Without Apparent Occasion: Recent Research on Melancholy (original) (raw)
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It is Christmas 2006, Time Magazine proclaims me person of the year. I look at the cover and raise my eyebrows. What? Me? 'Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.' My world. From this Time-issue I may conclude that this is the earthly heaven of the sovereign individual in an intimate embrace with information communication technology. The fruit of this love affair, according to Time, is a world-wide 'social experiment' of energetic, productive, innovative, creative, in short of free spirits. At long last: we are free, we are equals and we are interactive. Adhortations such as those in the Christmas issue of Time, are frequently let loose upon us these days. They are characteristic of a time in which drive and entrepreneurial spirit are considered to be among the highest values. It seems a paradox that encouragement appears to be all the more necessary in this Realm of Freedom. As a consequence this incitement turns into something obsessive, it becomes a somewhat frenetic summons. What is being pursued here and what is it that is being avoided? I hope to address these questions in the following article by allotting a central place to an experience which, in the course of European history, has been understood in various ways and, therefore, has been undergone in various ways, namely: melancholy. A glance at the vicissitudes of this experience may afford a view of the (changing) condition of our culture.
The focus or underlying emphasis of this paper is to delve into the formative and initial understanding of melancholy as a phenomenon vis-à-vis philosophical speculations and analytical debates around this terminology, in the medieval period to 18th century. Melancholy as a phenomenon has long been analysed and researched upon to be categorically understood and defined. With advancement in medical sciences, this field further opened up a plethora of case studies, debates and discussions by psychiatrists and medical experts to comprehend it thoroughly. When psychology evolved as an empirical discipline it became distinctly diversified from philosophy over the centuries. Their approach and methodology towards understanding this phenomenon differs a lot and has also altered rapidly and consequently. This paper focuses on philosophical understanding of melancholy during medieval period. While defining aesthetics of sublime Kant also discusses about melancholy. This paper seeks to discuss speculative and initial understanding around melancholy, and also posits it as a distinct aesthetic category. Keywords –Etymological Origin, Ancient& Medieval Understanding, Kant
Review of Moody Minds Distempered. Essays on melancholy and Depression by Jennifer Radden
Philosophers can be a rather gloomy lot, so ruminations on melancholy have not been foreign to them. The question is how one can approach melancholy -or its modern day successor: depression -in a methodologically sound manner; without, that is, succumbing to a talk full of suggestive ambiguities, ineliminable vagueness, and opaque metaphors, that characterizes much of the writing on such notoriously elusive states. Jennifer Radden has, over many years of original research, produced a series of papers which shows us what the rigorous study of melancholy should look like. By bringing together most of those papers in one volume, O.U.P.
Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction
with Martin Middeke: “Melancholia as a Sense of Loss: An Introduction.” The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern. Eds Martin Middeke and Christina Wald. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 1-19.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2014
This essay attempts to discuss the relation of mood to philosophy in the context of Benjamin's early thought. Reviewing Ilit Ferber's Melancholy and Philosophy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theatre and Language, I try to show that melancholy, far from merely a psychological-solipsistic-pathological condition as it is generally understood today, is rather to be understood as philosophical attunement and which as such is inseparably connected with profound ethico-political questions concerning responsibility and justice, with work and play and with a possible phenomenological disclosure of the world as a whole. Walter Benjamin's early works are seen, in this context, to be indispensable help to think such questions anew. keywords Walter Benjamin, melancholy, mood Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin's Early Reflections on Theatre and Language, Stanford University Press, 2013, 264 pp, $24 . 95 (pbk), ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-8520-4.
The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern
Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, 2012
cultural criticism, and one could have wished that this essay had been longer, offering an extended discussion of the various positions within psychogeography and its investment in the contemporary cultural politics of space. BASEL INA HABERMANN The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern. Ed. and introd. Martin M i d d e k e & Christina W a l d. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 271 pp., € 74.99. To review an essay collection on melancholia, arguably a very "English disease" (197), in the immediate aftermath of the London Olympic Games during which the British nation unabashedly celebrated the triumphs of its athletes is a curious experience, to say the least. This sense of national triumphhighlighted by IOC president Jacques Rogge's characterization of the games as 'happy and glorious' in allusion to the national anthemwas both underpinned and set in relief by the opening ceremony (and, to a lesser extent, the closing ceremony) which was pervaded by what can only be called a postcolonial, post-imperial melancholy. It began with a tableau of Merry Old England, a pastoral landscape of farmhouses and meadows inhabited by a rustic population in tune with nature and the seasons. Before the eyes of the 80,000 spectators in the Olympic stadium, this nostalgic vision of England's past was transformed and indeed destroyed with the arrival of industrialism, represented by redbrick factories with smouldering forges and smoking chimneys. Enacting the nation's history as a history of loss, this introduced a distinctly melancholic mood in the self-fashioning of English identity. Yet "be not afeard", the spectators in the stadium and before the TV-screens were immediately reassured by Kenneth Branagh posing as Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel posing in turn as a rather unlikely Caliban, whose famous speech from the Tempest supposedly was to explain away the stench and noises and environmental destruction of industrialization: "the isle is full of noises/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not" (3.2.148-156). While one might argue that an Irish-born actor and a descendant of French immigrants are figures of successful integration, to choose Caliban as a model for this was perhaps less of a success: throughout the play, he not only resents his subjection and curses his colonial master, but the very speech cited here as an invocation of harmony and peace actually occurs at a point when Caliban plans to have Prospero assassinated by two drunken fools. Hardly a reassuring prospect for postcolonial Britain to wake up to after the beautiful dream of the games (if a midsummer night's dream is what they were), and it lends an ominously prophetic tone to Branagh/ Brunel/Caliban's final words "that when I waked,/I cried to dream again". The speech was repeated at the closing ceremony, again by a famous actor, Timothy Spall, posing as a formative figure of British history, Sir Winston Churchill, who shouted it from the roofs of a model London cityscape situated on a Union Jack that covered the entire ground of the arena. What are the implications of these ceremonies and speeches for a post-colonial, post-industrial Britishness from the perspective of melancholia as the 'English disease'? Several of the essays collected in the volume under review herein particular in the two middle sections engaging with history and (post)colonial heritage