Eros in Mourning

At the end of Henry Staten's breathtaking Eros in Mourning we are left to stare blindly into the awesome face of that which is said to transfix the canonical avatars of Western man from the grieving hero Akhilleus (Achilles) in Homer's Iliad to the death-driven psychoanalyst in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan... A splendid series of readings.

Staten is at his most astonishing when he illustrates how texts that on the manifest level appear to advocate an idealizing preservation of the self, on a latent one advocate a radical embrace of mortality and an absolute expenditure of the self.

Eros in Mourning offers the groundwork for a new poetics, which we can confidently call a poetics of mourning.

Eros in Mourning situates Jacques Lacan in the thanatoerotophobic tradition of misogyny. Luminous and erudite textual-historical analyses ofthe European tradition from Homer to Conrad perform the task. On this trajectory, Staten opens up Plato and Courtly Love, Hamlet and ParadiseLost, Dante and Madame de Lafayette in new ways. A compelling and brilliant book.

Each chapter is a tour de force of its own. The chapter on Christianity alone, with its extraordinary Nietzschean affirmation of the figure of Christ, tells more than a whole bag of the usual cultural studies! If you did not read this book, don't say you were not warned what you are missing!