"The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism" (original) (raw)

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.

Melancholia: The Disease of the Soul

"MELANCHOLIA provides a primer to a distinctly human phenomenon that defies description and yet urgently needs one. […] The work grounds itself in two main hypotheses: that the “disease of the soul” characterized by melancholia is universally human, and that there should be some order and rigor given to the disparate attempts to describe this across disciplines. It is the task of hermeneutics – and often a psychoanalytic hermeneutic – to interpret this slippery but very important and current malaise in a way that can lead to a productive engagement. There must be a careful description that remains hermeneutical, sensitive to our finitude and historicity. […] Taken as a whole, this book is a true work of the humanities, a work that deftly employs the methodologies of individual disciplines while recognizing the false sense of mastery that comes with a single methodology. The hermeneutic retrievals of important descriptions and embodiments of melancholia, as well as careful analyses of the impact of our distortions at that personal, cultural, and political level, make this an important contribution to a perennially urgent issue that eludes each humanistic discipline, but can be successfully engaged when they work together." - From the review by Boyd Blundell, Loyola University

In the ruins of truth: the work of melancholia and acts of memory

Inter-asia Cultural Studies, 2010

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IMPOSSIBLE EMOTIONS: THE ETHICS OF MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA

Zoon Politikon, 2021

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida's auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

The Deconstruction of Freud's Theory of Melancholy_Mlacnik

Družboslovne razprave/, 2018

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of melancholy and its discourse through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and “violence of writing”. In part one of the article, the ambivalent and contradictory conceptions of melancholy in the West are outlined in order to show the working of the logic of difference that makes any unified and universal definition impossible. Sigmund Freud first introduced a universal theory of melancholy in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), while part two of the article analyses the inherent enigmas and contradictions in Freud’s psychoanalytical distinction between mourning and melancholy in the specific socio-historical context. The binary oppositions in support of Freud’s dichotomy are also exposed. In the conclusion, the author shows how Freud’s paradoxes are deconstructed in contemporary theories in the humanities and social sciences that address various social and political discourses. KEY WORDS: deconstruction, violence of writing, Mourning and Melancholia, loss, psychoanalysis

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