The apostasy of melancholy (original) (raw)
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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
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
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.
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.
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.