Abstract
Laurence Rickels writes in his preface that twenty-two years ago Aberrations of Mourning "was way ahead of its time" (vii) in the sense that this book investigates fields of study that the university did not always recognize. Reprinted for 2011, the topics under discussion in Aberrations certainly dovetail many of the concerns of contemporary culture studies, including those interests of [End Page 222] Philip Roth who betrayed an interest in psychoanalysis very early on and, later still, continued to write about mourning and loss in a death-obsessed oeuvre culminating with his Nemeses tetralogy. Particularly in its psychoanalytic investigation of mourning, melancholia, trauma, haunting, the occult and technical media, Aberrations of Mourning lives up to its title regarding its focus on deviations and eccentricities when it comes to grieving the dead.