Without Apparent Occasion: Recent Research on Melancholy (original) (raw)
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
Melancholy and its sisters: transformations of a concept from Homer to Lars von Trier
History of European Ideas, 2021
This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer's print Melencolia I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume's contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists. Since antiquity, few concepts in western discourse have anchored and embodied other ideas so much as melancholy has. Melancholy characterized a host of physical and intellectual phenomena drawn together into a singular identity, with these new characteristics then radiating outwards into medicine , theology, and politics. And vice-versa: melancholy mediated social experiences just as its symptoms and representations simultaneously consolidated them. Writing in 'Trauer und Melancholie' ('Mourning and Melancholy', 1916), Sigmund Freud grasped the central problem of this strangely impressionable quality of melancholy: 'Melancholy, whose definition is volatile even in descriptive psychiatry, occurs in various clinical forms, the combination of which does not appear to be certain, some of which suggest somatic rather than psychogenic affections.' 1 Combinations and constellations hence characterize melancholy just as much as contexts and receptions do. As the contributions to this volume collectively argue, a stable and cumulative iconographic and visual history of melancholy developed across time and space in tandem with divergent literary and medical heritages. 2
Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
Early Modern Literary Studies, 2017
A man poses for his portrait. Rather than striking a conventionally commanding, manly stance with legs apart, Edward, Lord Herbert (ca. 1582-1642), lies down. Reclining with his head resting on his clenched fist, he stretches his booted and spurred legs out to one side and lies with his sword and shield over him. The posture is an oddly uncomfortable one (I have tried it), as no part of his torso touches the floorfortunate, then, that he is only posing for a miniature. The artist, Isaac Oliver (ca. 1565-1617), adds surroundings: not a richly draped interior, but a verdant woodland landscape. The setting may be peaceful, but the final image is hardly so. Herbert's pose, his serious, long gaze, his stiff upper body-all conjure up the spirit of melancholy. In the foreground, a river bank drops away sharply just inches from the subject's body, hinting at the fate awaiting those afflicted with mental turmoil. Why did Herbert choose to be pictured as a melancholic? The simple answer is that, in this period, it was fashionable for English aristocrats to be so, wearing suits of solemn black or lying in shady retreat. That melancholy was seen as desirable and glamorous stemmed ultimately from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems 30.1, which asked why artists, thinkers, and poets were so often affected by the disease of black bile. Marsilio Ficino elaborated this prompt into a full-blown neo-Platonic theory of melancholic genius, enabling the disorder to become a self-identifying marker of high status in the early modern period. These new studies of melancholy by Mattthew Bell and Stephanie Shirilan address why melancholy has been such an enduring and-for some-attractive condition. Bell's invigorating book has the more ambitious scope: it investigates the broad cultural, social, and medical contexts of the affliction from ancient Greece up to the end of the nineteenth century, covering topics including gender, nomenclature, geography, class, and nationality. Preferring the term "melancholia," as an indicator of the "European character of the disease" (p. xiii), Bell argues that the condition is fundamentally associated with a Western understanding of self-consciousness. It is not simply a product of Renaissance cultures of individualism, as
Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World, 2023
The intro lays out the scope and stakes of the melancholy disposition in Arab lit and culture
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 Difference Between Melancholy and Depression, Philobiblon, 25 (2), pp. 421-9 (2020)
PHILOBIBLON. Transylvanian Journal Of Multidisciplinary Research in the Humanities, 2020
Although from a medical point of view, melancholy and depression are indistinguishable, I will try to argue that, from a philosophical perspective, there is an important distinction between the two related affective states. Analyzing various philosophical, literary, poetical, psychiatric and musical works such as Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 Butlers Characters Goethes Werther (1774) Novaliss Hymns to the Night Beethovens Moonlight Sonata (1801), Baudelaires Flowers of Evil (1857), Cotards report on the Hypochondriac Delirium Kraepelins Textbook of Psychiatry (1883), I will try to clarify the psychological ambiguity between melancholy and depression.
Melancholy and the Somatic Subject of Stress Management
This article explores the curious relation between the Aristotelian concept of melancholy and the contemporary concept of stress and stress management in organizations. Through a symptomatological reading of the most important Aristotelian text on melancholy, Problems XXX, I, it identifies the mélaina cholé – the black bile – as the somatic subject of a higher order of self-management among extraordinary individuals and discusses how the conceptualization of this somatic subject has been popularized in the contemporary presentation of stress and stress management in popular literature. It discusses this popularization and its effects on three levels: the individual, the organizational and the managerial, suggesting that the properties, which used to be reserved for the extraordinary in character among politicians, poets, philosophers and artists has been popularized under the assumption of an anthropology, which subsumes the great, culturally constructive achievements under a general idea of Arbeitskraft, of labour power.
Death in Life and Life in Death: Melancholy and the Enlightenment
Gesnerus
This article, which deals with the 17th and 18th centuries, is concerned with the presence of death in the melancholiac's life as revealed in both the accounts written by sufferers themselves and medical works. It shows the exceptional place which melancholiacs consider themselves to occupy, compared to the rest of the living, as they inhabit the no-man's-land between life and death. The privileged status echoes the classical theme of the melancholic genius (Problem XXX). Although some, like George Cheyne or Samuel Johnson, denied the link, this cliché is nevertheless very present in the self-description of the melancholy. Suffering, which is always physical, is a sign of moral superiority.