viewers of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, the
encounter with Monique only becomes memory after the fact of her death. It is as if mourning
becomes the same as getting-to-know; as if the budding of an attachment remains viable after
death. Consequently, the work of mourning will have to be public from the outset, because the
grief of the viewers begins with the distribution of an affect that travels across subjects, not
Van der Weele 38
within them. The Monique we get to meet in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort is never just “in me”: she
is “in us”. The work offers an exteriorized memory (the work of mourning of Sophie Calle),
which only then lends itself to be used for an interior process of mourning – a process that
will no longer be private, since it was shared from the outset and is conditioned and made
possible by this shared nature, its affective basis.
For Derrida, mourning without prior memories seems to be an empty, pointless mode
of mourning. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort hints at a mode of mourning that starts out as empty,
guided only by an affective operation or an affective appeal; but as this affect draws the
viewer in, so the installation structure paves the way for a different work of mourning that is
fundamentally shared and fundamentally public. As I succumb to the unravelling effects of
grief, I find myself absorbed into a community that mourns collectively. At work here is the
transformative force of grief. I will develop this idea in chapter three.
In this way, the obituary of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort distinguishes itself by means of
three achievements. First, by gradually annulling the grammar of subjectivity to the point of
erasure, it affectively transfers to the viewer the unravelling sense of self that Butler and
Derrida have deemed crucial to the experience of being struck with grief. Second, the obituary
allows the viewer to generate an image of Monique (a stranger!) by means of a chain of
memory traces that metonymically comes to represent her; an image that subsequently
provides the raw material for the labour of mourning the viewer can then commence. Third,
through the dispersal of affect, the obituary ensures that this work of mourning will from the
outset be shared and public rather than interiorized and private, offering a mode of mourning
that eludes the theory outlined by Derrida. Here, the work of mourning is work only second to
affect: the affect of grief might engender a work of mourning, but in doing so it uncovers a
mode of mourning otherwise.
Van der Weele 39
Here we find a tentative response to a quandary I first posed in the introduction. There,
I wondered to what extent Butler’s notion of grievability assumes also a grieve-ability: a
potency of the subject to mourn, at all. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort allows us to grieve for someone
whom we have never met and will never “meet”; allows us to grieve even in the absence of
death. Here sparks the affect of grief: bringing Monique “in me”, allowing her to speak “in
me”, grieving not only for her loss but also for the loss of the possibility for a fuller
attachment than the one I could only make in the face of her absence, an attachment only to
the residue of Monique’s having-been-there and not-quite-being-there.
Van der Weele 40
Chapter 3: worry
The previous chapters have dealt with the absence of death (of an other) and the
absence of a prior attachment (to a dying other) in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. My aim so far has
been to delineate a mode of mourning that remains viable in spite of (or even owing to) these
absences. In this process, I have suggested a conceptual demarcation between mourning as
work and grief as affect, arguing that the latter can stick to objects and subjects without
requiring or even calling for the labour of the former.
Grief as affect does not rely on prior memories of an other. It also does not require
prior attachment to an other. We can feel it without a direct confrontation with death. It is
indeed something we feel. But surely feeling is not enough. We believe grief to do something,
or at least for it to have us do something. Why feel grief without grieving? For Judith Butler,
as we have seen, this something has to do with a certain recognition of our relation towards
others: grief is to have us grasp the vulnerability of other others and to care about their losses.
Grief has us care.
We encountered an intersection of care and grief twice before in this essay. In the first
chapter, I noted Sophie Calle’s desire to capture her mother’s death is a form of care, of
wanting to be there for her. In chapter two, Calle’s work of mourning, the externalization of
memories of her mother, similarly evokes a caring gesture. In this final chapter, I will further
explore this relationship between grief and care as expressed in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort.
Looking at the different ways in which Pas Pu Saisir La Mort mediates and performs gestures
of care, I aim to conceptualize grief not only as a “gateway” to caring for others, but also
more fundamentally as a way of caring for the other. Taking on this project involves drawing
a connection between Butler’s theory of grief and insights from feminist ethics of care. I will
begin to explore this connection towards the end of the present chapter, fleshing it out more
substantively in the conclusion.
Van der Weele 41
Worry: as relations unravel
“Ne vous faites pas de souci”: don’t you worry. So rang Monique Sindler’s last words,
according to her daughter Sophie Calle (Masschelein 127). As we have seen, Calle already
drew our attention to her mother’s last words in the obituary, where she wrote: “The days
before her death, she kept repeating: “It's odd. It's stupid.” ... Worry…, her last word” (Calle).
The contradiction between the seemingly soothing, reassuring nature of the phrase, “don’t you
worry”, and the negative connotations we carry about the word that ends this phrase when
taken in isolation, “worry”, creates an awkward tension. In asking her daughter not to worry,
Monique inadvertently ended her life by uttering a word that only affirms concern and
anguish. Through this utterance she has us suspect that there may still be something to worry
about, or that she herself continued to worry.
Calle seems to have taken this irony seriously, because Monique’s last word takes on a
significant presence in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort. Apart from its appearance in the obituary, we
find two printed and framed “souci” on the exhibition wall of the first room of the installation.
The work makes sure the written word “worry” is our first impression and subsequently has
this “worry” carry weight through its reiteration at various points in the installation, affirming
the tragic irony of Monique’s last words. But in this gesture, Calle simultaneously playfully
disengages from the weight of the words through subversion. Translated literally into English,
“ne vous faites pas de souci” might read as “don’t make yourself worry” – a command Calle
ignored to create her two framed ink prints. She literally made herself two worries. Calle
could not entirely abide by her mother’s wishes and professes her concern by externalizing it,
rendering literal her failure to live up to her mother’s request.11
Don’t you worry: Monique’s request is beautiful and generous. “I will die now, you
may relinquish your care for me”, she seems to say. Care begins with the acknowledgement
11
By choosing the word “externalizing”, I indirectly cite Jacques Derrida’s theory on the work of mourning. For
Derrida, externalizing traces of the other through writing and speaking is a way of ethically engaging with the
other who has died and lives only “in me” in bereaved memory (see chapter two).
Van der Weele 42
of a relation. In Caring (1984), Nel Noddings writes that “the essential elements of caring are
located in the relation between the one-caring and the cared-for” (9). For Noddings, the caring
gesture reveals a relationality that she considers “ontologically basic”: care expresses our
mutual dependency in a fundamental way (3-4).12 When Monique asks her daughter to stop
worrying after she dies, she tacitly subscribes to this idea. In death, as we have seen, the
relationship is in many ways undone. If care is an affirmation of this shared relationality, than
the severing of the ties between us through death (when “I” notice “I” could not have been “I”
without “you”) also appears to imply some conclusion to the caring relationship. The fact that
Monique pleaded her daughter to cede the care for her mother – thus abandoning what many
care ethicists deem an archetypal care relation (Held 26) – further intensifies the severity of
this moment of cessation.13
Yet even if her daughter stopped worrying, she did not stop caring. Giving shape to
these worries, drawing them out in matter-of-fact, rigid lettering, I see as an act of
externalization: of making palpable her concern, or in fact showing how her concern for an
other envelops and consumes her – a “displacement of interest from my own reality to the
reality of the other” (Noddings 14). It is in this sense a caring gesture, or at least an attempt at
caring. Here, however, care seemingly remains without recipient. Rendered in Noddings’
vocabulary, the “one-caring” does not cease to care, even in the face of death, but the “caredfor” appears to be lost now.14 Calle’s care is what I call care in excess, a phrase I will explore
in more detail below.
12
Clearly, Noddings’ work here resonates with that of Butler’s and Derrida’s, who as we saw in the previous
chapter also consider the relationship between “I” and “You” fundamental to the emergence of the subject. I will
return to this similarity later in this chapter, and more importantly in the conclusion.
13
An analysis of the full significance of the mother-daughter relationship in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort unfortunately
goes beyond the scope of the present essay. Emma Wilson’s chapter on the work in Love, Mortality and the
Moving Image, throughout which she draws on Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory, focuses more directly
on Monique’s role as mother.
14
Noddings’ vocabulary to describe the caring relationship in terms of a duality (“one-caring” and “cared-for”)
has been reconsidered by many authors. Eva Kittay, for instance, opts for calling them “dependency worker” and
“dependent” (28). My reason for adopting Noddings’ vocabulary is that her attempt is one of the earliest, and
Van der Weele 43
We would be mistaken to reduce this externalization of worry to a private exchange
between Calle and her mother, however. From the outset, I have approached Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort in terms of a multiplicity of encounters moving in a multiplicity of directions. Ahmed’s
affective economies rely on such conditions. Again, we find the two prints in the first exhibit
room, prior to the video projection and visually diverting attention away from the tiny, fading
script of the obituary. As Calle moves caringly towards her mother by admitting to her
persistent “souci”, so the viewer initially moves towards this faceless, voiceless utterance,
“souci”, and wonders: whose worry? Worry for what? Why worry? Yet posing these questions
means to answer them. As I start to wonder, I start to worry because apparently, there is
something to worry about. Here worry works affectively, evoking and transmitting an
emotion the object of which is difficult or even impossible to identify. Worry sticks (Ahmed,
Cultural Politics 8). In this way I claim the worries as my own, entering what Noddings
would call a caring relationship as “the other’s reality becomes a real possibility for me” (14).
Put more strongly, the distinction between the other’s reality and mine becomes blurred to the
point of erasure. If Noddings suggests the other’s feelings (of worry) become “temporarily
mine, as on loan to me” (30) I think we can say they come to belong to me, as they stick to me
and I fully inhabit and own them in a moment of pure receptivity. Reading the obituary will
only affirm this intuition. Here is a space of mourning; here is something to worry about.
So far I have aligned worry and care. As Calle and Monique were bound by a
relationship of care, Calle could not help but worry for her mother, even after death, even
after Monique had asked her not to. But as I have tried to show, worry is a sticky affect, one
that has bearing beyond the strict reciprocal duality of the caring relationship. This also means
I somehow come to enter or intervene in the caring relationship that was already in place.
Here a network of care arises where I might come to care for or be prepared to care for others
subsequent revisions have not altered the fundamental duality of the relationship, in spite of suggesting new
words to delineate it.
Van der Weele 44
who are not proximate to me. Noddings refers to these networks as chains of caring. She
writes: “[c]hains of caring are established, some linking unknown individuals to those already
anchored in the inner circles and some forming whole new circles of potential caring. I am
“prepared to care” through recognition of these chains” (47).15 Indeed, we might say that if
we can speak of an “object of worry” here, it is a worry about the fabric of relationality that
started to unravel as Monique started to slip away into death. My worry has me “prepared to
care”, but the recipient of my care is immediately taken away from me in death – the death
that was the “source” of my “souci” (which was first Monique’s worry, and Calle’s worry) in
the first place.
Of course, I cannot intervene in the caring relationship directly. My point, however, is
that Pas Pu Saisir La Mort shows us that in relationships of care, the qualifications of “direct”
and “indirect” cease to be distinguishable – especially in the face of death. Calle’s expression
of care through her worry cannot be said to be more caring than my own affective response to
her externalization of these worries. As care in excess, neither seems to do anything. Rather,
these are modes of affectivity that substantiate or render concrete a network of relationality
that is always already in place. I would say that when we find the other’s worry sticking onto
us, these affects reveal something about our sensitivity to the affective life of others, a
consequence of our embeddedness in a social milieu. Calling this “empathy” is off the mark. I
am concerned here with a transference of something more akin to emotion than to
contemplative understanding. It is not about knowing the other or about knowing how she
feels. It is not even about feeling what she feels. It is about my intuitive response to what I
15
Noddings argues that even in the case of strangers situated in complete isolation of my chain of caring, there is
an internal “I must” bidding me to care for the other. This “I must” is “that natural imperative that arises as I
receive the other”, Noddings explains (47). If this is an ontological claim, it comes with obvious dangers of
essentialism. I find an interrogation of this “natural imperative” to be necessary, but it is unfortunately beyond
the scope of the present chapter. One brief suggestion I can make here is to bring Emmanuel Levinas into the
discussion, for his vocabulary of the infinite demand of the other appears close to Noddings’ claims about the
stranger in spirit, without falling in the trap of naturalizing this bond or formulating a kind of human
anthropology of “natural care”.
Van der Weele 45
feel she is feeling. This is a response of care, one that segues from my absorption into the
chain of care in which both she and I manifest ourselves as links.
So it seems that worry stuck to me as a result of my inclusion into a network of
relations of care. Paradoxically, this very sticking is also what ensured my inclusion into this
network. Apprehending signs of worry made me worry (care); but I could only be made to
worry because I was prone to worry (care) in the first place. The ontology of this relation is
thus impossible to retrace. One does not come before the other, but the other always comes
before one. Butler’s model of subjectivity already brought us there in the previous chapter.
We are always already in relation, but this is not to deny that concrete relations only surface
in concrete moments of concrete affectivity. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort stages such a moment, I
contend.
But as I enter the second room (the room of the video projection) and as I am
confronted with a death that is never quite death, a death that denies death, my worry and my
absorption into the chain of caring lose their apparent transparency. If I had previously
identified the unravelling relationality that is a consequence of death as the object of worry,
the second room tears this concern away from its subject (the viewer) and leaves only the
ambiguity of a cared-for who criss-crosses incessantly over the shaky border between life and
death, effacing this very distinction. Doing so, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort leaves my care in a state
of perpetual suspension. It seems like I should care, but care is no longer possible. I cannot
care, for there is no cared-for in death; and I cannot care, for there is a cared-for in life but I
cannot reach her. I know Monique is dead (her death is what conditions Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort) so I know my care will always arrive too late, but at the same time, Monique keeps
coming back to me, beckoning for my care. My care is in excess and insufficient at once. All
that is available to me is the sense of loss that arises from this condition of not-quite, and also
from the frustration of being welcomed to and immediately witnessing the falling apart of a
Van der Weele 46
chain of caring. So there is loss, and there is grief. How might we come to understand this
grief as a way of caring in its own right?
Grief as palliative: care in excess
To further theorize the link between grief and the chain of caring, I want to say a few
words now about the specificity of the death of Monique. My essay in its entirety has dealt
with the specific death of Monique Sindler. What I want to discuss at present is not her death
itself but rather what I will call her mode of dying: the mode of dying known as palliative
care.
As a mode of dying, the idea of palliative care has instructed health care practitioners
in modernity roughly since the establishment of hospices for cancer patients in the 1960s
(Randall and Downie 6). The idea of palliative care is informed by a notion of what might
constitute a “good death”. In the official definition provided by the World Health
Organisation (WHO), palliative care is the name for “an approach that improves the quality of
life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness”
(“WHO Definition”). Palliative care thus entails an emphasis on limiting as much as possible
the extent to which a dying patient faces suffering, setting out “neither to hasten nor to
prolong death” (“WHO Definition”). David Roy writes: “[t]o free a gravely ill person’s time
of mind, memory, imagination, and feeling from the forces of agony that would compress that
time into ever narrower black holes of suffering is palliative care’s work of emancipation”
(v). To care here means not to heal but to mitigate, soften and smoothe out; to not voraciously
lengthen life but to accept the limits to living pleasurably our bodies indicate. I find Roy’s
vocabulary quite telling: he speaks of emancipation, as if a long, painful death is some social
ill from which we need to free ourselves through the practice of palliative care.
The obituary I analysed above (see chapter two) narrated the final month of Monique’s
life. The narrator of the text is devoted completely to fulfilling the last wishes of Monique –
Van der Weele 47
from taking a final trip together, to throwing one last party, to organising the details of the
funeral. The insistent use of the pronoun ‘she’ grants Monique the constant limelight, as if
only her being is relevant in the dying process (at least until finally this “she” makes place for
the absence of subject-less sentence structures, too). Similarly, the video projection shows us
an in profile close-up of Monique’s face, absorbing our gaze even in the brief moment others
enter the screen. The utter dedication to Monique’s memory that emanates from Pas Pu Saisir
La Mort in this way points me towards classifying her mode of dying as one instructed by the
principles of palliative care, even outside its strict medical sense.16
But what draws me to Pas Pu Saisir La Mort as a scene of palliation has more to do
with the way in which palliative care designates not the patient but the patient’s social
embeddedness as the site of care, the cared-for. Indeed, the most salient feature of palliative
care is its acknowledgement of the needs of those surrounding the ill subject, those links in
the chain of caring who suffer with her and alongside her. In official terms, the WHO speaks
of “the needs of patients and their families, including bereavement counselling, if indicated”
(“WHO Definition”). Fiona Randall and R.S. Downie refer to palliative care as “care which
should be expressed from inside a human relationship” (viii); this emphasis on the
interrelatedness of needs even has them deprecate what they call the “doctrine that relatives
are as much objects of palliative care concern as the actual patients” (9). However, it seems to
me that the model of palliativity proposed by Pas Pu Saisir La Mort undoes such a critique by
calling into question what it means to be an “actual patient”. The work enforces this undoing
when it has worry relentlessly jump back and forth: from Monique, to the artist, to one viewer
and to the next. Monique, initially the patient, shares her concern and lays bare a chain of care
16
It is very likely that Monique’s death was steered by the principles of palliative care. The illness she suffered,
breast cancer, commonly has palliative care as its treatment in the final stages of life. Certainly, the image of
Monique’s face in slumber evokes a familiar scene: a painless death, owing to a dose of morphine, in the
company of caring nurses and acquiescent family members. These associations will guide many viewers who
have found themselves part of such a tableau to recognize a scene of palliative care. It is undoubtedly first of all
in this literal sense that Pas Pu Saisir La Mort captures the principles of palliation.
Van der Weele 48
of distributed patienthood – although this distribution is unavoidably uneven. In this way, the
object and the subject of care come to overlap: by partaking in worry collectively, the burden
of care shifts from its initial position between the one-caring and the cared-for to circulating
in a wide mesh of care relations.17 In this mesh, the “actual patient” is without doubt an
originary node but this status gradually loses meaning as the mesh starts expanding. In this
way, care comes to extend beyond death: if we think of care as tying together a mesh of
relations, then the withdrawal of a single node does not render care superfluous.
It seems as though Pas Pu Saisir La Mort stages this effacement of the “actual patient”
in a rather dramatic way when it depicts its “actual patient” (Monique) as interminably in a
state of dying. Monique is dead, and still we care, as if there was never an “actual patient” to
begin with. Yet as I have shown in chapter one, this “state of dying” is rather a criss-crossing
back and forth between what we understand as being “alive” and being “dead”. This
continuous oscillation troubles our conceptions of life and death, of presence and absence,
and consequently now also of patient and non-patient. At the very point we have identified an
object of care (a cared-for, Monique), then, we are also confronted with the absence of this
object. I find it useful to note here that the verb “palliate”, derived from the Latin “palliare”
(“to cloak”), carries meanings beyond the context of health care to which it is most commonly
related. The Merriam-Webster dictionary mentions “to cover by excuses and apologies” and
“to moderate the intensity of” as second and third definitions (“palliate”). It seems to me that
when Pas Pu Saisir La Mort performs its unremitting elision of the object of grief, of
attachment, and of care, this elision (or perhaps I should say evasion) is also an act of
covering up and hiding Monique (capturing her?), blurring the binary distinctions to which I
17
For my use of the figure of the mesh I am indebted to Timothy Morton. He describes the mesh as “a
nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any
level” (275). Although Morton employs the figure of the mesh to describe the interrelatedness of all life forms, I
find that the concept resonates with the present analysis because it heeds the way interrelations blur boundaries
between familiar binaries – in the case of this essay, the one between one-caring and cared for, and between life
and death, for instance.
Van der Weele 49
referred above; and this act of covering up simultaneously mitigates the intensity of the
affects it distributes. Or, rather, it is through the distribution of affects that their intensity gets
mitigated, as the holder of the burden of care finds relief in its circulation (it is my worry, and
your worry, and her worry). It is also in this way I propose to designate Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort as a scene of palliation.
Nonetheless, in spite of the various ways in which Pas Pu Saisir La Mort seems to be
hiding Monique from us (all the while flaunting her presence teasingly, through the painting,
the obituary, the sheer closeness of her face in the video projection…), the affects of grief and
worry continue to settle in and move us. No doubt they continued to move Sophie Calle,
whose “souci” I described above using the phrase care in excess. I choose to call this care in
excess because the death of the cared-for seems to have severed the caring tie and erased the
grammar of care (the one-caring “I” and the cared-for “you”). To what extent can we
conceive of care without the reciprocal duality of the “one-caring” and “cared-for”? I would
say that it is exactly this instant when the syntax of care begins to fray and care appears to
become excessive that we can locate the emergence of grief. Grieving, more than merely
keeping the lost other “with me”, also means to keep on caring for this other, in spite of death
and because of death. To grieve is to care in excess. For the viewer of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort,
this excess takes on many dimensions, as excess here not only marks the absence of a caredfor through death, but also the absence of a body and of any prior attachment to this body.
Our care is in excess because the work palliates Monique’s presence.
Of course, we do not “care” in any concrete way for Monique. We cannot sit by her
bedside to console her, we cannot bring her to the seaside for a final glimpse of the ocean, nor
can we be there for her to hear her utter those final words. Our grief is exactly a response to
the fact that we cannot. If care here is an “act” – if it “does” something – it is to inscribe
myself into a network of relationality, a chain of caring, and to simultaneously affirm this
Van der Weele 50
network of relationality through my inscription into it. Speaking of care in this level of
abstraction risks alienating my writing from the many theorists of care who urge us to think
about care primarily and in the first instance as practice. Virginia Held, for instance, writes
that an ethics of care “has the potential of being based on the truly universal experience of
care”: the principles of its theory are thus to be looked for in the practices of care that sustain
us from childbirth onwards and of which all of us has been part (3). Eva Kittay finds even this
call on a “universal experience” too abstract, stressing that “[n]eed and vulnerability, no less
than the appropriateness of the response, are all evaluated, if not constituted, by the practice in
question” (33, emphasis mine). For these writers, then, writing about care is empty as soon as
care becomes an abstraction, uncoupled from the practice of caring. Of course, directly
aligning a “practice” of care exclusively with concrete “acts” is in itself impossible: many
ways in which we care for others we cannot call concrete. There is an affective dimension to
care that does not translate to direct interventions. More importantly, however, I think that
one’s immersion into a mesh of care relations, which Noddings would refer to as being
“prepared to care” (47) is already an act of caring, in that it forces one to consider and
recognize the needs and vulnerability of an other.18
I have described grief as an act of care. It is the remainder of care without a cared-for,
a caring in excess. At the heart of this act lies an affirmation of a mesh of caring relations,
which is also in a sense only constituted at the moment of its affirmation. The moment this
singular cared-for disappears, then, is also the moment we open up to the many “one-carings”
and “cared-fors” that make up nodes in this mesh. To be struck by grief affectively, as in Pas
Pu Saisir La Mort, means to enter a field of relationality previously unknown. It goes without
saying that this is a joyful discovery. In fact, I contend that here we can start to comprehend a
palliative mode of grieving. To grieve means to grapple with loss. Yet in my analysis, grief
18
It is here that an ethics of care can benefit from a more fundamental exploration of what many theorists of care
simply presuppose: the universality of the caring relationship. It is here that I identify an intersection with the
work of Judith Butler. I will return to this point in the conclusion of this essay.
Van der Weele 51
also circumvents loss, as through grieving we sew ourselves into a fabric of caring relations –
the very fabric that had started to tear and fray due to this initial loss. In this way grief acquits
us from some of the pain of loss. If the “I” discovers there is a “you” only at the moment she
loses this “you”, then this is also the moment this “I” gets a taste of the “we” that has
sustained and nurtured this “you” who is now lost. Grief is palliative because it helps us find
this “we”. It is palliative because it alleviates our losses and frees us from those “ever
narrower black holes of suffering” (Roy v) we are thrown into when faced with the death of a
loved one.
Emma Wilson has coined the term palliative art to describe works of art that “offer
unorthodox alternatives to the trajectories of mourning (and melancholia) explored in
psychoanalytic theory and practice whilst also, unlike deconstructive approaches to mourning,
seeking creative modes of relief or reprieve” (“Museum Spaces” 112). She writes: “[a]rt is
imagined here as a form of pain management, offering the living a mode of absorption and
distraction” (Love, Mortality 3). It is easy to see how Pas Pu Saisir La Mort might qualify for
palliative art in Wilson’s sense, and indeed Love, Mortality and the Moving Image even
features an analysis of the work. But I think that in understanding palliative art merely as a
way of tarrying with grief and “create… living, ongoing love relations’ between the ‘onemourning’ and the ‘mourned-for’” (14), Wilson misses an important aspect of the possibilities
of art in dealing with loss. What my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort has brought to the fore
is not just a way of coping with loss, but also a mitigation of the pains of loss through the
mesh of relations this palliative work of art helps its viewers unearth. This art is palliative not
because it simply softens the pain, but because it covers up the apparent concreteness of death
of the other and redirects attention to the chain of caring this death exposed. As a work of
palliative art, Pas Pu Saisir La Mort thematizes and engenders these processes of palliation
that are inherent to grieving.
Van der Weele 52
They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black19: conclusion
This essay is an inquiry into the affective life of grief. Its premise has been to
formulate a mode of mourning without loss – without personal bereavement, without prior
encounters, even without death. My analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort has aided me in
formulating such a mode of mourning. Central to my argument has been to conceptualize
grief as affect, as opposed to mourning as work. Sparked off through affective operations, this
mode of mourning relies on the imagination of the subject-to-mourn and is fundamentally
public and shared, working from the outside in. If we traditionally understand the work of
mourning as a process of externalization, this affective grief works through a radical
openness, a work of internalization. It establishes itself with the emergence of a caring
relationship. To grieve is to care in excess. It is also palliative. In a sense bordering on
perversion, to grieve is to rejoice, grasping the mesh of care relations in which it installs us.
In the introduction, I posed a question regarding Judith Butler’s notion of grievability
– to which I counterposed grieve-ability, our ability to mourn at all. I interrogated Butler’s
attempt to employ a model of mourning that favours interior life and assumes the loss of an
intimate attachment to describe the collective endeavour that grievable life seems to require.
The work of mourning we inherit from Freud considers mourning without loss (and holding
on to this non-loss) a melancholic attachment, a persistent type of narcissistic attachment. A
universal grieve-ability (and grievability) of life seems inconceivable if we understand
grieving here as pertaining to the work of mourning in the Freudian sense. There are too many
lives and too many deaths for which we cannot muster to mourn, whose anonymity and
distance prevents us from doing so, even if we wanted to. In this sense I endorse Roland
Barthes’ Mourning Diary when pleads: “[d]on’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic” (73).
Heeding to the affective dimension of grief, however, provides a different mode of mourning,
19
I borrow this phrase from songwriter Sufjan Stevens, whose Michigan contains a song called “They Also
Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black: For the Homeless In Muskegon”.
Van der Weele 53
one defined by receptivity and directed outwards, to others. To consider the affective life of
grief means to accept that we may mourn without the loss of prior private attachments. Of
course, this mode of mourning still requires deaths to be communicated within a discursive
framework in which these deaths are considered as having lived, and having lived a life
worthy of grieving. Here Butler’s theorizing remains vital, and never has it been my aim to
attack it.
I want to make two further remarks here. First, while I acknowledge the importance of
discursive limitations for rendering lives (un)grievable, it also strikes me that an affective
form of grief partly sidesteps the problem of discourse. If grief is an affective process, then
even lives rendered discursively ungrievable might still be grievable by me (and, by
extension, by us). To substantiate this claim I would have to address the ways in which
discourse and affect interlace, an endeavour beyond the scope of the present essay. Second,
and relatedly, I have yet to address how grief as affect might become subject to political abuse
through its distribution amongst subjects. How might grief allow for affective manipulation
and exploitation? In future research, it will be vital to address the politics of the affective life
of grief.
As my research for and writing of this essay developed, I came to realise that my
questions about grief were also questions about care. A grievable (and grieve-able) life is one
whose loss we care about. Yet in delineating a mode of mourning that would allow us to
mourn for distant strangers, I also began to think about grief as a way of caring for another. If
to grieve is to sustain (or, in the case of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort, begin to develop) an intimate
attachment to an other, how might we understand the energy spent on this persistence as an
act of caring in its own right? In what remains of this essay, I would like to develop my
thinking of chapter three and see how my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort might help
connect Butler’s ethics of grief to the field of ethics of care.
Van der Weele 54
In Frames of War (2009), Judith Butler also draws a connection between grief and
care. Butler writes: “[p]recisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that
being so that it may live. Only under condition in which the loss would matter does the value
of life appear” (14). Only if a life will be grieved does it come to count as a life in the first
place. The prospect of grieving the other secures a caring relation to the other. Caring
becomes a grieving in advance. Here Butler echoes Jacques Derrida’s assertion that
“friendship always begins by surviving” (Politics of Friendship 291), always assumes that in
a relation of care, one will witness the other’s death and will have to mourn and
commemorate this death (Brault and Naas 1). Grief thus structures our ties of care. Yet while
Butler and Derrida see grief (and by extension loss) as a kind of prerequisite for care, I think
we must understand grief as a form of care in its own right, one that shapes and affirms ties of
care amongst grieving subjects. As I have shown in my analysis of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort,
this caring is in excess, but never empty.
For Butler, to grieve (and care) for the other means to recognize the precariousness of
the life of the other. She considers precariousness “a shared condition of human life” that
“implies … a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all” (Frames of
War 13-4). The dependency she describes resonates well with the mesh of which I have been
speaking. Moreover, as I mentioned in chapter three, with this sense of fundamental
vulnerability Butler also finds allies in some writers in the field of the ethics of care. In The
Ethics of Care, an impressive roundup of decades of work in the field, Virginia Held contends
that an ethics of care “appeals to the universal experience of caring” (21): she speaks of a
“deeper reality of human interdependency” that has the act of caring for a vulnerable child as
the foundation of the continuation of all human life (54). Both, then, make an ontological
claim that singles out care for the vulnerable infant as the archetypal condition of human life,
in which “condition” works both with the meaning of “circumstance” (descriptively) and
Van der Weele 55
“requirement” (normatively). Both also conceive of the subject as principally relational.20
Finally, both have as their project to think through a political community that recognizes and
provides for the flourishing of the paradigmatic care relation.21
Those parallels notwithstanding, these authors differ greatly in the ways in which they
conceive of care itself. Because Butler’s project is focused on what she calls grievability,
investigating the normative schemes in which lives become recognized, care for her tends to
remain an abstraction: simply “to be sustained as a life” (Frames of War 14). Although
individual lives matter, her point is that in the face of precariousness, humans are “radically
substitutable” (14). Held, in contrast, remarks that any ethics of care first and foremost needs
to heed to care as practice, as a scene of nourishing. “[T]he ethics of care starts with the moral
claims of particular others” she writes (10, emphasis mine).
My analysis of the distribution of care in Pas Pu Saisir La Mort sits comfortably in
neither of these conceptions of care. At first, care manifests itself concretely in the
relationship between Calle and Monique. Yet as the work involves its audience affectively
and its viewers collectively begin to give shape to the mesh, this relationship expands and
blurs. The scene of Pas Pu Saisir La Mort then also ceases to resemble anything we might
consider a practice of care. But it never slips into an abstraction of care, either: as I argued in
20
For a discussion of the relational subject in Butler’s work, see chapter two. Held puts it succinctly when she
asserts that “[t]he ethics of care… characteristically sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and
epistemologically” (13). She minimally develops her model of subjectivity theoretically, rooted as it is in the
“practice” of caregiving. Here is one way in which care ethicists could benefit from the work of Butler and her
predecessors (notably Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas).
21
Butler restates this aim at many points both in Precarious Life and Frames of War. She pleads for instance for
“a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete
social policy regarding such issues as shelter, work, food, medical care, and legal status” (Frames of War 13).
See also the Introduction. Held summarizes the goal of a political community rooted in care as follows: “[w]e
can see how not only does every domain of society need transformation in light of the values of care but so
would the relations between such domains if we took care seriously, as care would move to the center of our
attention and become a primary concern of society. Instead of a society dominated by conflict restrained by law
and preoccupied with economic gain, we might have a society that saw as its most important task the flourishing
of children and the development of caring relations, not only in personal contexts but among citizens and using
governmental institutions” (18).
Van der Weele 56
chapter three, the work presents grieving as a way of caring for the other that is excessive, but
not contrived.
I argue then that Pas Pu Saisir La Mort offers a practice of care that also hints at the
ways in which Butler’s theory of precariousness and the field of care ethics could benefit
from each other’s insights. Butler’s theory of precariousness risks reducing care to an
abstraction that effaces the complexities of actual caring relationships. If Butler makes a “call
to interdependency” (48), I want to invoke Eva Kittay’s insistence that “interdependence
begins with dependence”: the vague abstraction of care in a concept of interdependence tends
to efface the fundamentally one-sided, dependent nature of many care relations (xii, emphasis
Kittay). An ideal of interdependence tends to imply the voluntary cooperation of essentially
independent subjects. While Butler’s theory clearly encompasses a critique of the ideology of
autonomy, this critique cannot become fully operative if care remains an abstraction in her
work.
On the other hand, the kinds of “indirect” caring and “indirect” mourning affectively
instigated by Pas Pu Saisir La Mort are difficult to account for in an ethics of care that always
begins with the practice of a relationship of dependency. Indeed, grief as affect and care in
excess has little chance of being taken seriously in a field that tends to value the idea that care
is first of all work (Held 9). Here Butler’s regard for the complexities of indirect care
relationships could help the field of care ethics to become more receptive to forms of care that
thwart a rather narrow understanding of what care can be. Butler writes: “[p]recariousness…
implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom
remain anonymous” (14, emphasis mine). Surely to be impinged upon means to be inflected
and affected by and for others, even those whom we have never met. To say these modes of
caring are indirect is not to say that they are empty. The secluded space of Pas Pu Saisir La
Mort has showed us as much.
Van der Weele 57
Aligning grief and care thusly allows me to point at a particularly difficult feature of
care: the impossibility of defining what constitutes care in the first place. Grief might be the
most salient of ways in which we care without this care affecting the recipient of our care –
simply because there is no longer a recipient, at least not a singular one. In medical discourse,
care is essentially defined by concerns of life and modes of dying up until the moment of
death. My notion of grief as care in excess destabilizes this connection, as well as the notion
of the isolated recipient of care. Not only does mourning extend the work of care beyond
death; grief also points us at the mesh of care relations in which the one who died was one of
many nodes. Here my argument resembles Sara Ahmed’s plea for a queer mourning, which
implies a shift from recognition of the object of grief to the subject of grief: “a subject that is
not alone in its grief, since grief is both about and directed to others” (Cultural Politics 161).
Mourning without loss similarly steers us towards others, as it operates not to mourn for any
specific object but to grasp our care relations with other grieving subjects.
My claim of grief as affect has been a claim for a mode of mourning otherwise. They
Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black: I might not mourn the death of a stranger as her
intimates will, but this does not mean to say my mourning is empty or contrived (or indeed,
affected). We may share our grief and even rejoice in it. Mourning without loss means gaining
you. To grasp my ties to the lives of others: the affective life of grief.
Van der Weele 58
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