The recent backlash over the ostensibly selective mourning and sympathy over the burning-down of the Notre Dame has instigated me to consider a particular question – do we have obligations and rights to grieve, to not grieve, to grieve universally and indiscriminately, or to grieve in a way that correlates with our nationalistic or personal sentiments? If “obligations/rights” isn’t the correct framework to use when approaching emotions, could there be a moderate alternative to both rights-based and virtue-based systems of analysis?
Grieving is an intriguing process, and grief a complex emotion. On one hand it embeds sorrow and pain, intertwined with a morsel of remorse; on the other hand it represents some kind of potential judgment – a form of evaluation, that suggests the recognition of the regrettability of particular loci of grief. Some argue that grief is a culture-variant and context-sensitive concept; others suggest that we should be wary of any attempt to define it universally. I suggest that we could perhaps work with, for now, the conception of grief as a family of resemblances, one that incorporates elements from all of the above mentioned textures and specific emotions. To pin grieving down to a single definition may render the following argument more ‘analytically rigorous’ or ‘tight’, but – as seen in the dangers of over-fetishising the ‘analytical way of doing things’ – erases the complexities and nuances immanent in the human experience.
I argue a more modest thesis in comparison to these questions – I want to start off the discussion on grief by considering, should we see grief as a political or private concept, to the extent that the private/public divide can withstand reasonable challenges (Okin, Young). There are two primary reasons in favour of conceptualising grieving a public, political process: i) that grieving is an apportioning of emotional labour and judgment-related resources, and ii) that grieving translates to political attitudes and actions that have public significance.
Firstly, grieving constitutes the division of emotional labour. There is emotional labour involved in grieving (pardon the potential concept creep here), in that we must recognise and revitalise our personal affinity with the event and person we grief for, reach within ourselves for the specific morose, negative sentiments that we deem appropriate as a reaction to the conjured image in our minds, and finally embrace the bundle of disbelief, shock, melancholy, and helplessness that comes with extreme grief. Grieving is hard – it drains your energy as it fills your mind with obsessive thoughts fixated upon both i) the past-ness(the irrevocability, the fact that it has been set-in-stone) and ii) the personal intimacyof the object of your grief. We seldom ‘grieve’ for future events that are yet to happen, because to grieve requires a feeling of realism – that ithas happened in the same world that youinhabit.
The allocation problem kicks in when we recognise that potential objects for grief are abundant across the world. I am reminded of Warsan Shire’s powerful line when I heard of the Sri Lanka attacks yesterday: “later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere”. From human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes (which I shall not name, but name by not naming) to climate change, from poverty and starvation to civil wars, there exist far too many prospective reasons for us to grief, far too many potential objects of grief for us to grieve comprehensively or judiciously.
When the Notre Dame burnt, France wept. Yet few wept for the silent deaths under war machines fuelled by neocolonialist narratives and imperialism.
Who ‘deserves’ such emotional labour? To what causes do we allocate such emotional labour? These are all political questions – because it is the cultural and narrative structures we prop up that drive the actions of both ourselves and others; more importantly, they are political in the same way that allocating scarce aid in times of crises, or assigning labels of blame or praise to individuals after a conflict is.
Here a cynic may be doubtful – perhaps we shouldn’t really be viewing grieving as an allocative problem, giving that no one truly ‘receives’ our grief. We do not, indeed, ‘transmit’ units of grief across individuals – to posit so would be to assume some quirky metaphysics. After all, grieving over one’s dying parent does not make them possess more ‘grief’; over a natural disaster does not render the victims any better off, on at least the surface level.
Yet this challenge misses the point. Trivially, many individuals for whom and over which we grieve often become aware of our grieving through the words and acts that embed our sentiments – whether it be the Facebook message that expresses consolation and remorse, or victims of public catastrophes drawing solace and comfort from the global constellation of Tweets and articles about the Notre Dame. The distributed currency is no grief, but is generally something proximately related to, or appropriately fitting of, grief. Yet more importantly, the politics of distribution exists even when the object of distribution is not received. When courts apportion blame (through their judgment) after civil wars towards the deceased and the fallen, these courts transform their what Foucault terms “juridico-sovereign” powers into the construction of discourses of guilt and blame that underpin public discussions and characterise the majoritarian psyche. There may be new objects that exist on the receiving end of the allocative problem – e.g. victims of aggressively blame-centric narratives, or beneficiaries from a guilt-ridden governmental mentality; yet merely because the old objects no longer are alive or present, does not imply that the apportioning of blame lacks political import or significance. Thus grief – with its demanding conscription of our emotional labour, and the entanglement of judgments embedded with the process of grieving – is indeed political.
An alternative reason to judge grieving as political, is that grieving has an inseparable connection with political attitudes and actions. This argument preemptively deals with the following challenge: that whilst actions and speech could be objects of judgment because of their inantely other-affecting and other-regarding nature (see Mill), attitudes and thoughts alone fall outside the political realm – they belong to the intimate space of the personal.
This dichotomisation may be partially true, yet neglects the important role that grieving has in affecting public politics. Our selective preferences for grieving tragedies closer to ‘home’ and ‘heart’ (Honig has an exceptional critique of how our understanding of ‘home’ is itself the product of political constructions of our state, culture, and human interactions) provide politicians with the justificatory capital and self-interested assumptions that advancing aid to nearby or proximate victims of tragedies is preferable to helping the distant other. Indeed, such preferences may well be what Unger and Singer wish to challenge repeatedly in their calls for cosmopolitan humanitarianism – the reason why their push appears so counterintuitive has much to do with our fundamentally nativist preferences rooted in our biological instincts. In short, our selective grieving both exacerbates and reinforces the compelling instinct that our friends, families, and countrymen are to be prioritised over the amorphous, unfamiliar ‘Other’.
More insidiously, perhaps, grieving skews our cognitive judgments and render us susceptible to emotive manipulation by both powerful, dominant political players and community figures. Americans’ reactions to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War at their later stages were largely comparable at their core – even if the two wars had distinctly different trajectories and outcomes (see Neta Crawford’s 2016 book for an excellent discussion of this). The outpouring of grief and public horror in the aftermath of 9/11 provided excellent momentum to the neoconservatives who were eager to send American soldiers to war, death, and their consigned fates as political pawns of a master game they never could have played. Grief over terrorist attacks transforms itself into anger, vengeance, and acrimonious mudslinging; it polarises discussions as parties employ events or persons seemingly victimised by the other side as the tone-setting foci of their discussions.
That is not to say grief is solely a negative or destructive public force in any way. Grief has incredible emancipatory potential – in uniting oppressed minorities over historical persecution and wrongdoings, in transforming their victimisation into motivation and rallying cries for a better tomorrow. Grief is cathartic, in encouraging the immediate release of built-up tensions and resentment – the 24-hour Rule of Don Shula comes to mind here. Finally, intense outbursts of grief enable otherwise powerless civilians to draw the public’s attentions to particular underrepresented causes, to force the hands of powerful brokers of power and compel them to respond. In short, grief is political through its political effects.
This argument may appear a tad erroneous at first glance – after all, isn’t it the case that all of our thoughts and beliefs have political and public implications? My belief that vaccines may be harmful (I don’t, actually) may feed into my support of the anti-Vaccine movement, hypothetically; my emotional consolation at the thought of ending wealth redistribution may translate into my partaking in libertarian tax reforms that call for abolition of taxes. Surely, if my claim is that downstream consequences shape how we ought to imagine upstream attitudes and emotions, then anything goes, and everything is political?
This reductio ad absurdum ignores several key, distinguishing features of grief that render grieving specifically and uniquely associated with the outcomes flagged above – this is not to say that emotions that satisfy these criteria could not also be considered political in nature; this is only to say that grief is amongst the many emotions that satisfy such conditions.
Grief is deeply intense– it stands in juxtaposition to simple beliefs or values, in its dominating projection and presence. W.H. Auden writes in Funeral Blues, “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song, I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” Grief is overwhelming, repetitive, and never truly subsides for an extended period of time, resting in the back burner of one’s mind.
Grief is also innately retrospective– unlike many other ‘negative’ attitudes, a core element of grief is that it invites us to engage in constant retrospection, to imagine the possibilities and possible worlds that could have been, in the absence of that one mistake or error we commit. Alternatively, it entraps us in reflections upon the past, in desperate attempts to recreate or restore what has irrevocably been lost. In contrast to emotions such as angeror joy, fear or surprise, grief is an emotion of the past – its antidote remains mercurially elusive in the limbo between the past and the present, never quite here, never quite there.
Furthermore, there are substantial ‘affective barriers’(cf. Srinavasan on affective injustice) that prevent us from effectively separating our grief from the subjective beliefs and values that we engender and bolster through grieving. We may feel sad, yet succeed in concealing our sadness through performing ‘happiness’; we may be able to restrain our anger despite its persistence. Yet just as extreme emotions like wrathor hysteria, grief is uncontainable – it transforms the individuals it possesses into expressive vehicles.
Finally, grieving embeds within it the adoption of particular values and ‘mental statements’. As we grieve, we set up and reinforce heuristics about what is worthgrieving over; in Lacanian terminology, we embrace the big Other that demarcates the boundaries of worthy andworthless grieving– in the process of doing so, we relate to the little others who live amongst the dynamically shifting communities of temporary grievers and momentary mourners. Grieving transcends the emotive, and embeds within it a degree of normativity that must be acknowledged.
So what gives? We have established that grieving is a public process, and grief a political emotion. There are reasonable grounds to situate grief in the political, no less to do with the creative tensions contained within grief’s interaction with our broader moral judgments and political intuitions. Yet could we really be said to possess duties to grieve in a particular manner? Do victims of tragedies have claims over how we feel in response to their deaths? These are questions that remain unanswered, but this piece should have hopefully at least opened our eyes to hitherto unchartered theoretical territory.