“누가 알리-같이 가는 길에 이야기를 나눌 수 있을지”: 데리다의 애도 이론으로 울프의 『제이콥의 방』 읽기

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) has the theme of how to deal with the loss of the loved ones during the World War I and properly mourn them. Following the theoretical leads of Jacque Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Judith Butler, this essay investigates political function of Woolf's melancholic language of mourning. Derrida's process of mourning—that is dependent on his concept of différance—somewhat dissents from Freudian successful mourning process. Although the act of identifying with the loved, yet, lost ones and constantly mourning them is neither healthy nor natural to Freud, Derrida criticizes Freudian ‘successful’ mourning process, that is without melancholic attachment with the deceased, as a violent act that shuts down our connections to them. This paper investigates how Woolf and Derrida both propose the act of melancholic remembrance of the lost as an ‘impossible’ yet ‘potent’ political act and further demand for the new type of language for the allegorical remembrance of the others. Derrida's mourning always accompanies the ghost that haunts us and it appears in the form of ‘repetition’ in language, preceding its origin. Woolf in Jacob's Room, similarly encourages us to be haunted by the ghosts of the past and learn to remember their traces, the traces of being ghost-written in order to properly mourn them.