redirecting rage against the lost other, defiling the sanctity of the dead for the purposes of life, raging against the dead in order not to join them.
Survival is a matter of avowing the trace of loss that inaugurates one’s own emergence.
To make of melancholia a simple “refusal” to grieve its losses conjures a subject who might already be something without its losses, that is, one who voluntarily extends and retracts his or her will.
Yet the subject who might grieve is implicated in a loss of autonomy that is mandated by linguistic and social life; it can never produce itself autonomously.
From the start, this ego is other than itself; what melancholia shows is that only by absorbing the other as oneself does one become something at all.
The social terms which make survival possible, which interpellate social existence, never reflect the autonomy of the one who comes to recognize him- or herself in them and, thus, stands a chance “to be” within language.
Indeed, by forfeiting that notion of autonomy survival becomes possible; the”ego” is released from its melancholic foreclosure of the social. 🙂 How is this?
The ego comes into being on the condition of the “trace” of the other, who is, at that moment of emergence, already at a distance. To accept the autonomy of the ego is to forget that trace; and to accept that trace is to embark upon a process of mourning that can never be complete, for no final severance could take place without dissolving the ego. 196
Regulatory power becomes “internal” only through the melancholic production of the figure of internal space, one that follows from the withdrawing of resources — a withdrawal and turning of language, as well. By withdrawing its own presence, power becomes an object lost — “a loss of a more ideal kind.” Eligible for melancholic incorporation, power no longer acts unilaterally on its subject.
Rather the subject is produced, paradoxically, through this withdrawal of power, its dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as a speaking topos. Social power vanishes, becoming the object lost, or social power makes vanish, effecting a mandatory set of losses. Thus, it effects a melancholia that reproduces power as the psychic voice of judgment addressed to (turned upon) oneself, thus modeling reflexivity on subjection. 198