The Gift of Grief

Abstract

In bringing the relational ground of our being into a sharp and painful relief, grief may at times potentiate a renewed engagement with the world in which new possibilities are disclosed to us. Tracing the contours of those moments where the gift of grief becomes visible in the lives and work of two thinkers who experienced devastating personal losses amid the Great War — the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl — the article elaborates a phenomenological anthropological perspective on grief and grieving. While still painful and world-destroying, the atmosphere of grief that these two thinkers experienced also gave rise in its wake to new ways of orienting and responding to the world in their lives and scholarly work.