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In The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film, a densely argued critique on mourning in our contemporary culture, Alessia Ricciardi asks an evocative question: What happens to grief in a less-than-serious society? In our trendy, celebrity-obsessed media-world, mourning is less inimical than unrecognized. The gimmicks of the moment, not as unpretentious as they pretend to be, are demanding if not voracious, and the strident imperatives of contemporary pop-culture (have sex! feel nothing!) do not so much deny death as ignore its emotional reverberations. At the same time, some of postmoderism, operating by the cynical assembly of cultural fragments, artistic arrangements designed for stylistic impressions rather than substantive insights, prides itself on a deconstructive decentering that could not achieve its aesthetic dislocations without an evasion of feeling.
The control of affect in contemporary culture is captured in Ricciardi's notion of the “fetish” as a kind of updated literality, art as a commercialized thing-in-itself, taken as a physical phenomenon saleable or acquirable in the economy of commodity-interchange, Jameson's “late-capitalism.” At the meeting point of late capitalism and post-moderism, the old fashioned 1960s-1970s intellectual, the “aging hippy” or antediluvian beatnik, becomes irrelevant, transformed into the hip metrosexual, the cultural consumer acquiring the music or painting or film that once signaled us, as Rilke said, to change our lives. Instead of changing we pad our lives with precisely those artifacts that once demanded critical introspection, an inner remaking. We acquire objects rather than alter values, and grief is not cost effective. Hence our time for Ricciardi marks an “end of mourning,” a finality against which she gamely mounts a sympathetic reading of the masked, continuing aesthetics of grief as “the ends of mourning.” She examines the beauty that can grow from bereavement not so much in “psychoanalysis, litera