University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2015 The Promise of Mourning Samantha Rose Hill University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Political Theory Commons Recommended Citation Hill, Samantha Rose, "The Promise of Mourning" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 304. https://doi.org/10.7275/6461835.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/304 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PROMISE OF MOURNING A Dissertation Presented by SAMANTHA ROSE HILL Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2015 Department of Political Science © Copyright by Samantha Rose Hill 2015 All Rights Reserved THE PROMISE OF MOURNING A Dissertation Presented by SAMANTHA ROSE HILL Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________________ Nicholas Xenos, Chair _________________________________________ Angelica Bernal, Member _________________________________________ Jonathan Skolnik, Member _________________________________________ Thomas Dumm, Member _________________________________________ Brian F. Schaffner, Department Chair Department of Political Science For Isabel Rose ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to my dissertation chair Nicholas Xenos for his constant support, for telling me that I could not write a dissertation on Hannah Arendt, and for introducing me to Jean Jacques Rousseau and Walter Benjamin, who will always remain with me. I am very thankful to Thomas Dumm for his generous mentorship, guidance, and encouragement. I am thankful to Jonathan Skolnik for his extremely helpful feedback, professional advice, and for encouraging me to move to Germany. And, to Angelica Bernal for her thoughtful comments, and teaching a course on Hannah Arendt that inspired the first chapter of this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without funding and support from The Political Science Department, the Graduate Employee Union, and Amherst College. I am also very thankful to the Library of Congress archives in Washington, DC that gave me open access to Arendt’s papers. I want to offer my gratitude to two remarkable women, Lisa Pettinati and Klara Zwickl, for their unwavering friendship and moral support during this process. I especially want to thank Mark Letteney for teaching me how to write footnotes, for late night editing sessions, for giving me a sense of unmitigated support during the final phase of this process, for his patience, grace, and surprising gift of love. v ABSTRACT THE PROMISE OF MOURNING FEBRUARY 2015 SAMANTHA ROSE HILL, B.A., ALBION COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor NICHOLAS XENOS This dissertation project offers a critique of the ethical turn within contemporary political theory through the Frankfurt School tradition of critical thought. While many contemporary political theorists rely upon Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia in order to argue for forms of democratic political action, I examine the relationship between loss, mourning, melancholy, and temporality in the works of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Sheldon Wolin, and Theodor Adorno in order to think about the relationship between critical thinking and political action. Focusing on their different approaches to time, history, and loss in relationship to politics demonstrates how concepts like mourning and loss can be opened up in new and interesting ways. Chapter one focuses on the work of Hannah Arendt and offers an account of her writings and reflections on the emergence of totalitarianism and the relationship between thinking and action. In thinking about the future of political resistance, Arendt turns towards the works of Franz Kafka and the French poet René Char in order to conceptualize the spirit of resistance in what she terms the lost treasure of the revolution. Her reflections on resistance, time, and the loss of tradition in modernity turn us towards the breakdown between language and thought. vi Chapter two explores Benjamin’s conceptions of history and time through his discussion of Trauerspiel and sovereignty. Turning to Benjamin’s work in “Theses on The Philosophy of History”, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, and his reflections in Berlin Childhood Around 1900, I examine how he helps us to think about the relationship between our understanding of history, a critical temporality, and the politics of mourning. Chapter three explores Wolin’s conceptions of democracy, democratic time, and his move from vocation to invocation in order to think about the ethical turn in contemporary political theory. In “Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation” Wolin offers a critique of what he calls the “systematization of loss” that illustrates how theorists have conformed to rhythmic cycles of capitalist production and consumption. Wolin’s turn towards Adorno in his essay on invocation is a rejection of demands for democratic political action. Wolin’s understanding of invocation is akin to Adorno’s understanding of melancholia in Minima Moralia, which refuses what he calls a “vain hope” for redemption. In the Conclusion, I return to the problem of the ethical turn within contemporary political theory, exploring how this reading of loss and mourning in relation to politics affects the way contemporary political theorists think about questions of political action. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................. v ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... vi PREFACE ............................................................................................................................................. 2 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 8 CHAPTER I: Hannah Arendt: Loss and Totalitarianism .................................................................................. 21 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 21 I. The Loss of Tradition and Authority ............................................................................. 28 II. Understanding Loss: “We Refugees” & The Human Condition .................................. 34 III. In Between Past and Future: The Gap Space ............................................................ 47 IV. Critical Thinking and The Gap Space ................................................................................ 49 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 58 II: Walter Benjamin: History, Time, and Trauerspiel ...................................................................... 60 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 60 I. Melancholy ......................................................................................................................... 64 I.II. Reading Benjamin’s Melancholy ................................................................................. 68 II. The Mourning Play and the Melancholy Prince ......................................................... 74 II.I. The Courtier ................................................................................................................... 84 III. Honig, Interrupted ............................................................................................................ 88 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 97 III. Wolin and Adorno: The Promise of Mourning in Contemporary Political Theory ......... 98 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 98 I. Fugitive Democracy and Democracy in America ............................................................ 103 II. Invoking the Political Theorist .................................................................................... 106 II.I. Systematized loss ......................................................................................................... 113 III. The Lost Object, Mourning, and Melancholia ........................................................ 117 III.I Melancholy and the Vocative Loss of We .............................................................. 122 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 129 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................ 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................................................................