Sorgens politik?

"Every lament is shadowed by the specter of its own insufficiency, redundancy, or inappropriateness – too much, too little, too soon, too late (the very terms of measure, the relentless pressure to compare and quantify, already suggesting a fundamental mismeasure) --and this dissonance only escalates when mourning is forced to tally among its own losses the essential context of recognition that might have made mourning itself either authorized or even visible as such. This accounts for the reflexive intensification and proliferation of lament, the uncomfortable slide from “plaint” to “complaint” -- from grief to grievance, from Klage to Anklage (Nietzsche and Freud both remark on this semantic slippage)-- but also underscores its intractably ethical and social stakes. Even as it chokes on its own impossibility, the very act of lament indicts a world in which lament itself would be stifled. Antigone, Hecuba, Hamlet –the list continues-- make the political stakes of this stifling explicit. This implies that lament itself can be a political intervention. We see this every time a funeral ignites into a demonstration, or whenever police take measures to ensure it doesn’t."

Rebecca Comay: Paradoxes of lament