Mourning Impossibility

Sean Gaston. The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida

That is what "literature" and the study of literature (which is so often working with the dead) does: as soon as I repeat a story or a narrative, as soon as I cite and recite, as soon as I encounter the elusive resistance of the idiom, the part becomes greater than the whole and the future of the past becomes ungovernable, unbridgeable, unfillable, inventive and the boundaries of the so-called "work of mourning" — the idealization and interiorization of the dead by the living — become untenable, unworkable and mourning becomes impossible, interminable, without rest.

Key for me here are the words "I" and "inventive". What happens in the after of the "as soon as"? I may have repeated but who listens? And then what?

Invention negates the unbridgeable. It creates a place to ford. Invention defeats monumentality. The obstacles are circumvented. This is the work of mourning that never ends. It is not a disaster. It is work. Simply work. Ongoing.

Encountering impossibility is not itself impossible. It bears repeating.

And so for day 1808
25.11.2011