LESSONS IN LOSS

Vincent Delecroix

(Payot & Rivages, 272 pages, 2019)

***The winner of Le Prix des Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco***

At first glance, the title Lessons in Loss suggests that Vincent Delecroix has conventional wisdom to impart on what it is to lose something or someone. Instead, we are presented with a new philosophy of loss full of contradictions, paradoxes, phantom limbs, and displacement that directly challenges the tendency to simply “move on” or to “process” loss. Delecroix describes the extent of what we have lost: loss of life, livelihoods, memory, youth, and even the world, as it once was.

Lessons in Loss turns to philosophy, literature, psychoanalytical theory, history, ethics, and Delecroix’s own experiences to reveal that human experience is constructed on and coexists with profound absences. We descend to the underworld with Aeneas; we consider the work of myths, and the historical figures whose deaths transformed them into symbols of piety, courage, and power; we revisit a pivotal act in Mozart’s Figaro, in which Barberina displaces the grief of a much larger loss (love) to the smaller grief (the loss of her pin); we lose ourselves in the same forest as Descartes’ lone traveler; and we contemplate the ruins of Rome.

Delecroix emphasizes that loss is not merely the disappearance of someone or something: It is a real rupture of our relationship with the world, a broken link that had previously situated us in relation to everything we know and love. This presence of the absent is sensibly true, and perhaps more “present” in its absence than ever, and any attempt to deny how loss lives within us involves a constant pathology. The author turns here to Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary and Günther Anders’ writings in exile to illustrate that the experience of grief is not a linear process, but cyclical, disjointed, and certainly outside our ability to control.

Although this is a book that addresses loss unwaveringly, it is by no means a resignation to it. Lessons in Loss reflects on, but does not wallow in, its certainty with a captivating intellectual curiosity whereby the many instances of collective and individual losses explored throughout expose the structures—economic, religious, historical, judicial, and more—upon which humanity stands. This is a powerful contribution to the philosophical canon on loss, in much need of a modern sensibility.

Vincent Delecroix is the director of Philosophy and Religious Studies at l’École pratique des hautes études. He is the author of several works, including Tombeau d’Achille, which was awarded the Grand Prix de littérature de l’Académie Française. Also a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Delecroix is a specialist of Søren Kierkegaard and regular guest on France Culture radio.