Loss: The Politics of Mourning (review)

Consider Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, propelled helplessly and blindly towards an unknown future, his anguished gaze fixed on the ruins of the past. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, David Eng and David Kazanjian suggest that our gazes share the angel’s shocked fixity. How can we move beyond the twentieth century’s “losses of bodies, spaces and ideals” (5) without such movement replicating the angel’s helpless immobilization in the face of catastrophe? The eighteen essays in Loss attempt to relieve this fixity, to reimagine the wreckage in catastrophe’s wake, and to reclaim loss as a productive, creative force. Engaging with loss, write Eng and Kazanjian, “generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future” (4).