‘Beyond’: Reading (toward) Drucilla

This paper enacts a work of mourning inspired by Drucilla Cornell’s own writings on the work of mourning in The Philosophy of the Limit. I begin by reflecting on the theme of the ‘beyond’ across her writings and, in particular, on how this ‘beyond’ names the space-time of the Other that keeps the present out of joint so that neither the past nor the future can ever be captured by an ontology of ‘presence’. It then looks at how she links the ‘beyond’ to the work of mourning – a letting go of any attempt to capture or possess the Other. Reading these reflections through Derrida’s thinking of writing as the prosthesis of memory, I argue for a practice of reading Drucilla’s texts as a work of mourning that allows her to live on in the traces of her life that are her books. I then (re)turn to the interpretation of Fanon’s psychoanalytic papers offered by Drucilla and me in our collaborative work, The Spirit of Revolution , to link the work of mourning to the collective politics of revolution. For Drucilla, I argue, it is through collective struggle, in fidelity to those who have died in the name of justice, that keeps the necessary work of mourning from sliding into individualized melancholia or destructive ‘acting-out’.