PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATIONS 2022, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 338–342 https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2022.2099564 COMMENT On the importance of breaks: transformative experiences and the process of narration Line Ryberg Ingerslev Institute of Philosophy, Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Wurzburg, Germany ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY In this comment, I argue that transformative experiences such as experiences of grief often imply a break in one’s coherent, nonfictional and biographical narratives and practical identities. The nature of these breaks is of a certain kind, as they interrupt even the process of narration. To insist that the process of narration as well as the narratives themselves belong to one and the same process of adjustment in transformative experiences such as grief might overlook the importance of such breaks, namely that the contain a moment of refusal and revolting against mourning. The tension involved in such breaks might not allow to be circumscribed into narratives nor do they fit into the process of narration as a destabilizing moment; the breaks insist on the incomprehensibility of each loss and they remain part of what it means to survive and to undergo transformative experiences. Received 24 May 2022 Accepted 8 June 2022 KEYWORDS Grief; practical identity; survival; silence; narratives During a walk with a friend and a young poet, Freud is struck by how the young poet is incapable of enjoying the beauty of the summerly landscape, as it shall all perish (Freud 1916). Reflecting upon the young poet’s experience of transience, Freud suggests that the experience consists in revolting against mourning. Mourning, as we know, is considered by Freud to be a healthy activity of working through a devastating loss (Freud 1917). In the end of our work of grief, an acceptance of the loss is gained, and the bereaved will thereby come to relearn the world (Attig 2011). The idea of a revolt against mourning is considered by Jonathan Lear (2018) as calling out the illusion of an afterlife. The experience of transience is tied to how we conceive of the afterlife in the following way: If we cannot think of meaningful forms of cultural preservation, it affects our engagement in this very life. The philosophical conception of an afterlife does not consist in a social or religious imaginary of what life is like for our deceased, rather it can be interpreted as a condition for mattering in the first place, namely mattering in this life of our shared ideas and shared values (Scheffler 2016). Lear’s claim is that the concept of an afterlife offers solace for the survivors of loss; when we mourn the death of others or when we face our own death, it involves the active belief in an afterlife that enables a trans-temporal continuing bond between the realms of the dead and the living. The confidence, as Lear writes, in the afterlife secures the continuing meaningfulness of our present interpersonal and cultural CONTACT Line Ryberg Ingerslev [email protected] © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATIONS 339 engagement. The possible perspective held by the poet entails a dreadful radicalisation of this conception of the afterlife, namely that it is an illusion (Lear 2018, 1205). Our normal understanding of mourning as a painful, but healthy, response to the death of others and the loss of what we care for is, in the eyes of Freud’s companion, a cover-up of the truth. A revolt against mourning is a revolt against not facing the truth, namely that ‘Death, for the poet, is a difficulty of reality: It is that before which the mind – through suffering, disorientation, fear and trembling, wounding, anxiety, and, perhaps, through laughter – recognizes its fundamental inability to comprehend.’ (Lear 2018, 1206). In the eyes of the poet, the hallmark of human health is truthfulness, as Lear writes (ibid), not recovery from grief and thus forgetting about suffering and having to lose what you love. We also find conceptualizations in the psychoanalytic literature of how ‘not knowing how to lose’ as Julia Kristeva describes (1989) can turn into a refusal to mourn. In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s interpretation (1994), a response to loss can be denying that it has taken place. The denial is practiced by way of incorporation of one’s loved object. By taking the loved object inwards and by erecting an intrapsychic tomb, the loved object is ‘burried alive’ and the loss is silenced. That is, when we take the deceased or otherwise lost object in, we can seemingly prevent the loss and we thereby silence the pain of losing a loved one: ‘Without the escape-route of somehow conveying our refusal to mourn, we are reduced to a radical denial of loss, to pretending that we had absolutely nothing to lose. There can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances. The words that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed – everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject.’ (Abraham and Torok, 130). Might we see in Freud’s companion, not only someone who revolts against the passing of time, but as someone who acts out in order to prevent it from passing? Is the melancholic root of transience an attempt to stop the flowing of time? If time were to pass, Freud’s companion would have to mourn this passing of time, to bid the present experience of beauty adieu, and to accept his loss. Is it the case, that when the poet revolts against mourning, he revolts against the very articulation of his loss, and instead he insist on the traumatic silence of not returning to the world? We might say that the revolt against mourning reveals one central aspect of the afterlife, namely that it is tied to articulation. Articulation of the loss would confirm the change of time; it would confirm the coming of a future. The above questions occur upon reflection on the role of narratives and the process of narration offered by the authors of ‘Grief, Self and Narration’ (Ratcliffe and Byrne 2022). In the paper, it is argued that narratives positively contribute to sustaining, restoring and revising a sense of who one is at times of existential disorientation such as in cases of losing a loved one. Narratives are conceived of as ‘stories that are told, to oneself or to others. Our emphasis here is on narratives with a principally non-fictional, biographical content’ (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 1–2) Ratcliffe and Byrne focus on the aspect of grief where the sense of who one is can suffer ‘a phenomenological disturbance that can be construed as a loss, diminution, or disruption’ (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 2). It is argued that narratives assist the bereaved in the process of grief where one’s feeling of belonging to the world has become indeterminate, and that dynamics of narration might facilitate the process of reorientation, finding a way to learn to live with one’s loss. Whereas narratives 340 L. R. INGERSLEV themselves provide affective scaffolding and coherence, the process of narration itself might be tied to experiences of disruption and destabilization (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 9– 11). Together, however, narratives and the process of narration are integral to a larger process of adjustment (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 13–4). With the young poet in mind, we might ask, whether these two aspects of adjustment, namely orientation and destabilization, are of the same root and whether are they tied in the same manner to transformative experiences such as grief. Might it be the case that within the transformative experience, we can attempt to cover up the truth and maybe even by a narrative strategy that diminishes the break we are experiencing? The break, that is, of coherent narratives and meaningful practical identities? Might it be the case that the incomprehensibility of a loss insists so forcefully to not be circumscribed by a new narrative and a new orientation and that we can in fact revolt against such processes? Might it be the case that revolting against mourning contains strategies of silencing a hope for narration? The losses we suffer do not always fit into the narrative structure and narrative strategies for adjustment and reorientation, as we find ourselves living with practical disruptions of meaning and the practical incomprehensibility of having survived our loved ones. ‘Is the trauma the encounter with death or the ongoing experience of having survived it?’, as Caruth asks (2016, 7). The oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life is what constitutes a double telling according to Caruth, that is, of two incompatible and absolutely inextricable components of the complexity of a history (ibid, 8). This complexity is addressed by Ratcliffe and Byrne as they consider the aspect of grief where one remains open towards being affected by one’s past. That is, letting the past be one that is still becoming past, we might say. According to the authors, this process contains ‘the possibility of endless revision and novelty’ of one’s past (Ratcliffe and Byrne 2022, 10). The role of discovering of one’s past, however, might not neatly fit into the ‘adjustment process’ of which the process of narration and narratives are an integral part (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 13–4). Rather, inherent to discovering anew the past as one’s own, is, as a constitutive element, the possibility of breaks in the process of narration. Such breaks show how grief might involve an opening to discover the past to be one we keep surviving whereby past that keeps becoming – our past (Ingerslev 2020a). The breaks of the process of narration are aspect of survival in the following way. Survival, we might say, involves a dreamlike engagement, as Lear puts it (Lear 2006), where what is practiced and what is thereby articulated or expressed in one’s doings is a practice of hope for a meaning that is not yet there, not yet fixed or open for narration (Ingerslev 2022, 2020b). That is, even if the process of narration is granted a destabilizing and disruptive force, it might be that it is of an entirely different root or order than that of narratives and narration. What it called the process of narration seems to be not only the struggling and creative aspect of language being disrupted, but a whole different dimension of life, namely that of surviving, that is of living with the uncertainty of not knowing how to lose, and thus of surviving with practical incomprehensibility. To revolt against mourning or even to refuse to mourn show how the breaks inherent to grief and to living with the practical incomprehensibility of survival are of a different order than the destabilizing process of narration. What Legrand calls inscription (2020), what Lear calls a dreamlike engagement (Lear 2017, 2006, 1998), and what Mattingly calls the paradox of hope (2010) describe ways of living with the practical PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATIONS 341 incomprehensibility of having survived a devastating loss. In these forms of survival, something else is at stake than a destabilization of our narratives in the process of narration. The process of narration is not in the foreground of such world-building responses to the loss of meaning, rather these responses themselves describe the ongoing struggle and practice of survival. These responses are constituted by breaks and cannot be integrated in the process of narration as they would be a cover-up of the truth. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This work was supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. Notes on contributor Line Ryberg Ingerslev is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of philosophy, Julius-MaximilianUniversity, Würzburg, Germany. Ingerslev’s work explores the intersection between phenomenology, psychoanalysis and the theory of action. She works on passivity, responsiveness, trauma, grief, habit, and on aspects of emotional distress, as exemplars of situations where control and ownership of action is diminsed. ORCID Line Ryberg Ingerslev http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-0619 References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel. Translated by Nicolas T. Rand. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Attig, Thomas. 2011. How We Grieve: Relearning the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 2016. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1916. “Vergänglichkeit.” In Studienausgabe, Bd. X, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, 224–288. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Freud, Sigmund. 1917. “Trauer und Melancholie.” In Studienausgabe, Bd. III, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and james Strachey, 197–212. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Ingerslev, Line. 2020a. “Inhibited Intentionality: On Possible Self-Understanding in Cases of Weak Agency.” Frontierts in Psychology. Special Issue: Integrating Philosophical and Scientific Approaches in Consciousness Research 11: 1–13. Ingerslev, Line. 2020b. “Grief.” In Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, edited by Thomas Szanto, and Hilge Landweehr, 403–415. London: Routledge. Ingerslev, Line. 2022. “Grief, Commitment, and the Sense of Community.” In Cultural, Existential and Phenomenological Dimensions of Grief Experience, edited by Allan Køster, and Ester Kofod, 40–53. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 1998. Open Minded. Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 342 L. R. INGERSLEV Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2017. Wisdom Won from Illenss. Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2018. “The Difficulty of Reality and a Revolt Against Mourning.” European Journal of Philosophy 26: 1197–1208. Legrand, Dorothée. 2020. “Testimony of Death: From Extermination Camps to Clinical Practice: A Discussion with Winnicott, Blanchot and Derrida.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 4 (2): 102–113. Mattingly, Cheryl. 2010. The Paradox of Hope. Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ratcliffe, Matthew, and Eleanor A. Byrne. 2022. “Grief, Self and Narrative.” Philosophical Explorations, 1–20. Scheffler, Samuel. 2016. Death and the Afterlife, edited by Niko Kolodny. New York: Oxford University Press. Copyright of Philosophical Explorations is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Puede agregar este documento a su colección de estudio (s)
Iniciar sesión Disponible sólo para usuarios autorizadosPuede agregar este documento a su lista guardada
Iniciar sesión Disponible sólo para usuarios autorizados(Para quejas, use otra forma )