{"id":27559,"date":"2026-07-10T03:35:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T01:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=27559"},"modified":"2026-07-10T07:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T05:50:12","slug":"acknowledging-what-exactly-has-been-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/?p=27559","title":{"rendered":"Acknowledging what exactly has been lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Isabella Hammad, Equator<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nas Freud himself argued in Mourning and Melancholia, proper mourning requires a person to acknowledge what exactly they have lost. If a loss is not brought into the full light of consciousness, grief curdles into melancholia. Stopping to perceive the traces of what is there no longer, then, precisely enacts the psychic movement of looking, acknowledging, and then, eventually, separating.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

Crucially, mourning requires a person \u2013 whether as a child or as an adult \u2013 to recognise that they are not omnipotent, that they are capable of being bad and of having destructive thoughts. In other words, mourning involves not only coming to terms with your lost or departed loved object (or beloved), but also with your own vulnerability and finitude.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

Witnessing, or looking and weeping, did not stop the atrocities, and the proliferation of images may even have conditioned people to normalise them, as they look at another mangled corpse covered in dust on a phone screen and then inevitably continue with their day. There have been other genocides in the history of our species; what has made this different seems to be the flagrancy with which it has been conducted, recorded and abetted.<\/p>\n

How plainly we see the future, continuous with our past: casual, industrial-scale warfare perpetrated with a lucid sadism, powers that care neither for the Earth nor for other human beings, a world increasingly in ruins, dominated by a technocratic elite that considers entire populations disposable, and has the power to dispose of them.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

The memorialising of the Nazi Holocaust in museums and other forms of pedagogy in the West seems designed to facilitate, in Naomi Klein\u2019s words, not \u201cre-membering<\/span>\u201d but rather re-traumatisation. \u201cLooking back,\u201d she writes in\u00a0Doppelganger<\/em>, \u201cI am struck by what wasn\u2019t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms.\u201d This is not mourning: this is a wound kept purposefully open to preclude reflection and justify genocidal violence through the logic and rhetoric of an ontological victimhood.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

The US built many army bases around the world, but the exercise of American imperialism did not require the same kind of colonial architecture as the old European empires. US military interference was most often conducted covertly or by proxy, through the funding of militant opposition groups, assassinations and the indirect facilitation of coups d\u2019etat. Meanwhile, the bulk of Cold War \u201ccontainment\u201d policies consisted in a strategy of soft power, including economic and cultural influence.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

Decades later, as US soft power is being rapidly dismantled, the disproportionate influence of American ideology suddenly appears obvious. Where the Biden administration expressed a final croaky gasp of a hypocritical establishment, still verbally committed to values like democracy and goodwill \u2013 a mask that was revealed to be very slippery indeed during Biden\u2019s unrelenting funding of Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza \u2013 the Trump administration demonstrates little ideological consistency beyond the maskless slogan \u201cAmerica First\u201d. It was always America first; they just used to be more quiet about it.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s accelerated genocide of the Palestinians made the contradictions in the US\u2019s imperial architecture unbearable and untenable, and threatened it with collapse, setting into motion a process of destruction that we are still trying to look at, and that is sometimes hard to see.<\/p>\n

As we look upon burned flesh in Gaza, we are also seeing the rubble of this older version of Western empire. How best to splice the frame, to keep them both in mind, to keep looking?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am very much struck by these last paragraphs being written in the past tense: “the exercise of American imperialism did<\/em> not require”, not “does<\/em> not require”. This is the first time I believe I have seen this. But yes, with Biden’s Gaza and Trump’s Iran War following Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq the American Century truly is over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isabella Hammad, Equator: as Freud himself argued in Mourning and Melancholia, proper mourning requires a person to acknowledge what exactly they have lost. If a loss is not brought into the full light of consciousness, grief curdles into melancholia. Stopping … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.lv\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}