Un estiu, de Francesc Parcerisas Un dol derridià per la mare i els amics

Abstract

In this essay, I read Francesc Parcerisas’s diary Un estiu as a mourning book, a book of losses: that of his mother, who is slowly fading away due to her senile dementia, and those of his long-time friends who die within a few months of each other. Freud and Derrida, as well as some post-Freudian and Lacanian thinkers who have reflected on mourning, provide me with the theoretical tools to read a tender yet implacable text in which the awareness of the devastating passing of time does not prevent the narrator from dwelling on things that are, only in appearance, small. This approach enables me to connect Un estiu with other mourning discourses from different genres and cultures, most of them a symbiosis of intellectual reflection and personal experience of mourning.