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 52

Works Cited 58

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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).

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

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.

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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

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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 non-

events 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

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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,

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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 death-

producing 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 about-

to-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-to-

die 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 socio-linguistic 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-quite-

absence. 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.

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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.

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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 “cared-

for” 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 cared-

for 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 ‘one-

mourning’ 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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