ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book emphasizes that mourning involves the relinquishment of what has been lost as an external object, as a precondition for being internalised within the self, and as a source of memory and personal identification. It then focuses on the changes associated with deindustrialisation of the 'traditional' centres of manufacturing and the decline of their associational communities that has been accompanied by cultural denigration. The book also discusses the rise of an intensively subjectivist culture, and of the concomitant politics of identity and competitive victimhood, in place of the universalist socio-economic, civic, and class perspectives of the 'traditional' left. Joanna Williams (2016) critiques the hypersensitivity and subjectivist concepts of micro-aggressions, micro-invalidations, and micro-assault that serve to constantly foreground issues of identity and inequality.
