EROS IN MOURNING
BY HENRY STATEN
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995
Nouri Gana
Now that my ladder is gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
In the beginning there was eros and mourning, then, wearied of
scenes of unseasonable grief, Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity,
among others, joined forces to create and disseminate a prophylac-
tic theory of managing mortal eros via the implementation of an
economics of idealization and transcendence. This, according to
Henry Staten, is squarely the gist of the trajectory that the whole
Western tradition has followed in its hitherto contested relation to
eros. Eros in Mourning is a fascinating remapping of such a trajec-
tory through an “economized” engagement of several variations
on two “arche-texts”: Homer’s Iliad and the Gospel of John. The
subsequent chapters of the book—which range from studies of the
troubadour song, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Lacan’s Seminars—seek to lay bare the
literary inscriptions of the sedimentations of the strategies of ide-
alization and transcendence in the face of the erotic anxiety hang-
ing over the horizon of desire.
Staten’s argument, exposed in the Wrst chapter, titled “The Argu-
ment,” is by and large rounded out in his applicative forays into
the Iliad and the Gospel of John. In the spirit of deconstruction,
namely Jacques Derrida’s large corpus on the subject, Staten under-
stands mourning not exclusively as a reaction to loss or, as Freud
Cultural Critique 61—Fall 2005—Copyright 2005 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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would have it, as a process of healing from loss but as a dialectic
that structures every move in the formation of object relations. More-
over, at the core of this “dialectic of mourning” are not only the
moments of libidinal approach, attachment, and loss but also the