Paper short abstract:

My paper considers the relationship between grief, empathy, and openness to others, human and nonhuman. Taking the notion that we are undone by grief quite literally, it reads grief as producing an ontological vulnerability that can open us up to nonhuman presences, including the dead.

Paper long abstract:

My paper considers the relationship between grief, empathy, and openness to all kinds of others, human and nonhuman. We sometimes say that the recently bereaved have been undone by grief, seeing presences or hearing voices that are not there. I take this notion of being undone seriously, asking after the bodily fragmentation that grief enacts, the undoing of the boundaries we secular moderns imagine as "I." Drawing on philosophers Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe, I read grief not as debility but as a mode of capacitation. As Derrida notes in an essay on blindness, in this mode, "The eye would be destined not to see but to weep," and in the moment when those tears veil sight, they also "unveil what is proper to the eye." I therefore read grief - and the vulnerability it produces - as having the potential to open us up to the possibility of experiencing nonhumans - including no-longer-humans, i.e. the dead - in ways that upend secular notions of the real, and that extend the sensory (in)capacities that constitute the secular-modern self. I draw on both ethnography (especially Tibetan frameworks of death and dying) and non-scientific genres - Joan Didion's memoir about bereavement and the sci-fi film Arrival - to work through this relationship between grief and openness to unexpected presences.