It is across great scars of wrong / I reach toward the song of kindred men.

—Robert Duncan

In the late morning on Saturday, November 3, 1979, a caravan of Ku Klux Klansmen steered its way through the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina. The thirty-five individuals packed into nine automobiles were on their way to disrupt a scheduled rally in a black public-housing neighborhood that had been planned by the Communist Workers Party (CWP), which had been organizing mill and cafeteria workers along with the Greensboro Association for Poor People (GAPP). Ostensibly, this disruption was to be limited to throwing eggs and making speeches, but the pistols and shotguns packed into the Klansmen’s vehicles bespoke other possibilities. As the first car—with its Confederate flag license plate—pushed its way amid the protesters, a shouting match broke out. The verbal confrontation between the demonstrators and the white supremacists quickly escalated to violence, and five CWP members and activists were shot dead. Ten others were wounded. The event came to be known as the “Greensboro Massacre.”

The deadly confrontation on November 3 quickly set off a period not only of grief but also of conflict within Greensboro and beyond over the meaning and larger significance of the event. For instance, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the CWP issued a pamphlet entitled “Turn Grief into Strength! Avenge the CWP Five!”¹ The pamphlet described the formation of the Committee to Avenge the Communist Workers Party Five, whose first order of business would be to plan a funeral and protest march to take place the following Sunday. A flyer for the proposed march depicted an idealized CWP member smashing the butt of a shotgun into the chin of a figure marked “capitalism” (who was surrounded on either side with figures depicting the FBI and the KKK). During the funeral procession, nearly eight hundred activists marched in support of the CWP (several activists brandished shotguns in a show of defiance),² shadowed by as many as one thousand law enforcement officials.³

The Communist Workers Party implored local citizens to mourn and “remember the CWP 5,” and to see the events of early November as “the turning point of class struggle in the U.S.” This latter statement was engraved onto a large granite monument in the Maplewood Cemetery in Greensboro, where four of the five deceased members of the CWP were buried. The monument declared that the CWP Five had been murdered by “the criminal monopoly capitalist class,” and that their deaths—while a “tremendous loss to the CWP and to their families,” amounted to a “clarion call to the U.S. people to fight for workers’ rule.” The revolutionary rhetoric of the CWP continued throughout the subsequent trials against members of the KKK—activists interrupted the first trial with a stink bomb and refused to participate in what they described as a “sham”—and in both the following state court and federal criminal trials, the Klansmen were acquitted on all charges, each time by an all-white jury.⁴

The Communist Workers Party was not the only active participant in the struggle to comprehend or publicly narrate the meaning of the Greensboro Massacre. Immediately, the CWP’s struggle to memorialize their dead encountered heavy resistance from city officials and local business and civic leaders in Greensboro. In the eyes of these officials, the Greensboro Massacre was little more than an ugly incident between two extremist groups. Framed by city officials not as a “massacre” of vulnerable citizens but as a “shootout” between out-of-town radicals, the massacre was seen to have little if anything to do with Greensboro itself. The city, on this account, was an “innocent victim” caught between the equally unsavory radicalism of the CWP and the KKK.⁵

The struggle to mobilize public action and to shape public discourse on the basis of the Greensboro Massacre took place against the backdrop of Greensboro’s official civic narrative as a vanguard city for civil rights progress. Greensboro officials had worked assiduously in previous decades to cultivate a progressive image of the city with regard to race relations. For instance, Greensboro was one of the first cities in the South to announce that it would comply with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Greensboro was also the site of the famous Woolworth’s sit-in in February 1960, in which the so-called Greensboro Four occupied spots at the segregated downtown lunch counter and refused to leave. The nonviolent, direct action of the Greensboro Four was widely credited as the spark for the broader sit-in movement across the South.⁶ Their actions contributed to a sense of Greensboro exceptionalism in the area of civil rights and helped facilitate what historian William Chafe called Greensboro’s “progressive mystique.”⁷ At the core of this mystique was the notion of “civility,” which encapsulated the belief that racial disparities and conflicts were best addressed through indirect means—sublimated into a gradual process of eroding inequalities and achieving mutual respect.⁸

The Greensboro Massacre and its aftermath clearly did not fit into this larger civic narrative about racial moderation and gradual progress, nor did the image of a Death to the Klan rally organized by self-avowed communists being shot up by white supremacists reflect the supposedly consensual norm of civility. Many prominent citizens—both black and white—could not reconcile their image of civil rights progress with the revolutionary rhetoric of the CWP or with the ugly violence of the Greensboro Massacre. The massacre and its aftermath, then, seemingly had to be split off from the official narrative of race relations and civil rights in Greensboro.

Efforts to split off the trauma were largely successful. In downtown Greensboro, for instance, the narrative of the 1960 sit-in is memorialized in the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which opened on the site of the former Woolworth’s building in 2010.⁹ The museum, funded in part by the state of North Carolina, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the City of Greensboro, dramatizes the experience of the Greensboro Four before and during their courageous challenge of segregation. It also contextualizes the sit-ins within the broader struggle for civil and human rights, including in its exhibition space not only artifacts from the period of slavery and Jim Crow but also tokens from U.N. peacekeeping missions. Missing from the museum, however, is any mention of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, or the subsequent protests or trials. In this respect, the museum seems to embody the official civic narrative that emerged in the aftermath of the Massacre—namely, that it had “nothing to do” with Greensboro or, by implication, the struggle for civil rights and racial equality. Although the Greensboro Four of the Woolworth’s sit-in are justly lauded for their bravery, the CWP Five are simply not part of the picture.

These omissions within the civil rights museum are all the more striking when we consider what happened twenty-five years after the massacre. In 2004, after extensive grassroots organizing, seven individuals were sworn in during a public ceremony to create the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC). The GTRC, in striking contrast to both the strident politics of the CWP and the amnesic community cover story, was designed as a public process by which citizens in Greensboro could deliberatively engage the events of 1979 and their aftermath. Charged with investigating the causes and consequences of the Greensboro Massacre, the commission heard public testimony over the following fifteen months from surviving members of the CWP, the KKK, and others associated with the events of 1979. On completion of a final report, the organizing forces behind the commission sponsored a series of public dialogues to discuss the process and its results. The memory of the GTRC continues to have a presence in Greensboro (although, as previously noted, not in the international civil rights museum) and has inspired similar grassroots, unofficial reconciliation efforts in other places.

Greensboro, since the events of 1979, dramatizes the full range of what could be described as the politics of mourning. To speak about the politics of mourning is to acknowledge the fact that many salient political issues are strongly linked with experiences of pain and loss.¹⁰ If mourning is the process by which individuals and collectivities respond to loss, then to speak of the politics of mourning is to acknowledge the ways that these responses often feed into and are fed by broader social struggles for redress, recognition, or reparation. From AIDS activist and Black Lives Matter “die-ins” to the transnational “women-in-black” protest movement, countless political struggles in a variety of cultural contexts have been waged through the rhetoric and the iconography of mourning.¹¹

Yet the idea of a politics of mourning also reflects a deeper problematic—namely, that what counts as socially legible pain and loss is itself a political question. Which and whose losses will be commemorated or honored are questions that touch on the struggle within all societies over collective values. Jeffrey Stout, for instance, has argued that the question of what is to be publicly mourned is answered by the values that are held by citizens to be socially nonnegotiable or “sacred.”¹² The struggle over the sacred requires public memorialization of triumphs and losses according to shared norms, which—in a democracy—are ideally those of nondomination, accountability, and shared agency.¹³ Mourning is inescapably a part of politics because politically, just as much individually, we are what (or who) we mourn. It matters a great deal, to name just one example, whether banks close in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. or Jefferson Davis. Who sacrifices what for whom, whose pain is publicly registered and honored, and how those losses are commemorated—these are unavoidable and imperative political questions.

The need for rituals and processes of public mourning reflects the fact it is impossible to conceptualize collective life without corresponding practices that identify certain losses as significant and worthy of remembrance. However, as many observers have pointed out, public acts of remembrance often conceal a simultaneous request for forgetting. Mourning the losses of some often involves an explicit or implicit silencing of those who fall outside the circle of socially legible loss. For instance, Judith Butler has shown how some deaths appear to be more readily “grievable” than others, depending on dominant social frameworks.¹⁴ In-group biases, prejudices, and power relations often circumscribe who or what can be mourned. On Butler’s reading, it was this form of mourning that typified American public life in the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For Butler, the mediated public spectacle of the attacks shaped citizens of the United States into the image of a nation unified in grief, but at the cost of idealizing the attacked homeland and demonizing the perpetrators as freedom-hating “evil-doers.”¹⁵ Pressures of idealization, moreover, intensified feelings of distrust and unease with perceived outsiders—Muslims, Arab Americans, or anyone who looked vaguely “foreign.” This in turn fed what Libby Anker has described as “melodramatic” political discourse, which interpreted the losses of 9/11 in terms of sullied innocence and injured sovereignty that could only be redeemed through a heroic, violent response.¹⁶ For Anker, such responses are ultimately self-defeating because the “lost” objects of sovereignty and innocence are themselves the product of an idealizing fantasy or collective illusion. What appears to be a response to felt loss or trauma, then, seems closer to a form of social melancholia or blocked grief. Yet what is undeniable is that grief over the trauma of 9/11 has ramified through a variety of political issues and contests, ranging from the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque in 2010 to the presidential primaries of 2016.¹⁷

Whether polities can avoid what Butler calls the “dry grief of endless political rage” or what Anker sees as a self-defeating melodrama of impossible sovereignty depends on how the politics of mourning is taken up and practiced.¹⁸ Critics of regnant forms of public mourning and memorialization therefore carry a responsibility to articulate not just what is problematic with how we mourn but how we might mourn better—more inclusively, more democratically. The alternative is not to pretend that we can do otherwise than mourn, because what these events and their contested aftermaths reveal most clearly are the bedrock assumptions of this book, namely, that politics is intertwined with mourning and mourning has a politics.

Greensboro proves to be a fruitful site for the investigation of mourning’s politics because the recent history of the city reflects the broad range of ways in which mourning can manifest itself within public life. In the reactions of the CWP to the shooting deaths of their members, we can see the intimate connection between mourning and an activist politics of resistance directed against the state or other agents of social oppression. In this respect, the CWP’s efforts fit into a long tradition. Funerals have repeatedly served as occasions for popular mobilization against injustice, from the context of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi to antiapartheid activism in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Northern Ireland’s most intense period of sectarian strife, to the “dirty war” period of Argentina and to pre- (and post-) revolutionary Iran.¹⁹ Political demands have often flowed directly from funerary practice, and public mourning has, again and again, served as a site for political mobilization and as a mode of political resistance aimed at challenging or toppling the reigning order of things.²⁰ In 2015, for instance, protests erupted in Baltimore after the funeral for Freddie Gray, a local man who died as a result of a “rough ride” administered by the Baltimore Police Department following Gray’s arrest. In these instances of protest or direct action, social divisions are reinforced or named—such as the CWP’s uncompromising rhetoric of the “capitalist monopoly class”—providing an affectively charged, agonistic frame for politics.

Alongside this form of activist and often militant resistance, however, are the civic rites, rituals, and narratives of memorialization that attempt to provide an authoritative interpretation for social traumas. Through eulogies or commemorative events, public officials and other prominent voices shape the discourse surrounding social trauma.²¹ Such rituals offer a collective means of mourning by incorporating traumatic events into narratives of civic life. As was the case in Greensboro, civic norms (such as “civility”) provide a mechanism of selection by which certain events can be actively remembered or mourned while others are to be split off or left behind. Moreover, these norms often set the terms of political membership, such that belonging to a community (or to the “real” community) can be seen in light of whose losses we take seriously or honor.

With the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however, a relatively novel process of public mourning presents itself. The GTRC was a grassroots-organized, unofficial truth commission designed to facilitate public dialogue on a traumatic event, its historical context, and its long reach into the present. Reducible to neither an agonistic process of articulating social divisions nor to a consensualist ritual of amnesic commemoration, the GTRC staged a public process of identifying and clarifying the conflicts and differences within the community, including testimony from unrepentant Klan members alongside social justice advocates. The process included the voices not only of victims and perpetrators but also of witnesses and bystanders, along with citizens who only had an indirect connection to the event but who could testify to its lingering aftereffects. The commission clarified the differences between black and white citizens’ perceptions of the massacre, revealing both the plurality and complexity within the city and the fact that social norms such as civility had acquired very different meanings depending on one’s social position.²²

In this respect, the GTRC did not simply name social divisions, nor did it paper over them. Instead, it provided an inclusive public space within which those divisions could be articulated and acknowledged, with the result that citizens of Greensboro were presented with an opportunity to face up to and deliberate about the massacre and its afterlife. The opportunity to engage in public dialogue is by itself, of course, a form of social action, but the GTRC also provided space and occasion for citizens to take concrete steps to address social issues revealed by the GTRC—such as inequality, violence, and community distrust. I refer to these concrete actions as the GTRC’s democratic “ripple effects.” The aftereffects of the GTRC include new and strengthened associational networks and civic capacity in Greensboro, which—while not heralding an imminent end to racial discrimination or disrespect—sow the seeds of a more robust and resilient form of democracy in Greensboro and in those communities that might learn from its example.

In this book, I use the recent experiences of Greensboro as a means of thinking through the paradoxes, pathologies, and possibilities surrounding the politics of mourning. This is a particularly urgent task at this moment. It is urgent in part because the discourse of grief and mourning remains generative for activist politics—as demonstrated by the “die-ins” following the 2014 grand jury decisions in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson and Staten Island, respectively, and by the way in which the funeral for Freddie Gray in Baltimore became a flashpoint not only for localized direct actions but for broader protests against police brutality, the war on drugs, concentrated poverty and racial mistrust. Yet a conceptualization of the politics of mourning is also timely insofar as countries and communities are increasingly attuned to the politics of memory and memorialization. We are living in what some scholars are calling the “age of apology,” in which national and local communities are showing a greater willingness to revisit dark and violent episodes in their recent and not-so-recent history.²³ The GTRC, for instance, built on previous models of truth and reconciliation processes in South Africa and elsewhere, and the GTRC has in turn become a model for how communities can self-organize processes of examining violent episodes in their histories and the living legacies of those events. Over the past three decades, local and global pressures have conspired to make “dealing with the past” an essential component of national and international politics.²⁴ The politics of mourning, then, is intensifying and proliferating, which invites reflection as to its limitations and potential.

Some might argue, however, that an analysis of the situation of Greensboro in terms of mourning is misguided. These voices might claim that what Greensboro reveals is a clear-cut case of miscarried justice, in which long-standing racial prejudices perverted the judicial process and led to the Klansmen’s acquittal, which in turn entrenched social divisions and intensified racial mistrust in Greensboro. By approaching the case of Greensboro from the perspective of a theory of justice, our attention would be directed toward the maldistribution of basic goods such as police protection, adequate housing, living wages, or to the presence of racial stereotypes and discrimination, all of which contributed to the tragic conflict in Greensboro and the inadequate response by public officials. The rhetoric of mourning, on the other hand, might seem to confuse a responsibility of the individual or the group (for a therapeutic or healing response to loss) with the responsibilities of the state or of its citizens (for the administration of fair procedures and the fair provision of basic goods).²⁵

The value of the language of mourning, however, is precisely that it draws our eye toward a messier, multilayered struggle for recognition that exceeds—although it is not fully separate from—the struggle for justice, and it shows that the state is not the only important figure in this struggle. Fair, formal juridical procedures and the provision of basic goods are essential to supporting a democratic culture of equal respect. However, the emphasis on neutral principles of justice and the pursuit of liberal rights are, by themselves, insufficiently strong foundation stones for democratic society. As Axel Honneth has argued, the “load-bearing structures” for democratic culture consist less in juridical or legal relations than in “practices, customs, and social roles” within the everyday lifeworld.²⁶ Legally guaranteed rights and the institutions that support them are essential mechanisms by which democratic citizens can experience feelings of social respect. Yet, if we see democratic society in broader terms as a layered arrangement of recognition relationships, then we can appreciate these mechanisms as merely one of the many sets of institutions and practices through which the struggle for just recognition is waged.²⁷ Along these lines, Danielle Allen argues that a community’s “civic etiquette”—which includes an understanding (often implicit) about whose losses are to be honored—has a significant effect on social trust and political engagement.²⁸ Civic etiquette is shaped but not determined or exhausted by positive laws or by the actions of the state. Hence for Allen as for Honneth, the process by which citizens acknowledge both seismic social traumas and mundane experiences of disrespect is a significant aspect of the broader work of cultivating democratic Sittlichkeit, a responsibility that is social or collective by its nature.²⁹

Let us imagine a historical counterfactual as a way of bringing out these issues. Imagine that the members of the KKK had been found guilty during the initial trial in Greensboro. Imagine shackled Klansmen being led off to serve prison sentences of various lengths, as a chorus of concerned citizens cheers the verdict on the courthouse steps. One can then imagine some of those affected by the massacre—though not the members of the CWP themselves—speaking outside the courtroom about “justice being done.” The local and national media would have amplified this message of resolution, before turning off the cameras and focusing their attention elsewhere. But with justice having been executed, the perpetrators having been convicted and sentenced, would the multilayered trauma of the Greensboro Massacre and the still simmering conflicts surrounding race and class in the city have been resolved? Would the need to narrate and interpret the events of 1979 have somehow evaporated? Would the “progressive mystique” surrounding congratulatory public narratives have been challenged or disrupted? More importantly, would the civic etiquette of a city like Greensboro—stratified by race and class, and replete with misrecognitions, mistrust, and deadly hostilities—have dramatically shifted? Rather, it is likely that such an outcome would have desocialized the events of November 1979 by focusing on the particular perpetrators and victims. The trial would have isolated these individuals from the broader social context that made the event possible in the first place and that had been reshaped by the event in ways that the trial could not fully unpack or undo. The larger, messy and internally contested story of the massacre would have faded away untold. From the angle of a theory of justice, this scenario might be seen as unproblematic or unavoidable. Yet as Iris Marion Young has argued, a narrow liability framework of justice—while appropriate in many instances—unduly limits the reach of social responsibility in situations of complex or structural injustice.³⁰ More importantly, from the perspective of a struggle for recognition, the failure to take into account the larger story of the event marks a continuation of social injury. Official or social silence surrounding historical traumas is a heavy silence; it is a wounding silence.³¹

The dominant discourses and practices of justice, then, while necessary to a democratic society committed to norms of equal respect, are an insufficient means of responding to traumatic events like the Greensboro Massacre, in part because traumatic events are never discrete phenomena isolated in time and place.³² Instead, these events often reflect enduring patterns of misrecognition within social and political life. As such, the challenge of recognition will necessarily exceed the challenge of justice. Justice, in the words of Luc Boltanski, is that which “brings disputes to an end”; it is aimed at the authoritative resolution or settling of conflicts.³³ Yet what is important in situations of chronic social misrecognition is less an authoritative closing of accounts than the cultivation of democratic capacities for recognition and respect.³⁴ Struggles for coexistence in contemporary American life are intensified by lingering resentments born of legacies of misrecognition. For instance, in Greensboro, the massacre and its aftermath further entrenched social disparities and mistrust, making positive and mutualistic social relations more difficult.³⁵ For these reasons, democratic citizens need to be oriented less toward the resolution of conflict and more toward the ongoing struggle for recognition in the face of deep differences and amid the living legacies of social traumas.³⁶

In this book, I show how the vocabulary of mourning can usefully draw our attention toward these multilayered struggles for recognition and the practices and spaces in which they take place. In so doing, I am stepping into and contributing to a lively conversation within political theory, among other disciplines, about the meaning and mechanisms of social mourning. Within contemporary political theory (perhaps ironically), the politics of mourning have been persistently filtered through two classical figures: Antigone and Pericles. Antigone, the ill-fated daughter of Oedipus, has come to embody the penchant for mourning to crystallize into direct actions or protests that challenge the dominant social-political order. Antigone’s burial of her fallen brother Polyneices and her defiance of Creon serves as a model for how marginalized citizens can mobilize counterpublics of resistance, and in recent years political theorists such as Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig have repeatedly turned to Antigone in order to theorize a radical or agonistic account of politics.³⁷

On the other hand the figure of Pericles—the Greek statesman and general during the so-called golden age of classical Athens—has come to stand in for the work of shaping public discourse surrounding social traumas by filtering such traumas through consensual civic norms and narratives. Pericles provides the ideal type for this activity, which is concerned with incorporating public traumas into the living traditions and shared values of the polity (or, by contrast, splitting off traumas because they cannot fit into the dominant narratives of these traditions or values). In his oration as represented in Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles justifies the sacrifice of the Athenian soldiers by magnifying the glory and greatness of the polis. The surviving community subsumes or incorporates its dead, who in turn become representatives of supposedly consensual norms. Although the Periclean funeral oration has been criticized practically from its point of origin, its basic tropes persist.³⁸ Contemporary funeral orations, as Simon Stow has argued, often “demand little” of their audience beyond an uncritical patriotism that reaffirms the social-political status quo.³⁹ Stow has charted the appearance of this “romantic” style of public grief in the wake of public traumas such as September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, while showing how the Periclean politics of mourning reappear within the ongoing struggle over the public meaning of the civil rights movement.⁴⁰ Public commemorations of civil rights icons often subsume these figures within a national narrative of inevitable progress. Commemorative events and discourses incorporate the story of civil rights into a story about the unique greatness of the American polis, yet only by excising the contentiousness, contingency, and (often) the unfinished nature of the struggle.⁴¹ In this way, civic rituals of memorialization carry forward the tropes of the ancient funeral oration, which, as Nicole Loraux has argued, was an attempt to discursively transform Athenian democracy “into a beautiful, harmonious whole.”⁴² Funeral orations therefore depict the city not as it is and was, but as it “wishes [itself] to be.”⁴³

Antigone and Pericles, then, serve as figures for dominant modes of public mourning. Each of these modes, however, is shadowed by pathologies or internal excesses that make them problematic for democratic societies. Antigone has become exemplary in part because she stands for an insistent remembrance of injustices in opposition to hasty foreclosures and a shrinking of the public space for contestation over the meaning of past traumas.⁴⁴ Strong-necked insistence on justice aims to disrupt both practices of oppression and discourses of false reconciliation.⁴⁵ Antigone is inspiring in part because she does not capitulate, despite the difficult circumstances of and steep penalty for her resistance. As a result, Sophocles’s heroine has enjoyed a very busy afterlife, as the performance of Antigone has galvanized resistance to state silence surrounding social traumas in a dizzying variety of locations.⁴⁶

The Antigonean insistence on justice over and against social forgetting, however, seemingly requires both the drawing of clear lines of division and an absolute commitment to the struggle. Yet the all-or-nothing fanaticism of memory justice quickly encounters a paradox, expressed sharply by Robert Meister: “In revolutionary justice the victim is to become victor; the problem with this concept is that nothing counts as winning except continuing the fight. But the problem with abandoning it is that nothing counts as justice if it is not worth the struggle.”⁴⁷ The absolute commitment to memory justice can cultivate a rigid moral-political identity that cannot imagine “ways of winning” and therefore insists above all else on the continued necessity of the fight, regardless of how the other “combatant” may respond or how the terrain of struggle may shift.⁴⁸ The paradox resides in the fact that memory justice both makes a claim for recognition and develops a moral-psychological subject position that makes the settlement of recognition claims difficult if not impossible: if the commitment to the struggle is given up, then the internalized object has been compromised. Yet because this object has served as the fixed source of identity, its compromise represents a mortal threat to the self. The moral-psychological position of memory justice, then, requires fresh reasons to carry on the (endless) fight, lest it forsake the (wounded) superego.⁴⁹ Every resistant Antigone requires an inflexible Creon, and if the latter changes his ways, then a substitute Creon must quickly be found.

These difficulties have not gone unnoticed. Victims of social trauma can suffer from what Wendy Brown has described as “wounded attachment,” a form of political subjectivity that remains perversely tethered not only to its social injuries but also to the social order that produced those injuries.⁵⁰ For Brown, this form of subjectivity settles for a “cathartic reaffirmation of victimhood” and abandons riskier positions and mobilizations that might challenge oppressive forms of political life.⁵¹ An inordinate focus on past injuries, as Frantz Fanon put it, threatens to turn the victim into a “prisoner of history” locked in the “Tower of the Past.”⁵² Antigonean, agonistic resistance can coalesce into a rigid, heroic political posture that obscures the slower, patient work of democratic resistance.⁵³ Like Antigone, wounded activists can spurn potential allies along with the difficult work of persuasion, given that they might feel charged with the moral righteousness activated by experiences of victimhood.⁵⁴ For instance, witness the CWP activists in the wake of Greensboro Massacre, whose refusal to participate in the subsequent trial helped facilitate the Klan members’ acquittal. If an Antigonean style of mourning is an essential means of retaining the memory of misrecognition within public narratives, it is not without its potential pathologies.

The Periclean mode of public mourning, however, can also generate political pathologies. Commemorative discourses apply subtle moral pressure that can stigmatize political contestation. When “the community” is unified in grief, those who challenge the social actions undertaken on the basis of this consensus can be split off as dangerous outsiders, opposed to the “real” members of the group. Moreover, consensualist practices of memorialization can depoliticize the past by seeing contingent victories through fantasies of inevitable progress. Doing so promotes a false picture of social cohesion and closure, which in turn disciplines a society’s civic etiquette.⁵⁵ Commemorative rituals can cultivate a benumbing amnesia over the past and a befogging romanticism about the present. For instance, insofar as the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro passes over the Greensboro Massacre and the radical distrust and disparities that preceded and were intensified by that event, it contributes to the construction of a narrow narrative of civil rights struggle and progress that excludes the messier, more conflicted aspects of race and class relations in the South and the broader American polity—both past and present.

The kernel of moral and political truth within Periclean practices, however, is that processes of meaning making over the past and of articulating continuity between the past and present are unavoidable features of collective life and essential components of political identity. Communities do not exist without rituals and narratives of commemoration or remembrance—in fact, communities can be loosely defined by what they ask their members to remember or to forget.⁵⁶ The democratic challenge is to engage in this labor in ways that mitigate temptations toward idealization, splitting, or denial, which inspire pathologies of democratic life. Namely, these defenses can exaggerate social differences, reify identities, and make collaborative action unlikely or impossible. The dual-sided struggle is to resist hasty foreclosures on traumas of social misrecognition while remembering that insistent memory justice can preclude an awareness of possibilities for civic agency and social transformation.

Pericles and Antigone, then, stand in for ambiguous tendencies within political communities. Both the counsel of selective forgetting in the name of social cohesion and the insistence on remembrance in the name of social contestation can lead to pathological social formations, feeding either pernicious practices of denial or manic cycles of inflexible resistance. Yet both are also unavoidable sociopolitical orientations (practically and normatively). A society without insistent voices of memory justice risks a slide into barbarism; yet a society without norms of commemoration that provide a sense of (relative) cohesion is simply unimaginable. In the chapters that follow, once again, I attempt to navigate the paradoxes, pathologies, and possibilities that surround consensualist and agonistic practices of public mourning. In the process I articulate a theory and practice of a democratic work of mourning that attempts to theorize a tricky middle space that joins agonism and consensualism. I argue that this articulation is essential for seeing the promise and understanding the limitations of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a democratic practice and space of mourning, by which citizens in Greensboro engaged in a public examination of a traumatic event—an examination that was significant in and of itself but also because of its democratic aftereffects. The GTRC—when situated in a theory of democratic mourning—testifies to and gives us hope for the ongoing labor of social recognition.

To understand the full meaning of the politics of mourning, we have to utilize resources both within and beyond political theory. The reason for this is that the struggle for recognition of which public mourning is an indispensable part is neither strictly a political nor a psychological phenomenon, but both at the same time. As Pamela Conover argues, recognition demands are “ultimately psychological in nature,” because they reach out for patterns of reliable attention in which individual identities can develop and flourish.⁵⁷ However, with this formulation Conover elides the fact that the psychological demands of recognition are articulated and achieved within political contexts marked by inequalities of power, differential experiences of justice, and varying levels of mistrust, which inherently complicates both the articulation and the satisfaction of these claims. Recognition is therefore a complexly social, political, and psychological phenomenon. Along these lines, the drive for legal recognition embodied in the expansion and protection of human rights should be seen as a necessary part of a larger struggle for an intact identity, a struggle that assumes agents to have determinate needs and desires following from unavoidable experiences of interdependency. The legal or political subject is also a needy subject, and legal subjectification must therefore be understood in the context not only of political but psychological needs.

The work of Axel Honneth reflects eloquently on this interconnection between the psychological and the social. In fact, it is because of this interconnection that Honneth roots his theory of recognition in object relations psychoanalysis, which illuminates the interpersonal developmental trajectories by which various needs for recognition are fulfilled or denied.⁵⁸ According to Honneth, the satisfaction of interpersonal needs for recognition results in the acceptance of a difficult balancing act between independence and merger. For example, following the work of D. W. Winnicott, Honneth argues that the “capacity to be alone”—to have confidence in oneself as an agent—is inseparable from the internalization of relationships of care reflecting our undeniable dependency on others.⁵⁹ Navigating this terrain successfully leads to the development of basic self-confidence, a prerequisite for experiencing oneself as an object of legal respect or social regard.

While Honneth limits his use of psychoanalysis to his conceptualization of the interpersonal sphere of recognition, he argues that this sphere has significant implications for social and political life. Although the recognition accorded to legal and social subjects does not resemble the affection and intimacy through which interpersonal recognition is communicated, the need for the former is ultimately inseparable from the interdependencies and desires revealed by the latter. Once again, the legal or civic subject cannot be cleanly separated from the needy subject. Moreover, the interpersonal sphere is where the abilities to tolerate anxiety and ambiguity, to live constructively and respectfully with others, to handle differences and conflicts, are first tested and developed.⁶⁰ The interpersonal sphere can therefore be seen as protopolitical, insofar as it can be seen as a preparatory space for political engagement. The interpersonal sphere, however, is also properly political because the question of who can legitimately occupy the interpersonal sphere reflects a struggle over the kinds of intimacy that are socially legitimate and legible.

The interconnection between the psychological and the social within recognition struggles, once again, requires that we reach beyond disciplinary boundaries in an effort to understand the politics of mourning.⁶¹ Psychoanalytic frameworks, I argue, are especially well suited to address this intermediate space at the intersection of personal and collective practices. Nancy Luxon, for instance, has argued that the “combative collaborative” within psychoanalytic practice contains a form of civic education that makes individuals more mindful of cultural and social codes and can “introject these individuals into the authorial practice of originating and revising” these codes.⁶² Psychoanalytic settings exist “to the side” of normal social interactions, but they help cultivate relationships through which individuals can exercise their interpretive skills and develop a greater capacity for participation in public life. Going even further than Luxon, Honneth argues that psychoanalytic frameworks draw our attention to “emancipatory moments in our normal human life”—moments in which we clarify our internal and external conflicts and deepen capacities for mutual respect, tolerance, and trust.⁶³ In other words, the qualities of democratic citizenship that might enable a politics of just recognition are inextricably linked with intersubjective developmental trajectories (and misdevelopments) that psychoanalytic approaches can help to illuminate. The work of mourning, in this light, can be seen as a psychopolitical process. How communities and citizens process or memorialize loss, and how they act together in the wake of social traumas, will depend on both psychological and social capacities. This does not reduce the polis to the psyche, but shows their intertwinement.

Psychoanalytic approaches are of course already active within theoretical conversations about the politics of mourning. For instance, Sigmund Freud’s seminal 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” has become a significant touchstone for social theorists who deploy (or challenge) Freud’s famous distinction between pathological melancholia and healthy attempts at “working through” or mourning a lost object.⁶⁴ In his essay Freud recognized the potential political nature of mourning, noting that we mourn not only significant others but lost or compromised ideals and other collectively shared objects. Yet Freud’s approach is problematic for conceptualizing a democratic politics of mourning and the larger struggle for recognition, in part because it depicts mourning as the process by which a socially withdrawn ego relinquishes and replaces what it lost through a process of detachment from failing investments and a reattachment to more responsive objects. As compelling as this narrative might seem, it creates false expectations about the politics of mourning, which is never characterized by a unified (or isolated) subject who can sovereignly survey the ramifications of its loss. Social mourning is a relational and public process, not an isolated or private task. Moreover, the traumas connected to an ongoing struggle for recognition are often not so much lost objects as they are enduring patterns or habits of disregard. To say that these damages must (or even that they can) be relinquished without taking into consideration asymmetries of power and representation is to risk continuing, rather than disrupting, these habits. The emphasis on “getting over” or relinquishing the lost object beckons a wounding silence. Finally, social mourning is not, contrary to Freud’s narrative, primarily about overcoming loss; it is about finding ways of living with social traumas, their ongoing legacies, and the disagreements and conflicts within every political space that are often revealed by these traumas and by everyday experiences of loss, suffering, and grief.

If a Freudian approach is insufficient, then, this does not imply that we have to leave the psychoanalytic terrain in an effort to conceptualize the politics of mourning. Object relations psychoanalysis, in distinction to an orthodox Freudian account, provides a framework that takes into account both the relational nature of the politics of recognition and the latter’s intertwinement with mourning. In particular, the work of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott can be used to theorize both the obstacles and the preconditions for what I am calling the democratic work of mourning. Object relations approaches offer political theorists a conceptual vocabulary that sensitizes us to the ways in which social practices of mourning can feed vicious cycles of persecution, stereotyping, and misperception. Informed by this perspective, I show how instances of public mourning can activate certain cognitive-affective schemas characterized by mundane yet socially problematic defenses against anxiety, uncertainty, and frustration. The turn toward Klein and Winnicott, then, provides a diagnostic vocabulary that illuminates the pathologies attendant to both agonism and consensualism, including the common tropes of idealization and demonization and associated practices of splitting and denial. A psychoanalytically informed approach to the politics of mourning can reveal how agonism and consensualism each trade on and activate these defenses, which inspires a frozen politics of either endless struggle or fantastical harmony.

Yet the turn to object relations psychoanalysis is inspired by more than critique. Object relations approaches can also move us beyond a diagnosis of public mourning’s pathologies and indicate alternative practices and spaces that might allow citizens to unwind these pathologies. Klein’s concepts of the “depressive position” and the “good object” and Winnicott’s understanding of “potential space” (discussed later in this chapter) form the conceptual kernel of an aspirational politics of mourning in which social conflicts are identified, clarified, and more openly engaged. This aspirational politics of mourning does not transcend agonistic or consensualist practices, but it contextualizes and, ideally, filters the struggle for memory justice and the search for civic narrative through a broader politics of recognition, based on the facilitation of intergroup contact and collaborative civic action. Working through, as it were, requires public work—democratic labors of recognition and repair.⁶⁵

To encapsulate this aspirational democratic work, I put forward a third classical figure for the politics of mourning—that of Orestes. In Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, The Oresteia, Orestes both undergoes an experience of trauma (the murder of his father) and enacts one himself (the murder of his mother). Based in part on Klein’s interpretation of Aeschylus, I argue that an Oresteian politics of mourning embodies a tragic awareness of a traumatic past alongside an optimism about democratic agency and the possibilities of social recognition. The image of Orestes, then, can inspire a democratic work of mourning that is irreducible to either agonism or consensualism, but that operates instead in the difficult space between them.⁶⁶ The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission can be usefully situated within this image, which magnifies its potential—and the potential for similar practices—as a space of democratic mourning.

In this chapter, I outline the steps of this argument in more detail, including the reason why the turn toward Klein and object relations psychoanalysis is crucial for the formation of an adequate account of the politics of mourning. Subsequent chapters develop critiques of agonism (chapter 2) and consensualism (chapter 3), before turning to the development of the theory of the democratic work of mourning and its accompanying objects and spaces (chapters 4 and 5). Each of the three middle chapters also unpacks concepts drawn from the object relations tradition: the depressive position (chapter 2), the good object (chapter 3), and potential space (chapter 4). Therefore, the value of this approach will be elaborated as the book unfolds. In the final chapter, I return to Greensboro in order to contextualize the GTRC within the broader politics of truth and reconciliation. In the afterword, I turn this conversation back to the recent deaths of unarmed black citizens such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray and to the Black Lives Matter protest movement that has mobilized in response to these deaths and to enduring patterns of misrecognition.

Antigone and the Agonistic Politics of Mourning

The image and story of Antigone have been remarkably resilient within the western political tradition and beyond.⁶⁷ Antigone’s exemplarity derives from the way that her narrative of resistance legitimates struggles by marginalized individuals and groups to achieve social redress. Antigone is a model activist mourner. She steadfastly insists that her losses should be honored, she refuses to cede on her claims, and she does not shy away from the struggle for hegemony that this commitment inspires. In this respect, Antigone has become a fitting representative for agonist political theory, which insists that antagonism and a struggle for hegemony reside at the very root of political life.⁶⁸ As Bonnie Honig puts it, the struggle between Antigone and Creon “is probably for most political theorists the template for what is meant by agonism.”⁶⁹ From the work of Judith Butler—who turns to Antigone to theorize a performative politics of repudiation that can challenge dominant norms and discourses—to Honig’s own appropriation of Antigone as a lively, demanding agonistic figure, Antigone and the politics of her mourning have been essential components of contemporary agonist approaches.

But what are agonists taking on board when they identify with Antigone and her particular politics of grief? What are the potential pathologies attendant to a view of mourning as agonistic mobilization, with its friend/enemy distinction and the associated tropes of idealization and demonization? For Gail Holst-Warhaft, grief offers a “unique opportunity for social mobilization and political action” because “grief is probably the most powerful emotion we ever feel.”⁷⁰ Grief’s passion, according to Holst-Warhaft, is excessive and ecstatic; it carries us “to the edge of madness.”⁷¹ At this edge, grief and anger collapse together in ways that can spark powerful political resistance. The power of Antigonean mourning, then, rests on the energy created by what Holst-Warhaft calls the “unity of shared rage.”⁷² The unity of shared rage fashions solidarity out of sorrow and channels grief into public grievance.⁷³

Shared rage is then an essential aspect of an agonistic politics of grief. Political psychologists describe this in terms of the “psychology of outrage,” which enables individuals and groups to overcome obstacles to collective action by inciting resistance against an oppressive social order.⁷⁴ As we have seen, the ability of groups such as the CWP to mobilize supporters in the wake of November 3 traded on the connections between grief, outrage, and vengeance. Yet this also indicates clearly the potential drawbacks of agonistic rage. The psychology of outrage can feed a process of abjection and debasement, which might be necessary in order to shore up a political identity of resistance, but which does so often at the cost demonizing the other toward whom the resistance is directed.⁷⁵ Social traumas filtered through an agonistic, friend/enemy distinction thereby support the formation of rigid and moralistic political identities, and the troubling or contesting of these identities is then itself a potential trauma that must be warded off. Becoming sensitive to the depth or complexity of the other would threaten the integrity of a self that is formed through outraged differentiation, and hence the other must stay debased or cruel if the self is to sustain its identity.⁷⁶ Yet rigid, polarized identities supported by a psychology of outrage and abjection can all too easily slide toward fantasies of the violent elimination of the other, an outcome that is psychologically less threatening than the acceptance of the other because fantasies of annihilation reinforce feelings of omnipotence and ward off anxieties of vulnerability.⁷⁷ As Julia Kristeva argues, the idea of the enemy is immediately and viscerally reassuring, and the hated object (unlike the loved object) “never disappoints.”⁷⁸

We can witness a politics and a psychology of outrage, and the associated tropes of abjection, idealization, and omnipotence, within the CWP’s organizing efforts both before and after the Greensboro Massacre. The CWP’s efforts to organize members of the working class in the Piedmont and Triangle regions of North Carolina were typified by polarizing rhetoric, and a cornerstone of their strategy were their repeated provocations of the KKK. Months before the events of November 3, the CWP had broken up a Klan rally in China Grove, North Carolina, burning a confederate flag in the process. The march on November 3 was itself advertised as a “Death to the Klan” rally, and it was publicized in an open letter to the KKK in which Klansmen were referred to as “scum” and a “temporary pest.” All of these actions were part of the CWP’s attempt to associate the Klan with the more immediate targets of labor organization, namely (in their words), the “monopoly capitalist class.” The CWP’s polarizing rhetorical strategy created an image of the abject enemy that collapsed the differences between owners of local textile mills and the KKK. Within the CWP’s rhetoric, there was no effective difference between the KKK and local business leaders; the latter’s “three piece suits,” in their eyes, might as well have been “hooded sheets.”⁷⁹ Identifying other social institutions and actors with the white terrorist violence of the Klan reveals the CWP’s strategy of cultivating a large-scale working-class movement through the definition of an abject other to be resisted. After the massacre in November 1979, the CWP’s rigid, polarized distinctions between the abject capitalist/Klan enemy and the idealized fallen members (who represented the “invincible Communist spirit”) supported their refusal to cooperate with the state criminal trial, which, once again, helped to facilitate the KKK members’ acquittal. Psychologically, of course, the acquittal could be seen as a more satisfactory outcome because it allowed the CWP and its allies to maintain the purity of their distinctions between the inherently corrupt system and the pure spirit of Communist opposition.⁸⁰

The pathologies attendant to an agonistic politics of grief may seem obvious, but the difficulty is that the drawing of lines between friend and enemy can be democratically generative.⁸¹ Just as abolitionists sought to sharpen the contradiction between a country (ostensibly) committed to equality and the practice of chattel slavery and legal discrimination, so too can the agonistic work of differentiation help to identify sources of social misrecognition and trauma. Yet insofar as the practice of differentiation reinforces social-psychological tendencies toward abjection and idealization, the politics of Antigonean mourning are precariously perched between democratic performance and pathology. Once again, political subjects that have internalized at their core a righteous struggle for justice can find it difficult to cede this internal object regardless of external circumstances. To quote Meister again, without an envisioned “way of winning,” the only alternative is to ceaselessly continue the fight, which reifies both the opposition and the (heroic) self.⁸² As the former CWP member Signe Waller later reflected, the organization’s “stiff-necked polemical stance made united fronts difficult and isolated us from potential allies in the mainstream.” What appeared in the moment as a principled stand against injustice based on the group’s “moral authority” was later identified by Waller as a “smug sectarianism” that “had isolated us from much of the community.” According to Waller, the CWP’s moral authority itself relied on defenses of denial and splitting, only later recognized: “We were not as good or as dedicated or as right as we sometimes claimed to be, and the others were often not as bad or as wrong.” As Waller concludes, in a line impossible for Antigone, “If you survive, you learn circumspection.”⁸³

Pericles and the Politics of Memorialization

If Antigone has come to stand in for a resistant, agonistic politics of grief, then the figure of Pericles can stand in for a concurrent mode of mourning in which civic rituals and discourses attempt to place public traumas within (or to displace them from) the polity’s dominant narratives and norms. Periclean mourning rituals provide a context of public meaning making that sublimates felt grief and the disruptions of trauma into forms of civic identification and social coherence. As Nicole Loraux has argued, classical funeral oratory aimed to transform the democratic polity from a fractious mixture into “a beautiful, harmonious whole.”⁸⁴ The idealization of the polis aims to dissolve the anxieties provoked by social trauma or loss, and the enduring values of the community provide a means of situating and comprehending the dislocating effects of painful events. In this light, rituals of commemoration must also be seen as civic rites of forgetting.⁸⁵ As Simon Stow has pointed out, this style of public mourning demands little from its audience beyond an uncritical attachment to the polity. By demanding little more than a recommitment to consensual civic norms, however, these rituals and discourses can conceal the contested nature of public traumas and the larger struggle for social recognition.

For instance, consider the Periclean politics of mourning surrounding the memorialization of African American enslavement, de jure discrimination under Jim Crow, and the struggle for legal recognition and social standing represented by the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has moved into a central place within American public memorialization during the latter half of the twentieth century, yet this has seemingly come at the cost of a simultaneous sacralization and temporal restriction of the movement. Civil rights icons such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks are idealized and increasingly placed alongside other consensualist objects of admiration within American history such as Abraham Lincoln.⁸⁶ Yet the lionization of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) means that other relevant figures and movements (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], for instance) are relegated to the position of bit players within the cosmic-political drama through which what King called the moral arc of the universe was bent toward justice.⁸⁷ Even that lionization is often highly amnesic. For instance Rosa Parks is repeatedly memorialized as someone whose “tired feet” inspired her resistance, which neglects the years of focused activism and training that preceded her direct action.⁸⁸ The focus on SCLC leadership, moreover, displaces traditions of grassroots organizing and democratic capacity building in the Deep South that were essential factors in the struggle toward racial equality.⁸⁹

Public acts of memorialization are always selective, and they are additionally political insofar as they shape civic etiquette—the range of expected behaviors, norms and possibilities of democratic life. Consensualizing practices of civic memorialization, then, can dehumanize history’s protagonists (seeing them as superhuman rather than all too human) and depoliticize the past. Retrospective claims about consensual norms displace the contentious struggles and contingent victories of civil rights, as the politics of civil rights become absorbed by a liberal story of pressure groups and steady legislative advance. Consensual practices of civic memorialization also restrict the broader agenda of civil rights, which involved not only the fight against legal discrimination but also against poverty and low wages, along with a developing critique of imperialism and colonialism.⁹⁰ This broader and more contentious agenda is displaced, if not defeated, by an ongoing politics of memory that endlessly replays “I Have a Dream,” but skips over “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in which King conjoined the struggle for civil rights in the United States to the struggle against economic injustice and a transnational movement for human rights. Dominant modes of remembering civil rights reveal an impoverished understanding of the full range of the struggle, its contingent successes, and its unfinished business.⁹¹

Memorialization is a high-stakes game. A public space such as the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro memorializes the struggle for civil rights in a particular way and through a particular lens. Through its selection of various objects and the presentation of particular narratives, it charts the pain, strife, and sacrifice by which social gains have been made. Yet as with all such efforts, the memorialization of civil rights in Greensboro is just as noteworthy for what it leaves out of the story. In this instance, the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 and the disparities and distrust within and between different communities in Greensboro that the events both reflected and served to entrench have been studiously avoided.⁹² The result is a less contentious, less difficult, and less complex political history, etiquette, and identity.

If the agonistic politics of mourning imply a lively, activist rage, then the consensualist politics of mourning recommend civic passivity. Museum visitors are asked to be witnesses to history and to accept or absorb the lessons of the historical struggle for civil rights. Just as with Pericles’s funeral oration, such practices shape their audience into carriers of a corrected, consensual version of social progress and civic identity. Civil rights actors are turned into superhuman figures, and the daily, lived struggle of organizing behind civil rights successes—the slow, patient building of capacity and courage that made democratic change possible—is made fugitive.⁹³ Moreover, events that do not fit the script are split off and left unacknowledged. As a result, communities are politically impoverished by these narratives and their associated rituals.

Nevertheless, the contested meaning of social traumas and the contours of consensus with respect to civil rights are not struggles from which we can easily retreat. The stories that are told about the dead—the meaning that is ascribed to social traumas and struggles, and the practices that are commonly associated with those struggles—inevitably shape political identities, imagination, and outcomes in the present.⁹⁴ In fact, the very question of which lives are “grievable” is a political question of the highest importance.⁹⁵ Cognizant of these facts, some political theorists have attempted to draw distinctions between rituals of commemoration that uncritically reinforce dominant social norms and reinforce patterns of social stratification, versus critical or politicizing forms of memorialization that can serve as the basis for sustained challenges to an amnesic consensualism.⁹⁶ Stow, for instance, has drawn a distinction between Periclean, “romantic” forms of public mourning and a “tragic” style of memorialization that emphasizes social contestation and contingency over consensual norms and narratives of progress.⁹⁷ For Stow, the exemplars in this latter tradition—ranging from Frederick Douglass to Joseph Lowery—provide a necessary “agonistic antidote” to consensualist practices of public mourning.⁹⁸ Yet, as I will argue in more detail in chapter 3, Stow’s tragic exemplars are not so much playing a different, nonconsensualist game as they are attempting to play the game of democratic memorialization better—more inclusively, more honestly, and with a sharper sense of the contingency of progress and the inevitability of contestation. Figures such as Douglass excoriated dominant practices of memorialization, but their critique was aimed at displacing these narratives, not at displacing the process of collective narrativization itself.

As Paul Ricoeur has argued, “consensus is a dangerous game,” but it is also one in which we are unavoidably engaged.⁹⁹ To argue otherwise involves more than the useful application of an agonistic antidote to manic consensualism; it risks a counterpathology that idealizes disruption as such.¹⁰⁰ Again, to criticize the dominant rituals of civic memorialization in Greensboro for their exclusion of the Greensboro Massacre and its aftermath is not to play a different, agonistic game; it is an attempt to play the game of consensus in ways that include difficult, traumatic events alongside those that are “easier” to remember, in the interests of cultivating a more honest and capacious public memory. An enriched public memory can help citizens to acknowledge conflicts in the past and democratically address problems in the present. This is the promise of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a democratic practice of mourning. The GTRC cannot be adequately approached under either the agonistic or consensualist figures of mourning just drawn. Hence the need for a new interpretive lens, which I sketch out in the following section.

Object Relations Psychoanalysis and the Democratic Work of Mourning

It may be argued that the turn to psychoanalysis risks the reduction of political struggles for recognition to the internal dramas of the psyche. Yet in actuality, the turn toward Melanie Klein and object relations enriches social theory, by showing the interconnection between political objects, psychological defense mechanisms, and deep-seated cognitive-affective schemas (or what Klein calls “positions”). This does not reduce the political to the psychological, but it shows the depth of the political and the inevitable intertwinement between the dramas of social and psychic life.¹⁰¹ As Fred Alford has argued, psychoanalytic accounts of social interaction are not so much in competition with institutionally or materially oriented approaches; instead these approaches can complement one another by examining relevant phenomena through different, or multiple, lines of sight.¹⁰² Psychoanalysis can never completely explain political events, but political life cannot be adequately interpreted without an understanding of psychological defenses and dramas.¹⁰³ As Joel Kovel puts it, psychoanalysis “widens the semantic range” and sensitizes political and social theory to the interactions between the psyche and the political.¹⁰⁴ Object relations psychoanalysis is a particularly powerful investigative tool for political theory, because it dislodges Freudian assumptions about asocial drives and focuses attention on the ways that external and internal dynamics reciprocally shape each other. Because it challenges the orthodox Freudian picture of an asocial psyche, the concepts and categories of object relations psychoanalysis are inherently social concepts.¹⁰⁵ For instance, as Meister argues, Klein’s work both “sociologizes the individual” and “psychologizes the group.”¹⁰⁶ And while many social theorists—Meister included—argue that Klein’s focus on the subject’s internal world disqualifies her as a theorist of the political, for Klein this inner world is always in dialogue and tension with the external world of objects and experiences. This makes the work of Klein and of those she influenced, such as D. W. Winnicott, especially valuable for theorizing the interactions between psychological defenses and social phenomena.¹⁰⁷

In this work, I use Kleinian concepts to articulate a social-psychological theory concerned with how communities and citizens can democratically work through and address the legacies of social traumas of misrecognition. I argue that, with respect to both the typical and possible politics of mourning, Klein can give us a vantage point onto social experiences of trauma, loss, and grief. Kleinian concepts, while originating in the seemingly cloistered world of analyst and analysand, can be used to illuminate broader political processes in ways that other, less psychologically attuned theories cannot do.

Klein’s contribution to our understanding of the politics of mourning will be developed through each of the following chapters, but it is worth lingering on some of her concepts at this point, beginning with her understanding of mourning. For Klein, mourning is a repeated developmental challenge or “crossroads” that we encounter “again and again” throughout our lives.¹⁰⁸ Mourning is not primarily or merely the terminable process of accepting the loss of our attachments. Rather, it is the interminable process of mitigating a form of affective-cognitive dogmatism, which perverts our relationships to others and to ourselves. For Klein, the uncertainty and dislocation that accompany loss and pain trigger powerful psychological defenses including splitting, idealization, demonization, and omnipotence. These defenses mitigate anxieties by denying the loss in the first place or by exaggerating the power of the self to master its dependency on others. Through a labor of mourning, however, the ego is (ideally) able to work through these defenses by acknowledging the complexity and ambivalence of both its internal and external worlds. For Klein, then, mourning is less a finite process of putting to rest our lost objects than a broader, ongoing challenge of facing down the complexities and ambivalence of self, other, and world.

Klein’s concept of mourning grows out of her idea of the “positions.” For Klein, individuals experience reality from different cognitive-affective schemas, which she labels the “paranoid-schizoid” and the “depressive” positions. Unlike Freud’s notion of hard developmental stages, Klein’s positions are neither (strictly) chronological nor progressive; instead they refer to the ego’s oscillation between different forms of perceiving internal and external realities depending on environmental stresses and internal capacities. For Klein, the positions are an unavoidable inheritance of the earliest months of life, and they coalesce into different cognitive-affective modes of perception, with associated defenses, that recur periodically throughout life. The positions, in short, are ways of organizing the self, its internal anxieties and fantasies, and its experiences in the world.¹⁰⁹

The paranoid-schizoid position originates at birth, when the ego is relatively unintegrated and incapable of distinguishing sharply between inner and external worlds.¹¹⁰ During the earliest weeks of life, under normal conditions, the unintegrated ego experiences recurrent episodes of both nurturance and deprivation, and these experiences interact with rudimentary cognitive capacities to create powerful fantasies that infuse perceptions and emotions. Within the infant’s psyche a complex inner world is gradually built up through the interactions of fantasy and experience. Initially, the inner world is characterized by a bifurcation between “all-good” and “all-bad” figures reflecting the oscillatory experience between experiences of comfort and extreme stress. The frustration of bodily needs leads to fantasies of an “uncontrollable, overpowering object,”—and these anxious experiences establish “unavoidable grievances” at the heart of relationality.¹¹¹ In Klein’s terms, the early ego splits the world between the all-giving “good breast” and the persecutory “bad breast,” which serves as a receptacle for the negative affects associated with stress and deprivation. The early ego deploys this splitting defense—along with corollary defenses of idealization and demonization—as a hedge against an intolerable reality. Lacking object permanency, the paranoid-schizoid ego splits apart the reassuring and terrifying parts of its environment. Discomfort is projected out onto the fantastical “bad” objects, which are then reinternalized to form the kernel of the first superego, which rages against the subject with all the frustration and anxiety that the ego itself could not contain.¹¹² For Klein, then, early and unavoidable experiences of deprivation and impotency condemn the individual to a (temporary) pathological state of mind whereby their objects of perception are infused with the polarized passions of love and hate. Within the paranoid-schizoid position, the good and bad parts of both self and other are hermetically sealed from each other through fantastical constructs and psychological defense mechanisms. From within this space, the other either merges with and protects the fragile ego (in its role as the “good breast”), or it threatens the self with disintegration or annihilation (i.e., the “bad breast”). This latter figure must be purged out of the system, only to return in the form of the punishing, cruel superego around which persecutory anxieties constellate.

The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by feelings of persecutory anxiety and by manic defenses that distort the perception of self and other in order to protect the fragile ego. Within the depressive position, on the other hand, the ego overcomes these defenses and develops a capacity to integrate the heretofore-polarized aspects of its internal and external worlds. The depressive position is first heralded by the development of object permanency, which marks a cognitive and affective watershed insofar as it permits the discovery that the heretofore-separated good and bad objects are merely parts of the same object—the caregiver. The depressive position, therefore, marks the first appearance of loss—namely, the loss of the protective good breast, which up to this point had been invested with all the feelings of warmth, care, and goodness within the child’s early life. The good breast was a fantasized object that is in reality part of a larger whole. Recognizing the whole other, then, inspires a “psychical weaning” from the compromises and defenses of the paranoid-schizoid position and the bifurcated world of good and evil.¹¹³

The first loss is not the death of the loved object, then, but the death of the early “part objects” as pure sources of love or hatred. As Klein puts it, “With the introduction of the complete object … the loved and hated aspects of the mother are no longer felt to be so widely separated and the result is an increased fear of loss, states akin to mourning, and a strong feeling of guilt.”¹¹⁴ Mourning is the means by which the child can “work over in his mind [the] sense of loss entailed in the mother’s actual imperfections.”¹¹⁵ By this labor, the ambivalence of self and other is first experienced, which liberates feelings of guilt and allows for efforts to repair the damages done through persecutory attacks (in fantasy and otherwise) against the other. The liberation of guilt forms the basis for acts of “reparation”: “When the infant feels that his destructive impulses and phantasies are directed against the complete person of his loved object, guilt arises in full strength and together with that, the overriding urge to repair, preserve or revive the loved injured object.”¹¹⁶

Reparation is the gift of mourning. For Klein, reparation is born within the depressive position by the recognition of the “wholeness” and ambivalence of self and other, and the corollary recognition of the harm done by the persecutory splitting of experience into all good and all bad parts. Nurtured by the labor of mourning, reparation is not a simple empathy for others so much as the recognition that we have damaged the other (and ourselves) by maintaining a fantastical construct that cast them as objects of pure loathing or perfect love. The reparative impulse is essential for building relationships outside paranoid-schizoid fantasies of blissful merger or sheer antagonism. Within the depressive position, the individual has to let go of the image of an ideal or pure object. As a result, conflicts with one’s objects and within one’s self can be made conscious for the first time. As the ego increases its ability to live with the competing and conflicted demands of its objects and its passions, the individual cultivates a deeper capacity for tolerance and generosity. The depressive position in this respect marks a mitigation of cognitive and affective dogmatism, and the overcoming of the compromises and defenses by which the ego keeps the complexity and ambivalence of self and other out of its conscious awareness. As Klein puts it, steps in ego integration result “in a greater capacity … to acknowledge the increasingly poignant psychic reality.”¹¹⁷

Mourning opens up a space of mediation between self and other outside the paranoid-schizoid terms of merger or antagonism. In the paranoid-schizoid position, by contrast, there is no gap between the ego and its relational objects. The compromised ego creates “larger than life” people and emotions, “unmodified by their opposites.”¹¹⁸ Splitting the objects in this way is the infant’s first means of defense against the bewildering array of internal and external stimulations, and the feelings of disintegration that these stimulations provoke. The sanctity of both enemies and friends is protected as a defense against the more complex, ambivalent reality; the loved and hated aspects of experience are isolated from each other through a willful act of negation.¹¹⁹ Within the paranoid-schizoid position, the pain of persecution is preferable to the perplexity of lived experience.¹²⁰

Paranoid-schizoid defenses are an unavoidable side effect of human development, and the paranoid-schizoid position is a continual temptation throughout the course of life. For Klein, experiences of loss—in fact, any painful experience such as uncertainty, frustration, or anxiety—invoke the original instability and chaos of the paranoid-schizoid position. The defenses of this position enable the splitting of internal and external worlds into flat part objects that can be manipulated into a consolatory narrative of demons and angels. Insofar as loss and trauma provoke paranoid-schizoid defenses, they lead to an anxious search for receptacles of focused aggression or outsized love.

However, the internalization of part objects beneath the intense pressures of idealization and demonization comes at high cost: the disavowal of both the internalized objects’ and the self’s ambivalence, and the collapse of a space of mediation between self and other. The work of mourning interrupts the baleful circuit of the paranoid-schizoid position, with its outsized affects of persecutory guilt, resentment, and disintegrative anxiety. In mourning—again, responding not merely to the loss of an object but to the loss of an object as a one-sided persecutory or angelic object—the capacity for reflecting on loss and damage improves and the defenses of idealization, splitting, or denial are mitigated. The alternative pathway of the depressive position allows for the ego’s identification with whole, ambivalent others. These objects then repopulate the individual’s inner world—threatened or destabilized by experiences of loss—which in turn becomes an “assembly” of different voices.¹²¹

But Klein’s story is more complicated than this. Some measure of idealization, Klein implies, is unavoidable as a defense against anxiety. The so-called “good object,” first integrated under paranoid-schizoid pressures, later becomes the center or “focal point” of the integrated ego.¹²² The good object is not the good breast because the good object is a “whole” object. Still, the good object is not entirely distinct from the all-giving, reassuring good breast. Klein implies that the idealization defense that brought into being the latter is in part transformed and in part transferred to the whole, “good” object. It is due to the good object that the ego can become integrated, which implies a “measure of synthesis between love and hatred” in self, other, and the surrounding world.¹²³

The integrated ego, according to Klein, is better able to understand and navigate the conflicts that exist within the self and between self and other. The good object licenses this work of mediation because it reflects a deep-seated experience of “being understood.”¹²⁴ Without this internalized (and partly idealized) object, the ego is more liable to become unintegrated when faced with internal and external pressures. Experiences of being understood, by contrast, can strengthen the ego and increase its ability to bear the conflicts and misunderstandings between and within selves.¹²⁵ Somewhat paradoxically, then, the internalized ideal other (established under paranoid-schizoid pressures) is what permits the process of deidealization—the diminishment of an anxious need for inherently ideal part objects. Something in the self has to be beyond reproach in order for us to reproach ourselves, and if this object were to disappear so too would the work of self-understanding and the capacity for recognition. The establishment of the good object facilitates a work of mourning through which that object’s wholeness and ambivalence are acknowledged and the consolations of perfection and purity are overturned. Instead of an exaggeration of the goodness of the other (or the self) under the pressures of persecutory anxiety, the integrated ego has insight into its own shortcomings or imperfections.¹²⁶ On this basis, the integrated ego is increasingly tolerant of the complexities and ambivalence of its internal and external objects and experiences.¹²⁷ As Klein puts it, the insight gained from integration means that “potentially dangerous parts [of ourselves and others] … become bearable and diminish.”¹²⁸ By contrast, a failure of integration occurs when we project the discomforting parts of the self out into a persecutory other.

Klein’s language and categories seem primarily focused on the intimate world of early life, leading some to assume that her concepts have little, if any, direct political relevance. I argue, however, that this view is a misunderstanding of her work. Klein does locate the first source of intersubjective conflict in life’s earliest moments, and she spends a great deal of time depicting the inner world of the psyche. Yet the inner world of fantasy (conscious and unconscious) is in constant interaction with the external world.¹²⁹ Moreover, the early conflicts of the protoself continue to manifest themselves throughout life. According to Klein, we are split at the core by competing passions of love and hate, which are directed toward and reflected in the world around us, yet which also shape our experience of this world and inflect the array of defenses at our disposal for navigating relations with others. On this reading, Klein’s depiction of the struggle by which we come to terms with the fractious nature of the self and the ambivalence of our inner and external worlds is protopolitical in the way that interpersonal experiences of recognition are for Honneth or combative collaboration is for Luxon because it represents a developmental possibility with implications for political life. At the root of this developmental possibility is our capacity to mourn. Mourning in the depressive position allows suffering to “become productive,” and it stimulates an “enrichment” of a self that is “more capable of appreciating people and things, [and] more tolerant in their relation to others.”¹³⁰ We are not just what or whom we mourn; we are also, in a significant and powerful way, how we mourn.

As with Honneth’s theory of the interpersonal sphere of recognition, however, Klein’s understanding of mourning as a lifelong praxis is both protopolitical and properly political. Social misrecognition, as much as interpersonal misrecognition, can cause a regression to paranoid-schizoid defenses.¹³¹ The challenge of integration therefore expands outward from the early moments of interpersonal life into political discourses and civic relationships. In the words of Gal Gerson, the world of attachments is “concentric, extending from the infant’s first cry to the broadest achievements and failures of civilization.”¹³² In this light, Klein’s theory of the positions also captures key differences between how the space between subjects—between legal and political subjects as much as intimate subjects—is understood and negotiated. According to Eve Sedgwick, for instance, Klein’s positions offer distinct pictures of political agency. Within the paranoid-schizoid position, agency is “all or nothing” because it is colored by fantasies and anxieties of omnipotence and splitting.¹³³ Agency is all or nothing because the self and its others “can only be experienced as powerless or omnipotent.”¹³⁴ By contrast, the depressive position is constructed on an appreciation for ambivalence, or for the awareness of multiple powers, presences, and possibilities.¹³⁵ We might call this a mournful vision of agency, which accepts the difficult copresence of ambivalence and complexity within self and other. For Sedgwick, then, the depressive position gives off an image of power as “a form of relationality that deals in, for example, negotiations (including win-win negotiations), the exchange of affect, and other small differentials, the middle ranges of agency—the notion that you can be relatively empowered or disempowered without annihilating someone else or being annihilated.”¹³⁶

The agency of the depressive position is “a fragile achievement that requires discovering over and over.”¹³⁷ Klein’s positional account of life makes integration a precarious achievement more than a stable outcome. Integration and depressive agency are always susceptible to rupture or failure based on the interactions between external circumstances and internal capacities. The paranoid-schizoid position is a cognitive-affective state to which we habitually return throughout life, as strains and stresses provoke its characteristic defenses and collapse the space of mediation within the self and between self and other. Because any painful experience can set off this process, mourning is an activity that can never be fully finished. Mourning, then, is less a momentary response to loss than it is a way of living in the world with a greater and more tragic sense of appreciation, understanding, and generosity.

The work of Klein’s student and successor D. W. Winnicott helps to further develop these ideas in the direction of a social theory of mourning. Winnicott referred to the integrated ego in the terms of someone “who is capable of being depressed.”¹³⁸ Like Klein’s idea of the depressive position, Winnicott’s notion here is potentially misleading. Depressive capability must be distinguished from outright depression or melancholia, which are typified by an absence of affect, withdrawal from the world, and a disregard for the self (as Freud put it, in mourning the world temporarily becomes “poor and empty” whereas in melancholia “it is the ego itself”).¹³⁹ By contrast, the person capable of being depressed can sustain the stresses and strains within internal and external realities, and this ability serves as a hedge against depression or a debilitating melancholia. As Winnicott puts it, this capability implies that the individual can take “full responsibility for all feelings and ideas that belong to being alive.”¹⁴⁰ Integrated egos are more capable of “find[ing] the whole conflict within the self as well as being able to see the whole conflict outside the self, in external (shared) reality.”¹⁴¹ In Klein’s terms, the capacity for depressive functioning mitigates the temptations toward paranoid-schizoid defenses and allows for the clarification of and engagement with the conflicts that exist within and between selves.

Winnicott’s work also shows how integration of the ego is a social project.

Winnicott argued that cultural symbols, discourses, and spaces were an important part of psychic life, as the latter’s stability is ultimately inseparable from its environmental surroundings. At the root of this claim is Winnicott’s idea of “potential space.” Potential spaces are relational sites “between reality and fantasy, me and not-me, symbol and symbolized … each pole creating, preserving, and negating its opposite.”¹⁴² The idea is that these spaces are jointly created by the efforts of those who enter them; the space becomes a medium of interaction that is qualitatively different from the expectations that the individuals bring into the space. In other words, individuals create potential spaces, but these spaces exceed the sum of individual inputs and generate new and perhaps surprising forms of interaction. In potential spaces, individuals are both joined and separated—neither merged nor absolutely independent—allowing room for interactions that can mitigate the defenses of denial, splitting, and idealization. Examples of potential space include not only Winnicott’s famous example of the transitional object but also the space of analysis and areas of cultural experience.¹⁴³ In this respect, the idea of potential space draws attention away from Klein’s (supposed) focus on internal dramas and toward the interactions between self and other, in-group and out-group, friend and stranger. Bonnie Honig, for instance, has used Winnicott’s idea of potential spaces to theorize the political and cultural conditions conducive to a more generous immigration policy and to less dogmatic forms of cultural and national identity.¹⁴⁴ Following Winnicott, Honig has suggested that “there are institutional and cultural conditions for the proper work of mourning,” and that political action requires and can actively seek to create these spaces and practices of mourning.¹⁴⁵ Potential spaces simultaneously testify to and help to cultivate a capacity for “depressive” social identities, in which clear distinctions between inside and outside are replaced by a more muddled, ambivalent picture of self, other, and world.¹⁴⁶

Potential spaces, in effect, provide social breathing room; they are “the space in which we are alive as human beings, as opposed to being simply reflexively reactive beings.”¹⁴⁷ Potential spaces enable the recognition of the ambivalence and wholeness of self and other, by relieving the pressures of idealization and persecution and allowing for creative engagement between self and the world. What gives these spaces their potential for generating creative or exploratory engagement is the way that subjects mutually experience the space as “not-me,” as “outside magical control.”¹⁴⁸ The meaning of the space, in effect, is built up through this mutual recognition of ambivalence—it unfolds from the simultaneous presence of multiple powers within a space that is beyond any individual’s omnipotent control. The paranoid-schizoid position requires rigid and clearly defined spaces where the answer to the question “Who is in charge here?” can be easily discovered. Spaces reveal their potential when they erode the need for this question through a gradual awareness that the different inhabitants of the space are mutually accountable and that no one is in charge. On this realization, the space between selves becomes a more plastic medium of communication and discovery.¹⁴⁹

Political spaces and institutions can be seen as potential spaces that may weaken (or, conversely, intensify) the defenses inherent to the paranoid-schizoid position.¹⁵⁰ In other words, we can use Winnicott’s ideas to identify and cultivate social settings in which democratic forms of agency might appear. Importantly, this does not presume the possibility of social consensus or the final overcoming of social conflicts. Nothing in Klein or Winnicott suggests that the macrodramas of reconciliation are reducible to the microdramas of self and other, or that integrated selves will not find reason to disagree or even violently clash with each other. As Winnicott colorfully puts it, integrated (or what he calls “democratic”) selves are not incapable of antagonism, but “they have doubts … they are slow in getting the gun in hand and in pulling the trigger. In fact, they miss the bus to the front line.”¹⁵¹ Psychological developmental possibilities aside, however, collective life will still be marked by tensions and conflicts that may often tilt into violence. But object relations psychoanalysis does clearly indicate spaces and practices whereby the psychic work of integration and the social work of recognition and repair can mutually support one another.

I propose that we see Klein’s ideas of the depressive position and its concurrent work of mourning, along with the good object and Winnicott’s idea of potential space, as the kernel of social-political theory of mourning suitable for complex, pluralistic societies ostensibly committed to democratic ideals and practices. Klein saw the overcoming of paranoid-schizoid defenses as the basis of a more tolerant and generous attitude toward the fractiousness and complexity of self and other. In using Klein’s ideas for political analysis, I am arguing that a similar process of facing down the complexity of social traumas can become the basis for a democratic mode of mourning that exceeds a deaf politics of endless agonism while also avoiding the amnesia of consensualism. For Klein, the work of mourning does not erase the conflicts within the self or between self and other; instead, mourning is a repeated process of clarifying and acknowledging these conflicts without the consolations of paranoid-schizoid defenses that simultaneously enshrine our innocence and the others’ guilt. Yet this work of clarifying conflict is joined to a work of seeking and granting understanding qua social recognition. In other words, Klein’s theory of mourning helps us to acknowledge the coexistence of agonism and consensualism, without reducing our aspirations for political life to either of these moments.

Central to the ongoing labor of mourning, as described earlier, is a practice with ambivalence, both within the self and within “whole” others. As the philosopher David Wong has argued, ambivalence destabilizes confident moral judgments and shakes internal feelings of unique rightness or superiority.¹⁵² Consequently, the experience of ambivalence can inspire a desire for mediation—for a cooperative search for new terms amidst an acknowledgement of multiple presences and powers.¹⁵³ Ambivalence can turn overinterpreted and overdetermined social spaces into potential spaces and cultivate depressive forms of agency as so many democratic ripple effects.

In sum, the work of object relations psychoanalysis provides a sharp diagnostic tool for describing the pathologies that shadow agonist and consensualist approaches to the politics of mourning. Klein’s psychological theory of mourning can illuminate the politics of grief by showing how the latter trades on and activates various defenses that operate as mechanisms of denial. Social defenses against trauma and social and political responses to trauma bear a reciprocal relationship to internal, psychic defenses and positions.¹⁵⁴ Even if social institutions are not reducible to psychological or internal dramas, affective-cognitive modes of processing circulate around and contribute to the operation of social and political structures.¹⁵⁵ Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid position, then, helps to conceptualize the interconnection between agonistic and consensualist responses to loss, insofar as they can each trigger a manic politics in which the complexity of self and other is repressed and by which the mediating space of relational power is reduced to a zero-sum struggle for domination.

Klein’s concepts of the depressive position and the good object, on the other hand, offer an alternative pathway for the politics of mourning. The depressive position marks the integration of conflicted passions and objects; it therefore occupies a middle position between amnesic merger and endless antagonism. Klein’s idea of the good object emphasizes the importance of an idealizing commitment that, somewhat paradoxically, allows for the democratic work of de-idealization and relational agency. Winnicott’s supplement to this story is the emphasis on the social and cultural spaces wherein this work of mourning could take place. I argue that the GTRC was both a potential space and a potentially good object, which made social recognition and repair more possible in Greensboro and in those places that might learn from its example.