Freud’s Virtual Mourning
Freud’s Virtual Mourning and The Crow’s Flight Beyond Melancholy
Alan Bourassa
The most compelling Freud is not the academic caricature of the patriarch all too ready to excommunicate those who would challenge the dogma of psychoanalysis. The Freud that emerges from a careful consideration of the metapsychology in particular is a man who is only too happy to predict the downfall of his own theories, to call upon future psychologists to modify his work, and to abandon carefully constructed theories when they no longer serve as indices to the truth of the unconscious. It should not be surprising that Freud’s willingness to follow wherever his inquiries might lead is precisely what is often used against him (of course, as Jonathan Lear has aptly pointed out, Freud is criticized about equally for being an unchanging dogmatist as he is for cravenly betraying some ideas for others (19-21)). The development of the seduction theory into a theory of fantasy, the move from biological to cultural concerns, the more and more complex notions of virtual memory in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism: each has served as point of controversy, even outright rejection, for Freudian theory. But perhaps the most emotionally powerful of these shifts is in Freud’s theory of mourning from his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” in 1917 to The Ego and the Id in 1923. The understanding of mourning and of mournful life that comes in 1923 is – so one plausible story goes – a result of the theory’s encounter with the psychological wreckage wrought on German soldiers by the trench warfare of the First World War, and the irremediable emotional damage inflicted on Freud himself by his daughter Sophie’s death in 1920.
I do not want to confine the significance of Freud’s theory of mourning to his personal experience of mourning, or indeed to anyone’s personal experience, but rather to emphasize the radical shift in the theory of the ego that Freud not only makes, but makes possible. I will venture two intertwined claims. First, that the development of Freud’s theory of mourning introduced a kind of virtual gap in the notion of the ego, a gap which prefigured the Lacanian theory of the subject. Freud, in other words, had no theory of subjectivity in the Lacanian sense, but without the virtualization of the ego in the theory of mourning, there could be no theory of the subject. My second claim is that we have actually been provided, in an unlikely place admittedly, with an artistic image of what this virtualized mourning would look like.
The clearest connection between Freud’s early theory of mourning and Alex Proyas’s adaptation of the James O’Barr graphic novel The Crow, is that the theory and the film are both built on the theme of violence1, indeed, both are based on the theme of vengeful violence, the violence that comes about when a wound has been inflicted, an irreparable harm set so deeply into the soul that to dislodge it is to dislodge death itself.
But they are also both based on the idea of love, and the imperative to love what has been lost. And between violence and loss, grieving and revenge, there is an intimate bond. Violence lodges the lost object deep into the ego at the same time as it dislodges the ego itself.
The plot of The Crow is particularly satisfying as an adolescent revenge fantasy because it so faithfully follows the logic of payback. On Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, a young woman, Shelley, is raped and killed by a band of criminals tied to the city’s leading crime syndicate. Her boyfriend, Eric Draven, is killed when he tries to protect her. The young couple have been acting as de facto parents of a twelve year old girl, Sarah, who must now grieve their loss. A year from the date of the murder, Eric Draven rises from the grave, brought back to the world of the living by a mystical crow to, as Sarah says, “put the wrong things right.” As Eric Draven’s revenge begins to unfold, striking down each of the risibly named villains – Tin-Tin, Fun-Boy, T-Bird, Skank – a city police officer, Albrecht, who was present at the crime scene and who later watched Shelley die in the intensive care ward, begins to suspect that Eric has returned. His suspicions are confirmed when Eric confronts him in his own apartment. By touching Albrecht (the power to absorb memory images through touch is one that Eric reveals very quickly) he internalizes not only Albrecht’s memory of Shelley’s last hours, but the memory of Shelley’s own pain. Eric must finally confront the leader of the crime syndicate – a murderous arrested adolescent who is most distinguished by his incestuous love affair with his sister – and defeats him with the very memories he has received from Albrecht. He can return to his proper rest (and to an overdue post-mortem reunion with Shelley), and Sarah is left with her memories, her loss transformed by the ability to love.
As we lay out the stages and division of Freud’s theory of mourning (in both its earlier and later incarnations) we are immediately struck by two things. First, that each character in The Crow corresponds to some aspect of the mourning process, and second, that no one character embodies the whole process. Rather, grief has become non-personal, spread throughout the social field where it is no longer limited to the horizon of one person’s emotional experience. Although there is nothing quite as dull as seeing an object that correspond perfectly with a theory, it is, in this case, this very perfection that becomes interesting when we remove the one basic condition of consistency: that mourning be the experience of a person. In other words, what if Freud’s theory does not narrowly describe the experience of a person? To begin with let us see the linkages.
The theory of mourning requires that certain subjects, objects, actions and affects come together. There must, of course, be the one who suffers loss (the mourner), and the thing or person that is lost (the lost object). The loss can come in the form of death, distance or betrayal, although Freud cannot escape the conclusion that melancholia is more often characterized by betrayal than by simple loss. There must then be an act that begins the process of mourning, the detachment of the libidinal bond to the lost object. The cathexis must be broken and reformed onto a new object. In layman’s terms, love is made available by the loss of the object, and that love must eventually find a new object. In what is surely one of Freud’s most naively optimistic moments, he speculates that this detachment is achieved through a process of reality testing, whereby the lost object is fully acknowledged as lost, and libido is shifted onto new objects of affection. It is revealing that, even at the early stages of the theory represented by “Mourning and Melancholia”, we find ourselves hurried through the explanation of the mourning process, only to find ourselves where we might suspect Freud has been taking us all along. Freud’s true fascination in “Mourning and Melancholia” is how the process of mourning goes wrong. It is in the very distortion of mourning into melancholy that the theory of mourning starts on its way to virtualization.
Melancholy is characterized by internalization. The mourner does not let the object go, but rather internalizes it. In effect, by regressing to a stage of oral fixation, the mourner has swallowed the object whole, and set it up inside their own ego. It is at this point that the process of melancholia becomes inflected with violence (indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that melancholia is nothing but this violence). The loved object, because it was (as all loved objects) also the target of anger and resentment in life, and because it has left the mourner bereaved and often betrayed, becomes a kind of dangerous parasite in the ego, dangerous because it is at the same time the target of violence and inseparably identified with the ego. The ego risks, in effect, getting caught in the crossfire. The violence aimed at the introjected object cannot but wound the ego, sometimes, as Freud is careful to emphasize, fatally. However, even in the early theory of mourning there are at least two points of difficulty. The first is that, in melancholia, what is lost is by no means straightforward. Freud emphasizes that it is not so much the object as something in the object that is lost, something not localizable or even nameable.
…the patient too cannot consciously perceive what he has lost. This indeed might be so even when the patient was aware of the loss giving rise to the melancholia, that is, when he knows whom he has lost but not what it is he has lost in them. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of love-object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss. (“Mourning” 145)
The second related difficulty is that the object-cathexis in melancholia seems strangely easy to break at the same time as it refuses to be transcended: “On the one hand, a strong fixation to the love-object must have been present; on the other hand, in contradiction to this, the object-cathexis can have had little power of resistance” (150). In melancholia the free libido unchained in the breaking of the unresistant object-cathexis is what is withdrawn into the ego. So it is not so much the object as what Freud names “the shadow of the object” that falls across the ego.
What links both of these problems in “Mourning and Melancholia” is Freud’s uncertainty both as to what exactly is lost in melancholia and exactly what is introjected. The object is not lost, but something in the object; not the lost object, but its shadow falls across the ego. As, later in Freud’s career, the theory of mourning begins to merge with the theory of melancholia, this unnameability of loss becomes crucial for a theory of virtual mourning.
In The Ego and the Id, as well as in his correspondence with Ludwig Binswanger, Freud offers another possibility for the relationship between the ego and the lost object.
Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. (qtd in Clewell 61-62)
The ego becomes itself a kind of memorial, contoured by loss, but deriving its consistency precisely from what it has been forced to abandon. In other words, the ego is not infected by the introjected object, the object that becomes deadly precisely because it will not go away. The ego becomes rather a site of loss, a space traversed by multiple vectors of objects that derive their power precisely from the fact that they have gone away. And it is in this act of abandonment that the ego becomes something other. No longer simple a mechanism that has been sabotaged by the lost object, the ego becomes paradoxically what inscribes the loss and the very loss itself. “Working through depends on taking the lost other into the structure of one’s identity, a form of preserving the lost object in and as the self” (my emphasis) (Clewell 61).
If there is a central paradox in the later theory of mourning, it is precisely this problematic status of the ego. Of course, one of the key shifts from Freud to Lacan is in the status of the ego. Where, for Freud, it is a functioning mechanism carrying out several metabolizing functions with the help of charges of cathexis, for Lacan it is only the precipitate of misrecognition (meconnaisance), a kind of structuring illusion whose power depends solely upon its ability to pass itself off as a working faculty and its productions as images of truth. In Freud’s later theory of mourning, we see a movement away from the ego as this kind of unproblematic organ of the psyche, carrying out its proper tasks. It is the ontological splitting of the ego that opens up the possibility for a change in how it is conceptualized. On one hand it is the ontic surface that takes the mark of the object or – if one prefers a three-dimensional metaphor – it is the field into which the lost object sets itself as the central landmark. On the other hand it is ontologically problematic, that which only is by not being. The ego becomes what is left behind, the shaped void that is opened up by departure.
The Crow follows Freud’s logic of mourning in two ways. It enacts in its characterization the stages and components of mourning and melancholia, but it is also based on a problematic component, a detail that, like the ontically present and ontologically withdrawn ego, both stands out from the structure and deforms the structure around itself with the strength of its problematic attraction. The parallels between the elements of the theory of mourning and the character-elements of The Crow are – initially – reasonably clear.
Shelley is the lost object, that which must be mourned. In fact she only appears in the film through flashbacks of her attack, of her tender moments with Eric, and finally as a lovingly propitiated ghost welcoming Eric back to her arms. Sarah is unmistakably the mourner. She is not only the voice that explains the power of the crow to bring the dead back to earth, but the one who explicitly links the power of mourning with the power of loving beyond loss. She is also the most abandoned character, too young for the street life she is forced to live, still a child despite her assumed harshness. It is Sarah who must watch the doomed Shelley taken away from her and Sarah who is the proper recipient of Shelley and Eric’s engagement ring at the end of the film. It is also Sarah in whom anger and bereavement intertwine, and she who learns the love beyond melancholy. Sergeant Albrecht serves a function in the film that is both necessary for its denoument and parallels the theory of mourning perfectly. It is Albrecht in whom the loss is introjected. He carries with him the memories of Shelley’s death. While Eric cannot remember the details of the attack (he must ask Albrecht what happened the night of his death) Albrecht has internalized the memory until it is ready to pass to Eric. This leaves us with the villains: Tin-Tin, Fun-Boy, T-Bird and Skank. It is enough for the moment to note that they are – like the introjected lost object – the targets of violence and revenge and also oddly in a state of regression, like large and hyper-violent children. The ultimate target of revenge is, of course, the leader of what Eric calls the “whole jolly club, full of jolly pirate nicknames”, Top Dollar. It is he who is the embodiment of the evolutionary outcome of melancholia, the setting up inside of the ego of the punishing superego, the sovereign figure of both the transgression of the law (he is not bound by the incest taboo) and the law itself (he is the lawgiver of the underworld, the one who seeks the purity of the perfect crime in the flames of Devil’s Night). He is a figure of the ambiguity of the superego and of the law: punishing, lawgiving, prepared to inflict violence in the name of obedience, but also above the very law he represents, obscene, reveling in a jouissance inaccessible to those bound by the law.
So far we have ignored the most important character of all: the undead avenger Eric Draven. Eric is the rogue element both narratively (his appearance on the narrative scene introduces the imbalance that sets the story into motion) and theoretically (he is the one character who is not bound by an intellectual category). Eric Draven’s singularity lies in the fact that he fuses the two figures that cannot be fused. He stands in the impossible position of being both the lost object (he has died, he is missed and mourned by Sarah) and the mourner who must incorporate the loss of his great love object, Shelley. What, then, is the importance of the lost object that mourns? How can a figure both grieve and be grieved? What kind of character has both the presence of the thing that is left behind by the flight of the loved object, and the absence of what has flown? It will become clearer how Eric’s ambiguous status as subject/object of The Crow is virtually indistinguishable from the ambiguous status of the ego in Freud’s later theory of mourning. It will also become clearer how it is the injection of virtuality into the closed interior of the ego (an interior that is hollowed out by the introjection of the lost object) opens it out into a space of subjectivity.
The key protest to this line of argument is both predictable and absolutely necessary to make: that for the theory of melancholia interiority (or introjection) is not optional. To lay out the stages and topographical divisions of the process into a flat space is to, in effect, betray the theory. It is obviously crucial to the early theory that it must be the same mourner who suffers the loss, introjects the lost object, and inflicts violence on it (and thereby on themselves). It must also be, in the later theory, a single individual ego that contours itself around loss. Indeed interiority and individuality are crucial for a theory which unproblematically assumes that the process of mourning is simply personal and bound by the personal. To be bound by the personal is to assume that mourning is but a subset of personal experience, one thing among many that the individual experiences, one more product of the state of personhood. It is, however, this very assumption that Freud challenges in the shift from the early to the late theory of mourning. The ego that is the precipitate of lost objects can no longer be the ego that holds the lost object in a bounded space (whether to torture it or to be tortured by it). Precisely by taking the forces and relationships out of the space of the personal and placing them in a different space, we can begin to see the various aspects of mourning as embryonic elements of a virtualized mourning. We get a clearer picture of the kind of insistently transformative forces being held in place by a personalized theory of mourning.
But before we proceed another step with this theory of virtual mourning, we must stop for a few moments to examine the nature of this virtuality. If the virtual is what opens out the closed space of “Mourning and Melancholia”, allowing the theory of mourning to unfold into a new theory of ego formation and eventually, I argue, to the theory of subjectivity, we must account for this uncanny power of the virtual: tearing open the closed space, detaching the personal from the elements that make its emergence possible, creating unexpected conjunctions of events, affects, actions, bodies, spaces. The virtual cannot but appear haunting, uncanny. What better concept to bring to Freud, that master of disappearance and reemergence, ghostly departures and demonic returns?
It is perhaps appropriate that the concept of the virtual does not lend itself easily to exemplification, at least in the sense that its definition does not empty itself completely in any one example. On the other hand, the idea of the virtual seems to attract exemplifications. In fact, one of the most useful examples is precisely that of the strange attractor:
Let us take an attractor in mathematics: all positive lines or points in its sphere of attraction only approach it in an endless fashion, never reaching its form – the existence of this form is purely virtual, being nothing more than a shape toward which lines and points tend. However, precisely as such, the Virtual is the Real of this field: the immovable focal point around which all elements circulate. (Zizek 3-4)
This example comes from Zizek’s celebration/refutation of Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies, and it is Deleuze, of course, from whose concept of the virtual other descriptions spring. Alain Badiou does not exaggerate when he claims that, for Deleuze, Virtual is the name for Being (42). There are four principles of the virtual that Deleuze especially insists upon: it is to be distinguished from the possible, it is fully real in itself, its unfoldings are of the nature of the solution of a problem, and it proceeds by a process of divergence and difference.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze is careful to distinguish the virtual from the possible: “The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a ‘realization’. By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself . The process it undergoes is that of actualization” (211).
The full reality of the virtual is, emphatically, not a guarantee of fullness. The virtual, far from being a kind of flawless continuum, is characterized in its reality by the very gap that it opens in its inhabitation of Being.
The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension…The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points that correspond to them…When it is claimed that works of art are immersed in a virtuality, what is being invoked is not some confused determination but the completely determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements, it’s “virtual” or “embryonic” elements. (208-209)
…Being (what Plato calls the Idea) “corresponds” to the essence of the problem or the question as such. It is as though there were an “opening”, a “gap”, an ontological “fold” which relates being and question to one another. In this relation, being is difference itself. Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather, it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. (64)
The actualization of virtual, as Deleuze, argues, “Always takes place by difference, divergence, or differenciation. Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle” (212).
There is a new measure of freedom (freedom from the imperative that the realization of a potential must resemble the potential of which it is a realization) introduced in the notion that the virtual does not resemble its actualizations, any more than a solution resembles a problem. The dispersion of the virtual produces change, or we might say, just to offer the proper regard to the variety of relationships that virtual change offers, the virtual forces change, attracts change, invites change, catalyzes change, stages change. It is, to borrow a Deleuzian term, a quasi-cause.
The virtual operates as an immanent causality. It is not transcendent and cannot be abstracted from its actualizations. But for this reason, its actualizations can only take the form of a production of diversity or dispersion that is irreducible to the virtual itself, so that the virtual always remains heterogeneous. (Widder 125)
If it is true that there is a virtual image of the mourning process offered in The Crow, it must then also be true that this virtual image would have the qualities of the virtual that Deleuze and others insist upon. It must be a real (in fact, perhaps, as Zizek suggests, the most real) element of a situation; its reality must be characterized by the gap which it opens up; it can be characterized as a solution to a problem; it must unfold itself by following the vector that runs through the way stations of change.
It is Eric Draven, as we have seen, who occupies the place of the gap in the process of mourning and in the narrative of The Crow. His excessive reality over the situation in which he is inserted is spoken directly by a terrified T-Bird as he is being taped inside his car, knowing that his death is moments away: “I know you. I knew I knew you. I knew I knew you. But you ain’t you. You can’t be you. We put you through the window. There ain’t no comin’ back. This is the really real world. There ain’t no comin’ back. We killed you dead. There ain’t no comin’ back.” The “really real” world that T-Bird inhabits has no room for a greater reality except as a demonic and terrifying invader, much as the real world in Lacan (the world, in short, of the symbolically structured “socially constructed” reality) can only experience the Real as an uncanny intruder.
Perhaps the greatest sign of the superior reality of the virtual is that it will not be simply contained by the situation in which it finds itself (in which it must find itself); it is itself not a discernable element of that situation, but it brings about a restructuring of the elements of the situation. To say, as Deleuze does, that the virtual is actualized (not realized, since it is perfectly real in itself) yet not exhausted in its actualization (as potential is exhausted in its realization) is to say simply this: that the virtual brings about actualizations that fold themselves, and unfold themselves, around its greater reality. Eric Draven no longer belongs to the world of the living, but that world unfolds itself around him. Mother and daughter are brought together, bodies are purified or destroyed, the evil disappear, the good are rewarded with hope, memory that has lain fallow blossoms and is shared, guilt is assuaged, the dead are not only laid to rest, but allowed to have their proper place of love in the world of the living. Eric must return. The problem draws Eric back to the world, the insistence of the unresolved crime, the continuation in life of the unpunished guilty. The problem ties Eric to the world, just as the structure of the problematic ties the virtual to its divergence actualizations. The virtual must be in its world. It is not a transcendent entity that directs the world from a safe distance, but that which, within a situation, brings the situation about, intensifying it until it breaches the limits that have contained it, and yet not exhausting itself even in the intensity of this engagement.
It is for this reason that The Crow cannot be properly thought of as a sacrificial drama. The protagonist has already been sacrificed. What could be exhausted has already been exhausted, and what returns is the inexhaustible, that which does not rest or flag, and that which does not expend energy as much as expand it.
The gap that Eric Draven opens up by his occupation of the world is almost perfectly described in Freud’s own words to Binswanger above: “No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.” This “something else” names the transformative otherness of the virtual. Freud describes a gap that even when filled does not disappear. The gap remains in all of its subsistent virtual force despite what fills it at some other level than the virtual (the ontic, the experiential, the financial, the personal, the historical, the moral). Freud has, in fact, provided a very clear description of the virtual: it is a gap opened up in the ontic (call it a world, a situation, a place, an historical moment) that cannot but be filled up but that never suspends its imperative to the world: come to me. It resonates through and around what fills it. It always draws with the same energy no matter how much it has already drawn. We shall continue mourning the lost object, no matter how much love comes to fill up the breach in the heart, and this breach is what, as Freud tersely observes, “makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of these object-choices” (Ego and the Id 19).
Eric Draven is, in a sense, nothing but this gap. He returns to the world as a break in the consistency of that world. He occupies neither the position of mourner nor of lost object; nor can he be said to occupy both at the same time, since in order to occupy one position one must have vacated the world, and to occupy the other one must have remained behind. It is more accurate to say that Eric Draven occupies the split between these two positions. He is the line that separates the mourner from the mourned. However we may hope to define Eric Draven – belonging to the world or exiled from it, a figure of deadly vengeance or a figure of the most otherwordly love, a purveyor of justice or a force of extra-judicial vigilante violence – we must always locate him in the gap between binaries. And the more we understand the nature of this gap, the more it becomes clear how the evolution of the theory of mourning moves beyond the theory of the ego-as-agency. The gap of the virtual is an empty space, contentless. But it is that which insists in the symbolic field. It shapes the forces that intersect with it. As Zizek argues after Lacan, this virtual space “emerges in the interstice of the ‘minimal difference,’ in the minimal gap between two signifiers. In this sense, the subject is ‘a nothingness, a void, which exists’” (Organs 68).
It is, of course, the Lacanian subject that Zizek is describing here, and although much of his Organs Without Bodies is a harsh critique of the limits of Deleuzianism, it would not be possible, without Deleuze, for Zizek to argue that “Far from belonging to the level of actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the dimension of the ‘subject’ designates the reemergence of the virtual within the order of actuality. ‘Subject’ names the unique space of the explosion of virtuality within constituted reality” (68). Eric Draven, in all of his ambivalence, in his impossible position at the center of a world he is capable of shaping but incapable of occupying, is the artistic embodiment of the Subject: compelling, impossible, homeless. His emptiness is his very power, his spaciousness, in a world collapsing in on itself with grief.
The yield for this meeting of Deleuze and Lacan – the intersection of mourning, ego, virtuality and subjectivity – is significant. We can find in the evolution of the theory of mourning the embryonic elements of the Lacanian subject; we can see in the gap of subjectivity the explosive force of the virtual, the opening of a beyond mourning in the insistent self-differing of the virtual; and we encounter the ethical force of the virtual that breaks the deadlock of melancholia, the element that makes it possible to understand how the ego can move from self-torturing guilt to a guilt that functions as an opening to the future. It is only, in short, by seeing mourning as virtual that we can make sense of the ego that gives up self-lacerating violence for memorialization.
And it is this embodied split of the virtual subject that best explains the meaning of Eric’s return. The manner of Eric and Shelley’s death ensures that all that will be left behind is a world of melancholia, of continuing reproach and self-inflicted violence, a guilt at the inability to protect the loved object, a guilt that has detached from the personal and occupies the whole social field. Eric’s return ensures that the world he leaves the second time is a world that can mourn, a world that can contour itself around his departure. It is a world, in short, where the dead have found their proper place in the inexhaustible gap.
Notes
1 The Alex Proyas film is such a departure from James O’Barr’s graphic novel The Crow that a comparison between the two would be a far more involved project than I am undertaking here. Nevertheless, it is useful to point out how deeply commited to an unremitting melancholia O’Barr’s work is. The Introduction (by John Bergin) and the Afterword (by A.A. Attanasio) that frame the story express most succinctly the philosophy of melancholia and the belief that amounts to a faith that there is no beyond of melancholia, that melancholic suffering is the final word. From Bergin: “The Crow comes from some lonely void far beyond pain, sorrow, and words. This book you are holding was a place for James to put all the rage and anger he felt at having someone he loved torn away…and it is an attempt to find order and justice where there is none…for some things there is no forgiveness…absolutely none…That hard fact is impossible to learn to live with” (Bergin). Both Bergin and Attanasio write as if drawn irresistibly by the gravity of fury and guilt, drawn to the very destruction that melancholy threatens. Attanasio: “In our ignorance and tameless greed we have raped and killed the only woman The Crow ever loved. Now his scar-split mask fills the world. And each of us is one of his casualties” (Attanasio). O’Barr’s accomplishment in his graphic novel is to follow the logic of melancholy to where it leads – the suicidal gesture that is indistinguishable from the gesture of love – and to accept the obscene enjoyment offered by an unrelenting faith in the unforgiveable.
2 The question of the virtual, or, following Badiou, the “clamour of the virtual”, has been growing louder of late. The status of the virtual, its relationship to the possible (and to Aristoltelian potentiality), and its elision with the question of Being, comes up more and more not only in recent theoretical work dedicated directly to the question of the virtual, but in explorations of the corpus of Deleuze’s early work and of the later work of Lacan. Badiou’s ambivalent undercutting of Deleuze Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, Eric Santner’s essay “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire”, Zizek’s Organ’s Without Bodies and The Parallax View, Derrida’s Archive Fever: each finds the workings of the virtual – the embryonic insistent, strange attractor around which forces wrap themselves – in the complexities of perception and sensation, in the questions of ontology, in the paradoxical origins of law, and in the problematic inscriptions of memory.
3 Tammy Clewell in her essay “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss” comes to the engaging conclusion that Freud’s later theory of mourning has effectively done away with the need for melancholic violence by disengaging the notion of ambivalence from oedipal rivalry. Although she invokes the Lacanian mirror stage (rather than Lacan’s later theories of the Real, that are much more conducive to an engagement with the question of the virtual) as a source of subjectivity, she nonetheless gestures toward the link between mourning and subject (as opposed to ego) formation: “Like the kind of alienation at the heart of subjectivity described by Lacan in the mirror stage, ambivalence in Freud’s work thus names a uniquely human predicament: the predicament of being inhabited by otherness as a condition of one’s subjectivity” (65). This alienation is a precursor to the destitution of the empty subject, and not so bad for all that.
Works Cited
Attanasio, A.A. “Afterword.” The Crow. New York: Pocket, 1995.
Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Bergin, John. “Introduction.” The Crow. New York: Pocket, 1995.
Clewell, Tammy. “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52.1 (2004): 43-67.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans Joan Riviere. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth.1974.
—. “Mourning and Melancholia.” A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. John Rickman. London: Hogarth, 1953. 142-61.
Lear, Jonathan. Openminded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA:
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O’Barr, James. The Crow. New York: Pocket, 1995.
Widder, Nathan. “What’s Lacking in the Lack: A Comment on The Virtual.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.2 (2000): 117-138.
Zizek, Slavoj Organs Without Bodies. New York: Routlege, 2004.
—. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.