Marc Nichanian’s dead witness revisited through “Mourning and Melancholy” :|from historical loss to structural lack

Abstract

This study has two main objectives: The first aim is to produce a comprehensive secondary source on Marc Nichanian’s theoretical framework. And the second aim is to explore the potential results of an encounter between Marc Nichanian’s theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this thesis, I examine the debates around the interdiction of mourning, the death of the witness and the disintegration of language, locate them with regard to the literature on mourning and melancholy, and demonstrate that the impossibilities made visible by Nichanian lie beyond a historical loss, in a more fundamental level, in the repetition of a primordial impossibility that is the structural lack in the Other. I argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis enables us to better comprehend Nichanian’s approach to loss, mourning, and melancholy and endows us with conceptual tools to formulate a different conceptualization of mourning.