Eros in Mourning (review)

Now that my ladder is gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

—W. B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

In the beginning there was eros and mourning, then, wearied of scenes of unseasonable grief, Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity, among others, joined forces to create and disseminate a prophylactic theory of managing mortal eros via the implementation of an economics of idealization and transcendence. This, according to Henry Staten, is squarely the gist of the trajectory that the whole Western tradition has followed in its hitherto contested relation to eros. Eros in Mourning is a fascinating remapping of such a trajectory through an "economized" engagement of several variationson two "arche-texts": Homer's Iliad and the Gospel of John. The subsequent chapters of the book—which range from studies of the troubadour song, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Lacan's Seminars—seek to lay bare the literary inscriptions of the sedimentations of the strategies of idealization and transcendence in the face of the erotic anxiety hanging over the horizon of desire.

Staten's argument, exposed in the first chapter, titled "The Argument," is by and large rounded out in his applicative forays into the Iliad and the Gospel of John. In the spirit of deconstruction, namely Jacques Derrida's large corpus on the subject, Staten understands mourning not exclusively as a reaction to loss or, as Freud would have it, as a process of healing from loss but as a dialectic that structures every move in the formation of object relations. Moreover, at the core of this "dialectic of mourning" are not only the moments of libidinal approach, attachment, and loss but also the very concomitant "strategies of deferral, avoidance, or transcendence that arise in response to the threat of loss—strategies by which the self is 'economized' against the libidinal expenditure involved in mourning" (xi).

In his influential 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud had defined mourning as a temporal work (Trauerarbeit), engagedat the behest of the reality principle, and aiming at the withdrawal and reinvestment of libido respectively from lost object into new object: "Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachment to that object."¹ Although Freud here perceives mourning in terms of a stimulus-response behavioural apparatus, he nonetheless had written extensively throughout his oeuvre on the sublimation of eros such that, although not totally marked by his process-oriented conceptualization of mourning, the broad strokes of Staten's argument in Eros in Mourning "[point] toward Freud," to use Staten's own expression (3).

Like Derrida, for whom friendship, and potentially every kind of relationship, is "born in mourning,"² Staten strives to articulate this relationally constitutive aspect of mourning. "As soon as desire is something felt by a mortal being for a mortal being," Staten writes, "eros (as desire-in-general) will always be to some degree agitated by the anticipation of loss" (xi). More particularly, Staten seeks to discern underneath this same structure of mourning the contours of what he conceptualizes as "automourning," or the anticipation of self-loss, as juxtaposed to "heteromourning," or the anticipa-tion of the loss of the other. Although the loss of the other as object-libido is undoubtedly a memento mori, it is overarchly "the fear not of loss of object but of loss of self," Staten points out, that "motivates the classical project of transcendence of mourning" (xii). In an article "On Transience," Freud had already broached the subject of automourning when he interpreted the obsession of creative writers with the ephemeral as ensuing from a certain "foretaste of mourning,"³ but he had not by any means put the concept to the uses Staten has put it throughout the present book, and especially in his compelling chapter on the Iliad.

Not yet arrayed in the armor of idealization and transcendence, Homer's Iliad is...