To Grieve or not to Grieve? : Reflections on Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers

Abstract

Besides whatever else may be said about Chloé Zhao’s 2025 cinematic adaptation of Maggie O’ Farrell’s pandemic novel Hamnet (2020),^[1] there is little doubt that it lays bare one of the most elusive–when not entirely evasive–affective experiences: grief. In portraying what can be called the ‘myth’ (Shapiro, 2025) behind William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the movie narrates the specter of death that births the tragedy. Yet the movie, much like the novel itself, is not only about William’s attempt to mourn the loss of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet, which allegedly inspired the eponymous play. It also intimately focuses on Agnes Hathaway and, consequently, the persistent and enduring trajectory of her maternal grief.^[2] Muted in its salience. Deafening in its silence.

^[1] While some film critics have described it as ‘visual poetry’ (Clyde, 2025), ‘hauntingly beautiful’ (Zeitsman, 2025), a ‘sensory experience’ with ‘striking visual compositions, (Lemire, 2025),  and profound and life-affirming (Ordōna, 2025), Hamnet has also been called ‘exploitative than insightful’ (Barber, 2025), a genre of ‘grief porn’ that is  ‘ruthlessly manipulative’ of loss (Chang, 2025). None of these criticisms, however, ponder on the possible motives underlying this emotional coercion. Does the suffix  porn itself reveal that there is a chance we might have lost touch with the experience of grief and find any suggestion of it as a pitiful simulation? I wonder if the rage is not a defense against a narrative that threatens to uncover our collective apathy to grief.  Due to the constraints of time and space (even if not of relevance), I shall pause this line of reflection. The furious negation of grief demands its own essay. Elsewhere.

^[2]Anguished by the ‘poor treatment’ of Agnes (Anne) Hathaway by the Shakespeare scholars, who repeatedly dismissed her as an illiterate peasant, casting her as an impediment to the intellectual forays of the playwright, O’Farrell decided to attend to the life of the Bard by recognizing the centrality of his wife and their life together as a premise of his work (Creative Screenwriting, 2026, January 7). She underscored it by highlighting the character of Agnes in the screenplay adaptation that she co-wrote with Chloé Zhao.