Scattered thoughts on the tekhne of mourning

In a comment on the post on Derrida and racism below, Matt develops some amazing, compact insights, as he always does. He says:

I finally went and looked up Racism's Last Word, in light of this essay [the post] of yours and Derrida's response to the Columbia students. I'm interested in his conception of the 'work' of art (or at least these works of art) as necessarily pertaining to a future that is not implicit.
If I'm reading correctly, he describes South Africa as a projection and heightening of tensions implicit in the European tradition. Governmental and individual complicity with the regime is in fact a reflection of our own embeddedness in this discourse. But the work, by virtue of standing in this weird, futural relation to the present moment, can present a critique that is also an alternative. We can't get out of our embeddedness in discourse, but in the work of imagining a world without with a different discourse, we somehow give ourself enough space to resist that discourse.
In this, he doesn't seem far from Gillian Rose after all. Of course, she frames the 'work' in relation to textuality in terms of a psychological working-through--cathexis, rather than imagination--but I don't think they end up being too far off from each other.

I won't comment on how the work of art stands in relation to apartheid, but I will say something about "work" and the "work of mourning" in Derrida (which should illumine the problems that need to be developed and tackled in relation to the artwork). We all know that one huge contribution of Derrida was to show that "work," in the word, "artwork," needs to be considered textually. But the challenge to you, Matt, is to show how this too even goes for production or labor, as well as for the psychic work of mourning. So we get three senses of "work" here at play: 1) the work of art, 2) the work in labor and capitalist production, and 3) the psychic work in mourning. Elaborating all of these is a remark made in Specters of Marx that needs to be elaborated to the utmost (also the "elsewhere" needs to be found: I have yet to see what exactly he's referring to, unless it is "Economimesis"):

The logic of the key in which I hoped to orient this keynote address was one of a politico-logic of trauma and a topology of mourning. A normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept, between introjection and incorporation. [My italics, MJ] But the same logic, as we suggested, responds to the injunction of a justice which, beyond right or law, rises up in the very respect owed to whoever is not, no longer or not yet, living, presently living.

Mourning always follows a trauma. I have tried to show elsewhere that the mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production--in what links it to trauma, to mourning, to the idealizing iterability of exappropriation, thus to the spectral spiritualization that is at work in any tekhne.

-Specters of Marx, "In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade," 121-122

What is going on here? Gillian Rose is, actually, being refuted. Or rather, it is this use of "work" that she objects to in her book, Mourning Becomes the Law, to which Matt refers. Why? Derrida on the next page also calls this work of mourning an "interminable task." For Rose, this cannot be. Mourning for Rose is the space of normativity, of health, precisely in its readiness or anticipation of an ability to mourn again. One could call this an interminable task, but Rose would deny that this is the case. I'll stop here, though I have more to say about this.

All I'm going to do is indicate how this passage needs to be read in order to grasp what Matt is saying and also where he needs to go, given that I don't think you can say ultimately that Rose and Derrida are on the same page. 

The language in this passage is absolutely Heideggerian: exappropriation, spiritualization (which is also Hegelian, cf. Derrida's Of Spirit for how this relates to Heidegger), and finally tekhne. The last concept shows you that work is taken out of a specific context--which is Heidegger's reflections on art in "The Origin of the Work of Art," and also in his writings on technology where he contrasts tekhne and poiesis. But Derrida shows you that tekhne should be considered with respect to a "trait:" that is, that irreducible point or stigme which cannot be worked upon or subsumed into a logic of work as production. Where Heidegger tried to redefine tekhne with respect to how it had access to presence, Derrida inverts this task and shows how tekhne's access to presence is founded upon a recourse to representation--and specifically the most representable, that which exceeds through representation the logic of representation in its being too representable, the point, the grapheme, the trait, the trace, infinite iterability.

Given this, Derrida then redefines trauma as this trace. This doesn't mean he expands the definition of trauma to encompass anything and everything, like Cathy Caruth (who thinks she is being a good Derridian but just ends up as a hesitant Lacanian), but means that you only work with reference to it. You only genuinely can mourn when you account for this trace somehow, and that means introducing trauma into your economy of representation precisely without being able to see how to do this or being ready for it (this is the difference from Rose). In fact, rarely does trauma strike--if only because the ethical is this relationship to trauma as infinite iterability in fact it is impossible to be responsible for it, to take up a comportment to it. So there is no trauma and there is trauma. Trauma can either be there or not. This is different than it just being everywhere (Caruth).

So the work is a comportment to the trace, a comportment that is impossible to carry out. Thus this work is absolutely the same as melancholia, or, to be more precise, inhabits the difference between mourning and melancholia. Here is the work of mourning--a mourning that can never be separated from the impossibility of carrying it out as work, as production. This is what Derrida means when he says mourning lies between introjection and incorporation, between intaking and embodying.

If one gets this, one can then look at the stigme and the trace in relationship to art, and see how the work of art would be similar to what it is impossible to mourn--trauma.