Regretting the ungrievable: Affective politics, cruel optimism and biopower in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer

This article argues that regret in The Corpse Washer is not a private sentiment but a politicized affective structure shaped by post-invasion biopolitics. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of grievability, this article reads Jawad’s mourning as a quiet protest, a fragile assertion of humanity amid the debris of imperial abstraction. Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism lends language to Jawad’s longing – for an elsewhere, a before, or perhaps only a pause in the forward march of loss. And Michel Foucault, always circling the thresholds of power and death, offers a way to see how sovereignty retracts itself, how the care of the dead is delegated to the privatized, the solitary and the exhausted – when the state has turned away. These theoretical strands are not simply applied; they are embodied. They haunt the novel as the dead haunt Jawad, as regret shadows every gesture he cannot complete. The Corpse Washer does not offer resolution. It offers, instead, texture – of grief as it accumulates unevenly, distributed by war, by empire and by the slow decay of meaning. What Antoon offers is not comfort, not healing, but a trembling space in which to dwell beside the afterlives of violence and with the bodies – living and dead – left behind.