Agonistic Mourning

Athena Athanasiou departs from recent discussions of mourning, including in the work of Judith Butler, by raising an altogether original question which both challenges and extends the current orthodoxy: what would it be like to mourn the dead of the enemy? She draws on a wide range of philosophical and political theories to develop a new notion of agonistic democracy. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade, Serbia {Zene u Crnom), she suggests that we can understand their desire for the political as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.