What could it mean to mourn for the "loss of loss itself"? This peculiar and challenging idea, briefly mentioned in Judith Butler's afterword to the book Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2015), is the starting point of my doctoral research, which encompasses Afro-diasporic literature and media, psychoanalytically informed theories of the subject, queer theory, and postcolonial genealogies. My interest in such mourning is historiographical as well as individual; that is to say, that I am just as interested in the conditions that have produced such unidentifiable losses as I am in the individual or collective processes that attempt to mourn for them.

In this talk, I will introduce my research question by elaborating upon what I consider to be the "102 year history" of the Mourning/Melancholy binary in the (Anglophone) 20th century. I will begin with Freud's seminal essay Trauer und Melancholie from 1917 and end up with Stephen Best's account of "impossible mourning" given in his 2019 publication None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. On the way, we will encounter two other versions of Freud, his most interesting and novel interpreters in Török and Abraham, and Derrida's revisions and expansions upon the same in various essays, books, and eulogies. Following this, I will discuss the dissemination of this Freudian-Derridean paradigm in the cultural, racial, and gender theory of 1990-2000s America, before coming to rest at this arbitrary – but nonetheless fruitful – marker of 2019. My interest, as ever in this project, is to attempt to arrive within the present moment, or what David Scott has called the "postcolonial contemporary": the historical condition within which this peculiar and challenging thesis of mourning for the "loss of loss itself" even becomes thinkable, let alone achievable. Once (or if) that is achieved, I will happily provide a gloss of the intellectual arc of my dissertation.