"What counts as a life worth mourning?": A Comment on the Rhetorics and Ethics of Mourning

In her article "Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America,” Erika Doss identifies situations in which communal expressions of mourning determine who does—and does not—count as a person whose death is worth grieving, and, by implication, whose life was valuable. For example, in the aftermath of the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, students, families, church groups, and other members of the community mourned publicly for the lost lives by creating memorials, like the makeshift memorial of flowers, footballs, and school jerseys that erupted just hours after the shooting at a nearby park (Doss 296). In addition, carpenter Greg Zanis constructed crosses on a hill by the high school for each of the thirteen people killed—and the shooters, who committed suicide—crosses that served as public sites of mourning for both victims and perpetrators (Doss 311).

While some mourners left tokens and cards asking forgiveness at the crosses of the shooters, public dispute broke out about whether the shooters deserved to be mourned. The father of one of the student victims, Brian Rohrbough, removed the killers’ crosses only two days after their construction, complaining that “’it was an outrage to use a Christian symbol to honor the murderers at a victims’ site’” (Lowe and Guy qtd. in Doss 311). Rohrbough also helped relatives of another student victim chop down two of the fifteen trees planted by a local church to memorialize everyone who died in the tragic event (Doss 312).

While Zanis viewed the killers as “’victims of society,’” sharing the church’s recognition of them as worthy of commemoration like the people they killed, Rohrbough and other mourners recognized the killers as “undeserving of any form of commemoration or consideration”—as if through their brutal actions they had divested themselves of personhood worthy of mourning (Gray qtd. in Doss 311; Doss 311-312). Doss shows that what counts as lost personhood or subjectivity deserving of grief is constructed and in part projected onto individuals by their companions and communities.

Memorials of the Columbine shooting seem to have served rhetorical functions within the Colorado community. The fifteen crosses and trees appealed to audiences that valued all human life in a broad sense. Zanis conveyed his view of the shooters as "'victims'" themselves by memorializing them alongside the people they killed, affirming that their lives were, at least in a fundamental sense, as valuable as the lives of their victims (Gray qtd. in Doss 311). Zanis's crosses and the church's tree memorial apparently aimed to unite a grief-stricken community around the common value of human life. In response to a tragedy that ruptured the community through violent loss of life, these memorials seem to have emphasized communal connections; these memorials suggested that mourners could refuse to perpetuate such ruptures by focusing on the unity of a community that values all human life and mourns all loss of human life.

These appeals to unity and shared experiences of mourning, however, obviously excluded audiences like Rohrbough, who felt that people could divest themselves of any inherent or fundamental value by killing others. Rohrbough seems to represent the position that an ethical community refuses to affirm the value of any person who inflicts substantial harm on others. What Zanis and the church view as a unifying value of all humanity, Rohrbough and his ilk view as a divisive, dangerous inclusion of harmful individuals. Somewhat ironically, however, Rohrbough's opposition to the memorials' unifying appeals led to more destructive actions through his violation of the two crosses and trees.

What counts as a life worth mourning is rhetorically constructed, as the memorials of the Columbine shooting and Rohrbough's responses to them indicate. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas seems to affirm that a person's ethical value is determined through her rhetorical situations. Levinas argues that one's humanity is determined by the justice—or injustice—of her response to death. For Levinas, the human subject responds to the injustice that “inheres, at least potentially, in every death” by aiming to protect the other from an unjust death, even to the point of self-sacrifice (Spargo, Vigilant Memory 64). Such sacrificial responsibility to and for the other gives rise to one’s subjectivity, according to Levinas, even in the moment of death. Self-sacrifice therefore paradoxically may be both the end of one’s life and the beginning or epitome of one’s humanity—a way of sustaining connection with the other through death.

When viewed through the lens of Levinasian responsibility, death and loss seem to serve as exigences in rhetorical situations that determine one’s humanity, based on her just or unjust response to the other’s death. Because a just response to the other’s death aims to preserve both the other’s life and one’s connection with the other, this response seems to involve transforming the separation that death invokes into a kind of connection with the other. Rhetoric shares a similar aim, as Kenneth Burke explains in his definition of identification as a way of overcoming separation from others by creating connections. When death and loss rupture community, as with the Columbine shooting, bereaved survivors seem to desire affirmations of their values and of ethical communities—whatever their definitions of those may be.

Part of emotional experiences of grief may, therefore, entail a desire for the kinds of connections and communal unity for which rhetoric aims, as if mourning expresses a rhetorical motive. For Levinas, such a rhetorical motive is part of our ethical nature, since we arise as human subjects in response to the other, to whom we address ourselves ("Ethics"). In "Substitution," Levinas characterizes the human subject as one who is ethical, responsible to and for the other prior to any "intentionality," consciousness, or emotion; (101). Responsibility shapes our very capacity for emotion, as Levinas suggests in "Dying For . . ." when he claims that the responsibility conveyed through sacrifice for the other "would be . . . the primordial inflection of the affective as such" (216). All emotion, including mourning, therefore seems to emerge in the context of one's capacity for ethical responsibility. This responsibility, in turn, seems essentially rhetorical insofar as it emphasizes responses to the other, to an audience, whose very presence confers personhood to the self.

A Levinasian re-phrasing of the question "What counts as a life worth mourning?" might be something like "Why is my life worth mourning? What justifies my presence?" For Levinas, what justifies a life and makes it worth mourning is a person's rhetorical, responsible relationship to the other and her death. In these respects, ethical and rhetorical perspectives both seem essential in exploring the questions like "What counts as a life worth mourning?"

-Sarah Hart, Graduate Student, English Department 

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1950. Print.

Doss, Erika. "Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America." Material Religion 2.3 (2006): 294-319. PDF file.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Dying For . . . .” Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 207-217. PDF file.

---. “Ethics as First Philosophy.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. by Sean Hand. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1989. 75-87. Print.

---. “Substitution.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. by Sean Hand. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1989. 88-125. Print.

Spargo, R. Clifton. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, UP. 2006. Print.