sheebs

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.

Writing in the context of the AIDS crisis in the US, and addressing his community of fellow AIDS activists (he was involved with ACT UP New York), Crimp describes how mourning processes and rituals like candlelit vigils were frequently decried as anathema to militant political struggle— ‘indulgent, sentimental, defeatist'— by those involved in the movement. As people lost lovers and friends to the ravages of AIDS-related illnesses, the call was to fight for the living rather than to weep for the dead. But Crimp insists on the necessity of mourning within radical political communities and, more importantly, he cautions against the dangers of not mourning: ‘It is because our impatience with mourning is burdensome for the movement that I am seeking to understand it.'

Crimp acknowledges that mourning, as defined by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia, does indeed seem incompatible with political activism. For Freud, though a finite process, mourning is all consuming; it' leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests'. Crimp frames his argument in relation to Freud's outline of the concept of mourning, but he nonetheless acknowledges that ‘normal' mourning in Freud's sense is impossible within the context he is describing.

According to Crimp, Freud's theory says very little about communal grieving rituals, nor does it address the possibility that such rituals could be socially obstructed. Central to Freud's discussion of mourning is ‘reality-testing', through which the subject comes to acknowledge and eventually accept the loss of the loved object, consequently withdrawing or detaching their libido from it. ‘Reality', however, was not a neutral empirical backdrop in the context of the AIDS crisis because of the homophobic US state's ‘ruthless interference with bereavement' and because loss was not a fact of the past to come to terms with and move on from but part of an uncertain future: ‘Whether we share this fate is so unsure.' In the face of ‘social and political barbarism' and the enforced silencing of grief within a hostile and homophobic society, Crimp declares that ‘mourning becomes militancy.’

Except his argument doesn't end there. Though sympathetic to the transformation of sorrow into rage, he claims that because this process only takes place on a conscious level it leaves unconscious antagonisms unresolved. Militancy cannot function as a substitute for mourning but instead results from the socially enforced disavowal of grief; poison tears remain unwept. In this sense, militancy represses mourning.

Crimp complicates and reconceptualises Freud's definition of mourning by calling into question the notion that mourning can be accomplished by deferring to or accepting reality. Instead, he insists that the subject must attempt to survive within the structures of the violent external world without accepting them, while also being attentive to the damaging qualities of internal unconscious processes. In this (re) definition, mourning no longer entails a ‘respect for reality' as Freud outlined, and certainly not for the ‘riches' of ‘Western civilization'; it instead involves reconfiguring both external and internal realities. Crimp also implicitly challenges Freud's statement that in mourning ‘there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious', but though he identifies a certain melancholic self-doubting disposition in the AIDS activist community, he refuses to follow Freud in defining melancholia as pathological, nor does he claim that this emotional state results from a melancholic (and hence fully unconscious) relationship to the lost object. Crimp's understanding of militant mourning is thus distinct both from (normal) mourning and (pathological) melancholia as defined by Freud.

Sarah Schulman's Gentrification of the Mind (2012) seeks to redress the absence of a public conversation about the consequences of AIDS in the US, with the intention of overcoming the pervasive social amnesia that persists about the scale and impact of mass death. Schulman writes that ‘every gay person walking around who lived in New York or San Francisco in the 1980s and early 1990s is a survivor of devastation and carries with them the faces, fading names, and corpses of the otherwise forgotten dead.' She contrasts the ‘barely mentioned' 81,542 people known to have died of AIDS in New York City as of August 2008 with the 2,742 people killed on 9/11 whose deaths have been officially memorialised through national mourning rituals and commemorative sites. Her fury is not only directed at the forgetting of the dead but, moreover, at the forgetting of the politicians who have never been held accountable for their actions which enabled the crisis to reach such a devastating scale: ‘The names of our friends whom Ronald Reagan murdered are not engraved in a tower of black marble.'

Crimp similarly discusses the' gross political negligence' that exacerbated the AIDS epidemic, and he addresses the psychic damage inflicted by a homophobic society which delegitimised experiences of bereavement and' blamed, belittled, excluded, derided' people who died of AIDS-related illnesses and those who mourned them rather than offering empathy, support or adequate health care (here a parallel with the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire is apparent) .

Yet despite identifying brutal governmental pol- icies and negligent social practices, Crimp nonetheless warns against carving too neat a dichotomy between the external and the internal, the social and the psychological. Yes, he says, the world is violent and unjust and this must be combated. However, violence is not only located outside the subject in a hostile society; it also operates on an internal, unconscious level. No single line can be plotted that moves inexorably from external violence (cause) to internal misery (effect). Instead, suffering might better be understood as resulting from ongoing conflicts between and within the social and the psychological, conflicts which are always mutually constituted and whose origins are never located in a single time or place: ‘Violence is also self- inflicted.' For Crimp, focusing solely on transforming the external world through militant action does nothing to resolve the corrosive effects of unconscious processes.”]