Grief and the Poet

Philosophy, 2023

Can metaphysics yield the consolations of philosophy? One possibility, defended by Derek Parfit, is that reflection on the nature of identity and time could diminish both fear of death and grief. In this paper, I assess the prospect of such consolation, focussing especially on attempts to console a grieving third party. A shift to a reductionist view of personal identity might mean that death is less threatening. However, there is some evidence to suggest that such a shift does not necessarily translate into less death anxiety. Moreover, applied to grief at loss of another, such a perspective may be misdirected. A temporally neutral perspective offers a theoretically powerful way of reducing the sense of loss at being separated in time from a loved one. However, it is unclear whether it is psychologically possible to achieve. Even if it were possible, it may not diminish the pain of separation. I identify a serious challenge to philosophical consolation for grief. The greater the consolation that is offered, the greater the risk of losing important attachments and the less it may be psychologically accessible.

Rowman&Littlefield Int., 2017

Inspired by the philosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to affect, Affective Connections disavows the dominant oppositional discourse around representation to offer an affirmative approach to perception, cognition and experience. It advances a new materialist concept of synaesthetic perception, where synaesthesia is understood as a union of senses. This idea offers a new figuration for thinking about our cognition, exploring the role of embodied experience and the agency of matter in the production of knowledge. Looking at a number of memorials, memory sites and artworks relating to the Holocaust the book uses this idea of synaesthetic perception to explore trauma, memory and the production of art in relation to painful memories. In doing so, it demonstrates that modes of interacting with the past and encountering the lived experience of trauma can trigger a deeper understanding of these events and produce more complex forms of affective connections. It proposes a shift away from empathy towards sympathy (understood in new materialist terms), not just as a sentimental response to trauma but as an affective notion that allows for a more comprehensive grasp of experiences of discrimination, exclusion, suffering, or pain.

Purpose-In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists. Approach-We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment. Findings-Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Inquiry 53 (1), 2010

Donald Gustafson has argued that grief centres on a combination of belief and desire: (1) The belief that the subject has suffered an irreparable loss. (2) The desire that this should not be the case. And yet, as Gustafson points out, if the belief is true, the desire cannot be satisfied. Gustafson takes this to show that grief inevitably implies an irrational conflict between belief and desire. I offer a partial defence of grief against Gustafson’s charge of irrationality. My defence rests on two elements. First, I offer an alternative model of emotion, which presents emotions as complex episodes, initiated by emotional appraisals. Secondly, I appeal to John Bowlby’s account of grief to argue that grief involves two forms of sadness (anguish and desolation) which Gustafson’s analysis runs together. I concede that anguish does characteristically involve an element of irrationality. But the irrationality of anguish does not arise from an apparently gratuitous clash between belief and desire, but from a conflict between emotion and belief – a form of irrationality that is both familiar and easily explained. Moreover, desolation need not involve any irrationality.

2013

In this thesis I explore the contemporary grief memoir, an increasingly popular subset within the autobiography genre, and one that primarily concerns authors' subjective recollections and responses to the rupture in the fabric of their lives caused by the death of an intimate other-typically a spouse, parent or child. In my exegesis I examine Joan Didion's grief memoir-The Year of Magical Thinking (2011 [2005])written in the year following the sudden death of her husband of forty years and fellow writer, John Dunne, and the concurrent serious illness and hospitalisation of their adult daughter, Quintana, in 2004. In particular I analyse how Didion's memoir addresses the rupturing of her reflexive individuality and especially her dispositional orientation and idealization of an agentic, informed and progressive self as key components of her self-identity. In my creative non-fiction writing-Walking Grieved: a mediation of love, loss & memory-I explore the rupture and my responses occasioned by the death of my wife in 2003. I specifically reflect on how this has impacted on my romantic, familial and other self-identities and on my understandings of the constructs (social, historical and subjective) of intimate love, dying and death, memory, enduring grief, elective sociality and the narrations of self and other. Contemporary grief narratives represent an emerging body of literary work and socio-psychological theorizing that contests the 'denial of death' (Ariès 2008 [1981]: 559) ethos prevalent in modern Western societies. They also contest the equally prevalent Freudian model of pathological grief that asserts survivors need to 'move on' from grieving to form new intimate attachments, ideally within months (Dennis 2008; Neimeyer et al 2001). These memoirs represent a contemporary, even postmodern, form of ars moriendi and promote varied forms of 'textured recovery' (Prodromou 2012: 57) that are based on subjective, nuanced and eclectic grieving processes and outcomes. These include highly personal searches for understanding and comprehension of the death, of rupture and grieving, and the fashioning of post-rupture identities, ideas, values and practices that frequently incorporate the deceased and which span a range of themes-restorative, evaluative, interpretive, affirmative, affective, transformative (Dennis 2008). As a form of autobiography, grief memoirs also address issues of self-identity as a series of constantly evolving narratives or stories that individuals tell about themselves and which, in feedback loop, both generate and reflect the evolving modalities and ethics of autobiography (Eakin 1999, 2008). Narrated self-identity is always period and socio-culturally specific. For the middle-classes and higher social strata of post-industrial societies, self-identity therefore routinely coalesces around the hegemony and practices 'reflexive individuality' (Beck 2002: 3)-especially the ideals of agentic, knowledgeable, I warmly acknowledge the constant, proactive support and astute guidance of my supervisor, Dr Ingrid Horrocks, and likewise the generous input of my fellow MCW students and Massey University's English lecturers during the residential course. To Dr Samantha Lentle-Keenan, I warmly thank you for your critical reading of early drafts of my creative, non-fiction scribblings and for many enlightening discussions on dying and death. To Carla Rey Vasquez, I thank you for your superb friendship and for your supportive, perceptive reading and editing of both my exegesis and creative writing. And to Corinna Howland, I thank you for being a wonderful daughter, an exemplary sister to your brother Estlin, and also for your constructive and critical support, reading and editing of my thesis throughout. Most of all, I acknowledge the love and passion of my late wife Karen. Clearly this work exists because of you as my life and my enrichment-for you my darling. R.I.P.