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Consider Walter Benjamin's angel of history, propelled helplessly and blindly towards an unknown future, his anguished gaze fixed on the ruins of the past. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, David Eng and David Kazanjian suggest that our gazes share the angel's shocked fixity. How can we move beyond the twentieth century's "losses of bodies, spaces and ideals" (5) without such movement replicating the angel's helpless immobilization in the face of catastrophe? The eighteen essays in Loss attempt to relieve this fixity, to reimagine the wreckage in catastrophe's wake, and to reclaim loss as a productive, creative force. Engaging with loss, write Eng and Kazanjian, "generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future" (4).
For the purpose of this anthology, "loss" is very broadly conceived as "a placeholder of sorts" that includes "both individual and collective encounters with twentieth-century historical traumas and legacies of, among others, revolution, war, genocide, slavery, decolonization, exile, migration, reunification, globalization, and AIDS" (2), as well as the psychic and social mechanisms through which these catastrophes are engaged. The attraction of the volume is Eng and Kazanjian's model of loss as an active, creative, productive force, rather than an inevitable, solipsistic, helpless attachment to an irrecoverable absence, and their objective of formulating a "politics of mourning," which they define as "that creative process mediating a hopeful or hopeless relationship between loss and history" (2). The question is whether these objectives can be sustained by the theoretical paradigms that inform them. Eng and Kazanjian articulate these politics of mourning as the work of melancholia, by conjoining Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia" with Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Melancholia's "adamant refusal of closure" (3), they argue, animates the work of Benjamin's historical materialist, figuring the past as an object of melancholic longing which, unlike the object of mourning, will not assume a kind of fixity that enables its disattachment from the ego. Freed from its association with pathology, melancholia becomes a mechanism for maintaining a productive engagement with the past that weds the personal with the cultural. "As both a formal relation and a structure of feeling, a mechanism of disavowal and a constellation of affect, melancholia offers a...