Mourning Person

…how to mourn a missing body, a body that has gone missing even to itself, spirited away, a body whose wounds will disappear without a trace, like Sade's Justine, forever young and beautiful, intact and virginal–a continually unwritten surface, unscarred despite an infinity of mutilations?

I recently revisited this stunning passage from Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution after a particularly challenging session with my psychoanalyst. In the session, I was thinking about the body, my body in particular, and the identity of being disabled. In returning to this passage, it appeared as though I was searching for something—a feeling, a sensation, perhaps, an affect—with respect to how I, at a very personal and subjective level, experienced my disability. I felt as though my body had gone missing; more specifically, it felt as though it had gone missing to myself. When, then, does a body—a disabled body—become a person? Is it when the fantasy of the perfect able-bodied figuration can be mourned? Comay's passage concerns Antigone mourning the death of her brother Polynices. The tragic Greek heroine recognized that the only ethical thing to do is to bury and mourn her brother, despite the aggressive injunction against it. She saw in this act of mourning—an act that could cost her her own life—an opportunity to recognize the body of her brother as a person who deserved to be mourned, a person deserving of grief. In my case, who does (or, has to do) the work of mourning, which ultimately might be the work of recognizing the other as a person? Does it fall on myself or on those others around me in the world who perceive my bodily difference? Or both? Is this work of mourning able-bodied-ness an ethical act, perhaps the ethical act par excellence, of recognizing the personhood implicit in the otherness that disability represents within the normative world?

When I refer to my body as having gone missing to myself, I want to be clear that