![]() Yet, for Shulman, right-wing populism mainly serves to ‘displace the weight of grief by the energies of grievance’ in other words, it does not seek out mourning as a means of letting go or moving beyond certain forms of life, but remains fixated on fantasies about the past. Populists promise to restore a lost greatness, or to reinstate a time of shared prosperity. For Shulman, the affects and moods associated with loss seem to animate all forms of political speech and action today, and in particular, populist rhetoric that operates through genres of jeremiad or romance. ![]() Several contributors to this Critical Exchange confront the ubiquity of loss and sacrifice as political thematics and the embedded assumptions within these thematics about sovereignty, solidarity, and vulnerability. While Euben argued that the shared experience of the tragic festival in ancient Athens provided the context for re-evaluation, could a collective experience of separation provide a similar impetus? During the pandemic, millions have experienced separation from family members, friends, livelihoods, and daily routines – losses that, even if temporary, might inspire a re-evaluation of life and a means of the self-critique and self-scrutiny that Peter Euben saw as the heart of a democratic pedagogy ( 1986). Mourning can have an illuminating effect then and become an occasion for reflection and reconnection. We mourn only for those to whom we are attached, or for that to which we are committed (Hägglund, 2019). Beyond these specific injuries, mourning clarifies our attachments and practical commitments. Similarly, Athanasiou argues that the pandemic has laid bare ‘induced conditions of unlivability’, which are the living legacies of racism, nationalism, sexism, exploitation, and other structures of institutionalized or ritualized abuse and disregard. Such recognitions are belated – and, like the owl of Minerva, may have come too late – and they elide the experiences of black citizens who have been paying the ‘psychic tax’ of democracy grief for generations, and who are paying a steep price once again during the pandemic (Cineas, 2020). Disavowed precarity also calls into question the supposedly recent phenomenon of ‘democracy grief’ in the global north or what Hooker refers to here as the ‘civic sadness that has arisen with the recognition that the USA is a democracy in need of repair’. For Hooker, in particular, the pandemic has clarified patterns of racialized precarity to which political theorists and social actors have not adequately responded. The differential vulnerability to death and mourning during the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed enduring racial and class divides in the USA and clarified the impact of spreading inequality. Mourning is a work of clarification (Freud, 1917). ![]() Each of the contributions below approaches the broad topics of mourning and politics in slightly different ways, yet several common themes emerge, including sacrifice, sovereignty, solidarity, the dangers and value of mourning as an analytic framework and as an organizing basis for political praxis, the relationship between death and democracy and the specter of democracy’s death, and mourning’s relationship to the intelligibility or unintelligibility of particular forms of life. There is a politics to mourning: distributions of bodies and communities that are more or less vulnerable to suffering and death struggles to make these disparities salient and to challenge them and overarching cycles of contestation over the meaning and praxis of mourning in, and for, democracy. While only some of the contributions directly confront the question of death and democracy during a pandemic, all speak to the ways that loss, grief, and politics are intertwined – something that the current crisis has made abundantly clear. As this exchange was coming together, the virus was beginning its spread. Yet in this particular moment it is impossible to think about the linkages between politics and grief outside the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. Political theorists have increasingly turned to mourning as a prism through which to view the differential politics of grief and grievance (for an overview see McIvor and Hirsch, 2019). In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition were asked to reflect on the politics of mourning. Sorrows – like benevolent angels – lift the veils from my life.
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