Aberrations of Mourning

Laurence A. Rickels moved to the West Coast in 1981 after completing graduate training in German philology at Princeton University. While in California he earned a psychotherapy license. He has published numerous studies of the phenomenon he calls “unmourning,” a term that inspired his trilogy Aberrations of Mourning, The Case of California, and Nazi Psychoanalysis. He has also written the coursebooks The Vampire Lectures and The Devil Notebooks. All of these books have been published by the University of Minnesota Press.

"This book shatters the iron collar of German Studies in America. Brilliant and articulate, Professor Rickels exercises a rigorous erudition over works ranging from Lessing to Artaud. It is as if these works had fallen under a spell, responding willingly to the relentless demands of a master reader. Laurence Rickels’s work marks a moment in what I would call the New Wave sensibility in literary criticism. In the era following Vietnam, schizonomadic thought, and the technological incursions of the media, Aberrations of Mourning offers an urgently timed meditation on our cryptological era." -Avital Ronnell"Aberrations of Mourning contributes to the vanguards of critical thinking by establishing connections not only between generations and cultures, but between this world and that absolutely other world: it continues the search for and recovery of those missing in history’s natural disaster-the disaster of nature." -Akira Mizuta Lippit"For Rickels, the link between technology and mourning isn’t merely Freudian and speculative, but also solidly historically grounded…And the literature that emerges in the age of communications technologies-modernist literature-is this cult’s expression, its record, its holy script." -The Guardian

• Preface: Invitation to a ReprintingAberrations of MourningIntroduction1. Avuncular Structures (Sigmund Freud/Friedrich Nietzsche)2. The Fate of a Daughter (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing)3. The Father's Imprisonment (Wilelm Heinse)4. Necrofiliation (Antonin Artaud)5. Regulations for the Living Dead (Gottfried Keller)6. Burn Name Burn (Adalbert Stifter)7. Warm Brothers (Franz Kafka)8. Aristocriticism (Karl Kraus)9. The UnbornNotesIndex