Mourning as a Clinical Category, Mourning as an Ethical-Political Category: Butlerian Developments

Abstract

This article intends to run through the appropriation made by Judith Butler about the theme of mourning, and how this concept is modified and mixed in her work, when she works it initially in a debate as an inceptive political category and more radically in its clinical meaning in Psychic Life of Power, until her transition work and the theoretical construction of her ethics and/or political philosophy in Precarious Life, a book in which she will explicitly develop mourning as an ethical-political category and one of the fundamental vectors of her theory. Furthermore, the text intends to present an attempt, still latent, to understand or hypothesize the way Butler makes a dialogue between Psychoanalysis and Politics, in a much less simple way than may appear in the externality of her texts