A Heart Under Attack
Pitfalls of the weathering hypothesis
Rouzbeh Shapdey
The racial intrigues, spinning off local narrations
of stasis, the layers of inconceivability, intractable narrations
unforgivable narrations, that
may cause, at any moment, explosions that I suppress, but they detonate
nevertheless in me
in me the duration of stones
I owe my beating heart a debt for its endurance, its persistence, its
profound knowledge that is beyond any capacity to know its amplitude for taking these detonations and insisting on living, on
—Dionne Brand, “Nomenclature for the Time Being” (2022)
When Erica Garner lost her father to state-sanctioned murder at the hands of the police, her heart became a metaphorical vessel of pain belonging to her and Black women living across a nation built and sustained on antiblack violence. Three years later, when she died of a postpartum infarct at the tender age of twenty-seven, Garner’s heart—having grown large and weary from this pain—became a symbol of its untenable cost.
In the months following Garner’s premature death, a plethora of articles relating the physical tolls of systemic racism on Black women’s health surfaced online. Media outlets from Elle to Vice joined in diagnosing racism as Garner’s cause of death, citing as evidence a study about a phenomenon by the name of “weathering.” Coined in 1990 by Arline Geronimus, a researcher of racial health disparity at the University of Michigan, the “weathering hypothesis” attributes the increased rate of morbidity and mortality among Black people in the United States to the accumulation of “lifelong physiological stress-mediated wear and tear.” Notably, Geronimus demonstrates that these disparities cannot be explained by socioeconomic status alone. Irrespective of class, Black people—especially Black women—are sicker than white people. Hence, weathering: the process of erosion undergone by inorganic materials through long exposures to the atmosphere.
“In my text, the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack.” In her magnanimous study of weather In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe nebulizes the violence of antiblackness to a fine atmospheric spray, illuminating its pernicious enveloping, naming its “predictably unpredictable changes . . . that, nonetheless, remain antiblack.” In the wake of slavery, in the waking of its afterlives, Sharpe identifies the foreclosed forecast of antiblack violence as that which conglomerates time and space, singularizing yet never singular. Half a century earlier, Frantz Fanon diagnosed a similar pathology of atmosphere when, through his analyses of psychosomatic afflictions plaguing Algerians during the country’s war of liberation, he identified—no, sensed—an atmospheric violence whose presence, impalpable and leadening, deeply affected the colonized’s nerves and muscles.
It enters via sedimentation, believed Fanon, lodging itself into the muscles, seeding itself in the brain, crystallizing. For Sharpe, antiblack violence, its weather, becomes aspirated, inflaming arborescent alveoli at the decisive moment when one can no longer hold one’s breath. For Geronimus and her study of weathering, violence is metabolized by the Black body as stress in the course of coping with immaterial and material instantiations of antiblackness—a process that, in the physiological literature, is referred to as allostasis and its over/load. The price the body pays.
But why must the body pay? Since its eruption from the realm of scientific concepts into popular anti-racist discourse, weathering has rapidly become naturalized as the principal cause of Black unhealth attributable to antiblackness. At times, the discourse it generates approaches the self-evidence of tautology: Black people are sick in America because of weathering—weathering is caused by being Black in America. It is this imaginative ease, the anosognosic innocence with which Black life and pathology are scientifically sutured in the weather that worries this text and fuels its critique of the weathering hypothesis. Resisting weathering’s reduction of antiblack atmospheric violence to impotent concepts of stress and refusing its mystification of this violence as pathophysiology, this text examines Geronimus’s key studies in order to better understand their political valence, amplify their internal contradictions, and reinterpret the bodily dramas they set forth.
There is gravity in the stories we tell about how violence enters, circulates, and inhabits the body—stories that sometimes bear the names “biology” and “physiology.” According to the Caribbean polymath Sylvia Wynter, the co-constituting relationship between bios and mythos—science and the word—was eclipsed by the Enlightenment epistemological formation of a colonial genre of the human overdetermined by biological narratives: the “biocentric” human. Throughout the centuries, positivist science and biological determinism have, in the name of this human, formed a nexus of antiblack harm that is impossible to overstate; a methodology whose appetite for evidence of that which is always already known reenacts violence under the cover of empirical proof, while fixing the Black body as the site of studious data collection. While it is this author’s firm belief that no justice can be sought under the cover of biocentrism, by tracing an immanent critique of weathering focused on how—not the fact of—its biologization, it becomes increasingly clear that what betrays Black life in the weather is not a pathological constellation of forces termed “weathering” but the very tenets foundational to the science of physiology.
“How is it possible to endure the limit? What is the mode of this endurance?”
For weathering contains at its kernel a paradoxical conceit: under the total and totalizing climate of antiblackness, life itself—that is, the physiological and biological mechanisms of homeostatic regulation and adaptation—makes Black people sick. Black scholarship, art, and activism have long detailed the ways in which Western medicine—its institutions, practitioners, tools, and diagnoses—betrays Black people in health and sickness. Less often discussed is how the very concepts of health and sickness, the physiologies that undergird them, as well as the cure and healing that mediate them, might do the same. As the language and logic of weathering gain ground in the collective anti-racist imaginary, these difficult questions must not be suppressed. In the weather, in its total and totalizing climate, what health beckons convalescence?
*
Like the countless scientific studies of the body’s capacities for endurance that came before them, the inquiries of weathering were born from the policing of Black wombs.
In 1992, Geronimus published “The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of African-American Women and Infants: Evidence and Speculations” in Ethnicity and Disease: An International Journal on Population Differences in Disease Patterns. In answer to the question “Within disadvantaged populations, what are the maternal age patterns of poor birth outcome?,” Geronimus noted better infant health outcomes among Black teenage moms than among those in their twenties, counterevidencing biological, developmental, and socioeconomic hypotheses positing peak (white) reproductive health in adulthood. To account for this, Geronimus suggested the weathering hypothesis, whereby the widening of racial health disparities with maternal age might be explained by the chronological compounding of exposure to social inequalities, including racially distributed economic inequalities, racial discrimination, and race bias in exposures to environmental hazards. Here, however, Geronimus does not entirely limit the scope of her findings to the socioeconomic realm, acknowledging that weathering is likely to also result from a risk deemed “psychosocial,” correlating this with growing evidence that “prolonged, effortful, active coping with social injustice may, itself, exact a physical price.” In this early iteration, Geronimus did not yet have a functional mechanism to explicate her weathering hypothesis: she could only identify a surplus that disrupted the neat conscription of racial health disparities to the sphere of discrete and quantifiable socioeconomic variables. This was the “weather” in “weathering,” simply described in the study’s conclusion as the result of “a cumulative pattern of racism.” In 1992, before it atomized the violence of antiblackness within the Black body under channels of molecular stress and allostasis, weathering was a sociological study of the Black maternal born(e) from its physiological capacity—which is to say, its pathological imperative—to bear.
In her study “On Black Aesthesis,” media studies scholar Rizvana Bradley traces the Black maternal and feminine to the question of bearing, by way of their common signification of “emergence and sustenance, enduring and duration . . . irreducibly tethered to the terrors and beauties of reproduction.” This ontological proximity between reproduction’s terrors and beauties, Geronimus reminds us, already lies within the signifier of weathering, which is a contronym: “Weathering can be a sign of deterioration and erosion as in ‘the rock was weathering;’ and weathering can also be the opposite: A sign of strength and endurance as in ‘the family is weathering the recession.’ For health and aging, it can be both.” While the rock lies idle at the mercy of its environment, the weathering (Black) family is redeemed by its “tenacious and hopeful efforts” at resistance, which, nevertheless, are detrimental to it over time. The contronymic nature of weathering—its Janus-faced whimsy—bestows the eroding Black body with liberal legibility and agential subjectivity, fashioning it into what David Eng calls a “good liberal object worthy of repair.”
Under the cover of coping, Geronimus offers a discourse of Black resilience that comfortably situates itself within a long-standing tradition of scientific rhetoric that posits the Black (maternal) body’s capacity for tolerance—of pain, of suffering, of weather—as the imperative for its studied and studious infliction. For, as Bradley demonstrates, under the total climate of antiblackness, the unbearable is not so much a limit experience as it is precisely the form: the habitation, the aesthetic corporealization that the Black maternal is conscripted to bear. This is its boundless labor, its unforgivable debt whose terminology of cost, price, toll, and balance litters the study of weathering and its conceptualization of the physiological effects of antiblackness. The price the body pays. And yet, as Fred Moten warns, “paying implies capacities to have and to relinquish that are irreducible to expropriation.” Out of the predictability of this debt—the infinite capacity for the Black maternal to be worn out but never worn down—emerge the conditions of possibility for a study such as weathering to be born. Having described the fact of its violence, Geronimus must explain the how.
How is it possible to endure the limit? What is the mode of this endurance?
*
By the time Geronimus’s co-authored article “‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States,” was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2006, the hypothesis—that “the stress inherent in living in a race-conscious society” engenders the premature morbidity of Black people—had found its physiological corollary in the concepts of allostasis and allostatic over/load. Literally translating to “stability through change,” allostasis is a physiological model developed by the self-described biologist-activist Peter Sterling in order to account for the ways in which sociohistorical conditions not only disrupt the body’s physiology—and cause illness—but more profoundly redefine “normal” physiology through processes of perpetual plastic adaptation. A direct inheritor of Hans Selye’s originary and expansive theory of stress, allostasis is also an unruly offspring of Walter Cannon’s seminal theory of homeostasis. Its burden is estimated by the allostatic load, a biomarker used to measure the physiological changes wrought by “the cumulative wear and tear on the body’s systems owing to repeated adaptation to stressors.” Assigned as a score, this grading of violence is calculated algorithmically using a battery of clinical and subclinical stress-related biomarkers until, in the words of Dionne Brand, “the atmosphere [is] coaxed to visible molecules.” The allostatic model affords weathering—a sociological hypothesis on the etiology of racial health disparities—a functional explanation for its findings: the overloaded Black individual (or organ, or tissue, or cell), whose capacities for physiological adaptation to “stressors” in racist society are overwhelmed, is spun into feedforward self-destruction. In this state of prolonged allostasis, also referred to as allostatic overload, new physiological norms are generated that, albeit acutely protective, are in the long term deleterious. Black physiology is remodeled by the ubiquitous stress of antiblackness in a process of accelerated senescence—what Geronimus calls “dying old of a young age” and Brand “the duration of stones.”
At stake here is neither the scientific validity of Geronimus’s claims nor their situated importance. In a scientific economy that deals in quantifiable facts upon which matters of health policy are almost wholly dependent, the study of weathering provides requisite data pertaining to the health consequences of systemic racism. But if the violence identified in and by weathering is at the scale of life and its durational becoming, should we not be discussing the physiologies that conspire with antiblackness in the weather instead of reifying these processes as pathological aberrations of an otherwise “healthy” body’s failings under strenuous circumstances?
Indeed, the bulk of weathering’s merit lies in its initial hypothesis: that the physiological harms of racialization cannot be subsumed under temporally contained notions of injury, consciously registered events of aggression, or discrete variables of socioeconomic standing. The early study of weathering gestured toward a surplus that refused being made transparent—a violence that never happens but always is. It was, in this regard, a study of weather and a barometer of its differentially distributed atmospheric pressures. Like the interventions of Fanon and Sharpe, it spatialized the violence of antiblackness in order to better name and resist it. With the introduction of allostasis and its subsequent emphasis on stress, however, this drastically changed.
As the process of weathering became tethered to physiological and cultural notions of stress, it reintroduced the loci of antiblackness, its atmospheric violence, within the Black physiological body. No longer a reflection of the weather, weathering became framed as an inner maladaptive response to external environmental constraints, effectively splitting the Black weathering body into the overdetermined object of force and the subject of self-harm. Under stress, the physiological body is pharmakon: a system that simultaneously protects from harm and generates it. Although the responsibility for this harm appears, at first glance, equitably distributed between the body and the noxious stressor—teetering ambivalently between cause and consequence, illness and symptom, pathogenic agent and pathogenic syndrome—the allocation of blame under stress is far from symmetrical. No matter how violent an environment, how regular its onslaught, the physiological harm of stress ultimately becomes legible only insofar as it is the pathological reaction of a disordered body.
Consider the florid tales of bodily sedition that populate early physiological accounts of stress. Among its protagonists are hysterical physiologies reacting to imagined stimuli, stubborn physiologies barking at the moon, miscalculating physiologies overshooting their mark, and so on (one physiologist, comparing the workings of stress to anaphylaxis, goes so far as to describe it as “the veritable suicide of the organism”). Such are the narratives of pathologization that weathering inherits from the clinical concept of stress and bequeaths to the Black body. In its light, weathering becomes an adaptation disease, which is to say, a result of the Black body’s failure to adapt. Consequently, what demands adaptation matters not: the nonspecific, general reaction around which the theory of stress is built renders the nature of injury, as well as its etiology, irrelevant. Common cold, surgery, strenuous exercise, the human condition in modernity—the total climate of antiblackness, under stress, is indiscriminately flattened to the abstract category of trigger, the mere prompt for a rehearsed bodily script.
While weathering, affixed to stress, listens to the lament of organs, we hold our ears out for the alarm that triggers the physiological body’s reactive processes of resistance and exhaustion. To hear its disavowed tune is to refuse the conflation of harm with violence that physiological accounts of stress facilitate, if not downright encourage. It is to refuse the detailed pathologizing account of the Black body—what philosopher David Marriott calls “the body that consumes itself as it burns, a body that is permanently set on fire”—to stand in for evidence of the perfectly healthy functioning of an (eco)system predicated on Black debility and death. In order to fully grasp the intimacy with which physiological concepts of allostasis, adaptation, and regulation collude with their pathological counterparts in the weather, speculative counter-pathophysiologies of weathering must be drawn. Consider one such undiagnosing:
“White supremacy and antiblackness, in their malignant self-perpetration, shed particulate violence as gaseous ambiance. Under such a cloud, homeostatic mechanisms turn Black bodies into the buffers of a violence that condensates across the epidermal border and into the organismic container as blood, bile, or clepsydraic time—a transduction akin to what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson calls “somaticized necropolitics,” whereby antiblack necropower’s “boundaries” and “internal frontiers” are “not so much spatialized but corporealized” in the “black(ened) maternal body’s endocrine system, organ systems, neuropsychological pathways, and cellular functioning.” Under the guise of physiological regulation, allostatic thresholds are erected and re-erected throughout the body’s systems as battle lines, rewriting these as maps for the racially distributed settlement of ambient violence. Homeostasis, it becomes understood, fails to dignify the biological life of those who do not fall under the protection of sovereign skin, but are themselves the borders that skin in the myth of organismic independence, and its selective loosening in the name of relational enmeshment. The homeostasis of the few has always implied the homostasis of the masses: white vitalism is a vampiric physiology that necessitates the mechanistic immobilization of Black life, mystified as dynamic allostasis and plastic adaptation.”
Whether conceptualized as allostasis or homeostasis, physiology’s foundational theories of self-regulation and adaptation simultaneously write the Black physiological uptake of atmospheric violence as biological inevitability, while mystifying it under the guise of pathophysiological ineptitude. Despite weathering’s claims, it is not the failure of adaptation—the dysregulation of homeostasis or the overload of allostasis—that accounts for the physiological toll of antiblackness, but its unimpeded success. Physiology, predicated upon the normative belief that health depends on the body’s capacity to achieve equilibrium with its environment, ineluctably fails to account for the bodily violence inflicted in the name of this equilibrium by the environment. In the weather, the reproduction and degradation of life that Geronimus posits as the extreme poles of an autoantonymic state are time and again revealed as one and the same. When the very act of living happens at the cost of one’s so-called health, distinctions between erosion and resilience—adaptation and its failure, allostasis and its overload, good and bad stress, physiology and pathophysiology, the normal and the pathological—are evinced as value-laden categories demarcated by arbitrary thresholds devoid of ontological traction or qualitative relevance. Perpetuating these thresholds under the pretext of scientificity, weathering both mystifies its own processual nature and physiologically sanctions the very violence it seeks to condemn.
In Pollution Is Colonialism, environmental scientist and scholar Max Liboiron identifies the threshold theory of harm as one such methodology, whereby a given body—of water, or otherwise—is deemed capable of handling a determinate amount of contamination before pollution ensues. Liboiron traces back the threshold theory of harm—also known as the body’s assimilative capacity—to the development of modern environmental definitions of pollution in order to demonstrate how such theories of harm paradoxically serve as a permission and invitation to pollute below their threshold. As in colonial settler cosmologies that treat land as the storage site of waste, the area below the threshold becomes a sacrifice zone where violence is made permissible up to preordained doses. Only when the threshold is crossed does a contaminating presence veer into harmful pollution. Extrapolating Liboiron’s insights to the study of weathering, we notice that by establishing a threshold whereby the “healthy” adaptation to antiblack violence (allostasis) crosses over into “unhealthy” adaptation (allostatic over/load), the study of weathering not only sanctions the Black physiological body as the site of violence’s deposition but also rhetorically creates the conditions of possibility for a state of adaptation to antiblack violence deemed “healthy.”
In the end, the study of weathering draws a Black physiology to the image of antiblackness, whereby violence is the physiologically sanctioned baseline that is both inevitable and expected, in health and illness. Negotiating within a foreclosed forecast, weathering posits relation where only refusal is possible. As a result, it brims with the contradictions inherent in any study of Black health under antiblackness, regardless of orientations or conclusions. If there is any lesson to be drawn from Geronimus’s study—what it professes, what it disavows—it is that antiblackness turns the metaphysics of health on its head: in the weather, Black people who are sick are medically diagnosed as “normal”—deluded by their “North African Syndrome”—whereas those who are healthy are always already subclinically weathering—Black life being not only a risk factor for disease but the slow burn of disease itself.
Whereas Fanon’s metadiagnosis of the racist pseudoscientific North African Syndrome shed light on the impossibility of racialized suffering’s congealment into medically legible categories of illness and disease, the study of weathering identifies and enacts a similar processual exclusion from the domain of medical and physiological health. Here, it is the healthy Black subject who, if biomedically probed deeply enough, faithfully betrays their weathering with subclinical traces of violence strewn across blackened organs. Under such conditions, what are the affordances of health as a concept and signifier of Black life—and how does this shape our understanding of what it means to heal? Turning from the interrogation of physiological processes toward the concepts of health that abstract them, we resound into the weather a question originally posed by the philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem. With echolalic fidelity, we reverberate its query: Is a pedagogy of healing possible?
*
But why must the body pay?
Considering Freud’s triad of impossible professions—governing, educating, and healing—it is tempting to write off the eponymous question of Georges Canguilhem’s 1978 essay for the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse as a rhetorical ruse. Written at the invitation of French philosopher and psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis, “Is a Pedagogy of Healing Possible?” is instead a solemn reminder of the fragility of health in the face of life’s fleeting reserves. It is also, among other things, a critique of the concept known as the cure.
At the heart of the cure, says Canguilhem, is the false promise of return to an anterior state prior to disease. One need only notice the prefix “re-” that adorns the words signifying its various processes: restore, reconstruct, reestablish, reconstitute, recuperate, recover, repair. Belying the signifiers of remedy is a metaphysics of health immune to the inflections of time where health is an absolute good, a bodily possession lost in the event of illness and regained via effective therapeutic intervention. Such fantasies of health, however, are a vestige of classical mechanics incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics and the slow death by heat loss that condemns all organisms. Since health lost is lost irremediably, the philosopher warns, “no cure is ever a return.”[1]
For the weary and weathered, the mad and the incurable, the work of healing is an ongoing process whose serpentine path runs circles around the teleological road of recovery. The state prior to injury may not always exist. The moment before harm may be a lost memory. The catastrophe may be in perpetuum. Under these circumstances, the cure’s infinitely retreating horizon becomes a source of violence, its objective state—verifiable by clinical expertise—an expectation to which the lived dimension of suffering can never measure up. Only a pedagogy of healing that orients its object away from the sclerosed past, and toward a new, yet unknown state—of health, illness, being and becoming—could be worthy of its name. It is, as Anne Anlin Cheng writes, by suspending the cure as “change or transformation in linear temporality [that] psychoanalysis teaches us that change is the condition of subjectivity and, as such, the precondition for political relations.”
How, then, do you cure a heart under attack? The abolitionist prescription is simple: You don’t.
The political, however, never quite rears itself in “Is a Pedagogy of Healing Possible?” In its stead, we are offered the abstract salvation of a concept. In its penultimate sentence, Canguilhem concedes: “To learn to heal is to learn the contradiction between today’s hope and the defeat that comes in the end—without saying no to today’s hope.” But we know better not to say no. We are wise from Brand’s words:
“The beautiful innocence of those
who live at the center of empire, their
wonderful smiles, their sweet delight and
and their singular creation of the
word hope…”
Race, empire, slavery, colonialism—these do not figure in Canguilhem’s meditation on healing. And yet, despite their absence, “Is a Pedagogy of Healing Possible?” rests upon a philosophy of life bearing an unnervingly close resemblance to Geronimus’s concept of weathering. Figuring in its Canguilhemian inflection, weathering is framed as the natural consequence of all life, whose depleting duration spends the body’s vital reserves accounting for contingencies (“mastering perils”). From here, it is a small leap to Geronimus’s weathering hypothesis, where antiblackness becomes a contingency among others to accelerate the reduction of the powers of health. But in the weather, where we find ourselves, whom does contingency serve? How are we to account for those whose health cannot neatly be sundered from peril, those for whom peril is not a contingency to be buffered by the reserves of health but its precondition? As Jasbir Puar asks, “What are the interstitial ontologies of the body that knows anything can happen or the body that is always prepared for something to happen, when uncertainty is not just something niggling the liberal subject but a foreground condition of being?” When the only certainty is this bodily uncertainty, what is health but the false promise—or caricature—of defense, integrity, and safety?
It is hope: vacuous, ever-deferred hope.
Canguilhem himself is not oblivious to these issues; he is simply incapable of situating them within the analytics of racialization and antiblackness. In a chapter entitled “A New Concept in Pathology: Error” in The Normal and the Pathological, he discusses those diseases known as “inborn errors of metabolism” where certain enzymes of the body are congenitally absent. Delivering an anti-eugenic analysis, he astutely remarks that “by definition a treatment cannot put an end to what is not the consequence of an accident.”
In the weather, where disease does not arise from accidents, where health is always already illness, what use, then, is treatment? Our clinical reasoning falls short when it is no longer illness but health that narrows the body’s appetite for possibility. Writes Mira Mattar: “[W]e adhere to forms so slim from which only blandness, catatonia, hunger and destiny can peek.” To refuse this health-that-is-not-one is not a concession to the pathological but a call for the abolition of the health that is indiscriminate from it. It is a diagnosis of the ways in which the scientifically, medically, and philosophically sanctioned genres of the “normal” physiological body betray those in the weather—and a rejection of those prescriptions that sell its rehabilitation under the guise of healing. To effectively address and resist the somatization of violence in the weather, the biological body must not be erased, autopsied, or cured, but rewritten—as the site and source of a Black physiology that does not seek to adapt to its environment but abolish it.
The early stages of the ongoing pandemic offered a fugitive glimpse into such a world. For a fleeting moment, decarceration was understood and accepted as an urgent matter of health. Weathering played a role in this, summoning its data to advocate the release from jails, prisons, and detention centers of Black and Brown detainees, whose young age and lack of preexisting medical conditions would have otherwise excluded them from the high-risk category necessary to dignify their lives in the eyes of the state. Case studies offering detailed receipts of their weathering bodies temporarily succeeded in quenching the thirst for violence of their captors. Those deemed sufficiently weathered were released, while the rest—the majority—remained. The weather remained.
In the tireless and all too brief years she spent laboring for justice following the death of her father, Erica Garner became a figurehead of a movement for Black lives whose politically entrenched and reformist factions could not embrace the radicality of her posture. While others sought well-worn remedies in the prescriptions of party politics, Garner fought to rid the atmosphere of its weather. For this she was alienated and suffered greatly. But her steadfast pursuit of the abolitionist struggle for freedom made her a fearless adversary of a system that would not, in her waking life, produce the justice she relentlessly reclaimed. At Garner’s funeral in Harlem, hundreds gathered to mourn the passing of the militant abolitionist. Delivering a eulogy, the Reverend Al Sharpton reminded the crowd that Garner’s was not a heart attack but a “heart [that] was attacked.” The distance between weathering and the weather yawned agape.
How, then, do you cure a heart under attack? The abolitionist prescription is simple: You don’t.
“This does not seek a remedy
this does not need a balm
this needs an ending.”
[1] Not without cheekily reminding us that “when Freud, in the most debated part of his work, renewed the concept of return, it was only as a return to death, to the inorganic state that preceded life.”