Mournful Militancy

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 203.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151.

Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (1989): 3–18, 16.

Ibid., 4–5.

Ibid., 5.

Ibid., 10.

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (1914–1916), ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press), 243–58, 244.

Here Crimp contrasts his approach to that taken by Michael Moon in “Memorial Rags,” which proposes to read mourning through the lens of fetishism. Moon rejects Freud’s definition of mourning for being too individualized and normative but his concluding reading of Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser” is not ultimately incompatible with Crimp’s analysis. See Michael Moon, “Memorial Rags,” in Professions of Desire in Literature: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, eds. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 233–40.

Crimp, 7.

Ibid., 8–9.

Ibid., 10, 9.

Freud, 245.

Ibid.

Crimp argues that a certain “moralizing self-abasement” within the gay community has something in common with Freud’s description of the egoistic melancholic (12).

Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 45.

Ibid., 46.

Ibid., 48. Schulman also gives the example of Jesse Helms, a homophobic senator from North Carolina who argued on moral grounds that money should not be spent on helping people with AIDS. On the “state-condoned violence and murder” enabled by politicians like Reagan and Helms, see also David Wojnarowicz, “Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch Politician,” Close to the Knives, 138–64, 148.

Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," 15.

Ibid., 16.

Of course, people involved in AIDS activism were not necessarily on the left. As Leo Bersani famously notes: “To want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism—a fact both recognized and denied by the gay liberation movement.” See Bersani, “Is the rectum a grave?,” October 43 (1987): 197–222, 205. The question of the relationship between American communism and gay liberation struggles is central to Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which includes a fictionalized version of Roy Cohn, the infamous McCarthy-era lawyer who acted as prosecutor in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and who was a closeted homosexual. He died of AIDS in 1986.

Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London; Verso, 1986), 10.

Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," 17.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 5.

Freud, 256.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002) 14.

Anne Carson, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Tell God,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 1 (2002): 188–203, 203. I write in more detail about Weil in “Rub it Better Til It Bleeds,” How to Sleep Faster #7 (London: Arcadia Missa, 2017).