"The Demon of Melancholy: Genealogies, Modernities "April 24 and 25th 2008
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Christine Ross, Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University
The Withering of Melancholia in Contemporary Art

In the introduction of his latest book on depression, The New Black (2008), psychoanalyst Darian Leader makes a plea to "give up the concept of depression as it is currently framed." Instead, he argues, "we should see what we call depression as a set of symptoms that derive from complex and always different human stories. These stories will involve the experiences of separation and loss, ... In order to make sense of how we have responded to such experiences, we need to have the right conceptual tools, and these, I think, can be found in the old notions of mourning and melancholia." This claim strongly resonates with the main argument of two other recently published books, Shyness (2007) by Christopher Lane and The Loss of Sadness (2008) by Allan Hortwitz and Jerome Wakefield, who posit that psychiatry has transformed normal experiences of loss and sorrow into depressive disorders. These studies share a similar concern for the contemporary categorization of depression as a mental disorder that has both pathologized and medicalized experiences of loss, mourning, fear, and melancholia. In search of an alternative, they aspire to reestablish melancholia or any affective state related to loss as the pivotal notion around which the distress of the contemporary subject might be best understood. But this effort of rehabilitation, I want to argue, problematically articulates a denegation of subjectivity in its historical dimension. It disregards the amazing growth of depression in the last thirty years, not only as a set of symptoms but as a psychiatric condition, a classification inseparable from the belief in the authority of specific treatments--namely, antidepressant pharmaceutics and cognitive-behavioral psychology--, an expanding interdisciplinary field of knowledge, a system of value, subjectivity tout court . Depression has been instituted. It has been instituted through the very depreciation of melancholia. The modern decline of melancholy and its gradual replacement by melancholia and then depression articulates the disappearance of the association, which was initially formulated by pseudo-Aristotle and reaffirmed in Italian Renaissance humanism between melancholy and the modern notion of genius, ending the traditional rapprochement between melancholy states and compensating brilliance, sadness and creative energy, Robert Burton's "fear without a cause" and access to the sublime. This paper stands on the hiatus or caesura between melancholia and depression, between the attachment to the other through loss and the decline of loss. Focusing on a certain trajectory of contemporary art--one that has brought into the forefront of aesthetics what must be called a series of depressive enactments--my main claim is that depression is more than just a feature of art at the turn of the twenty-first century or a scientifically defined set of symptoms transposed into art. It is both a question brought to art and a paradigm in which art actively participates. As such, it is a means by which contemporary art has redefined itself through the deployment of new subjects (both in and before the image) whose subjectivity is shaped not so much by laws of desire as by rules of disengagement, subjects mobilized by the repeated task yet concomitant fatigue of being a self without others, whose relational faculties are considerably devitalized. The paper calls attention to Ken Lum's 2002 installation, Mirror Maze with 12 Signs of Depression , to disclose some of the major disengaging traits of the aesthetics of depression. Conventionally associated to melancholia, the practice par excellence to have visually enunciated the typus melancholicus , closely linked since the end of the nineteenth century (with its sister discipline, art history) to one of the major modern fields of study of melancholia--psychoanalysis--, art can be said to have now depreciated its melancholy condition for the sake of a depressed subjectivity.

Rebecca Wilkin, French, Indiana University
Politics and Pathology: edical Melancholy under Henri IV

In his Histoire de la folie, Michel Foucault characterized Descartes's exclusion of melancholy in the Meditations as a turning point in the history of madness:   loquacious during the Renaissance, madness would be silenced during the classical seventeenth century.   However, humanists a generation earlier had marginalized melancholy through their revival of the moral philosophy of the Stoics.   Supporters of Henri IV's claim to the throne of France diagnosed the Catholic League's apocalyptic outlook as a symptom of effeminate melancholy, while claiming for their own party the masle vertu of the stoic sage, who prevails over his passions through the rational exercise of will.   I characterize André Du Laurens' Discours des maladies melancoliques (1594), the first medical tract on melancholy to be published in French, as a medical counterpart to the vulgarization of stoic moral philosophy.   Just as neo-Stoics feminized melancholy, Du Laurens--who would become first physician to Henri IV--modeled melancholy's etiology on that of the female disease known as uterine "suffocation".   Du Laurens is now best known to medical historians for having refuted the notion of the "one-sex body;" I consider in closing what the neo-stoic feminization of melancholy reveals about the idea of sex difference in the Renaissance.

Max Pensky, Philosophy, Binghamton University
Melancholia and Philosophical History

Ideologies of moral progress in history arise with the Enlightenment project of a universal philosophical history: the ideology, then the discipline, of reconstructing history as a process. The rise of philosophical history in the eighteenth century is usually analyzed as part of the process of secularization - the preservation of meaning in universal history absent any theological guarantees, dedicated to support the ideology of progress fundamental to Western modernity. This paper argues for an alternative though compatible genealogy of universal history. Readings in Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Hume, and Hegel, the paper's first half argues for the origin of philosophical history as a conscious response to the threat of melancholia. Philosophical history is prescribed as a palliative to counteract a known psychic danger. This suggests that the relation between affect and theory in the origin of the idea of universal philosophical history might have a radically different value than intellectual history usually assumes. In the paper's second part, a reading of H.D. Kittsteiner's work on Walter Benjamin leads to a more general discussion of the transformation of the project of universal history in Benjamin's appropriation of Kant, and suggests that Benjamin's materialist historiography is best seen as a continuation, and not just a repudiation, of the Enlightenment project of warding off melancholia by means of a willed commitment to a universal philosophical history of moral progress.

Jacques Khalip, English, Brown University
Dead Calm: The Melancholy of Peace

This paper explores the melancholy substance of the lost promise Wordsworth utters in book 1 of The Prelude: “Long months of peace (if such bold word accord/With any promise of human life)[.]” By tracing the structure of peace in the writings of Kant, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, I argue that for these authors—all of whom lived in historical wartimes without any glimmer of relief—peace often emerges as a strangely unyielding concept that evokes the residue of an otherness which war endlessly tarries with in spite of all exterminations. For Kant in Towards Perpetual Peace, peace is famously linked at the beginning of his essay to the restfulness of the dead, but Kant moves beyond this immediate irony to contemplate peace in terms that still cannot be adequately approached by the cosmopolitan ethics of hospitality he delineates. Because it is entirely bound to the destructions of eighteenth-century European wartime, peace (for Kant) emerges as a promise, a future projection that has yet to happen because it never happened at all. Indeed, the “time” of peace seems to be defined by a melancholic resignation, an atemporality of sorts that occurs neither “before” nor “after” the slaughters of the battlefields.

Peter Schwenger, English, Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax
The Melancholy of Waking

Beginning with Marcel Proust's description of a disoriented awakening into a darkened room, this paper considers the relations between the secure place that is the preliminary of sleep and the restless space that is associated with dream.   Waking, then, is a contraction into place, the loss of a more spacious experiential mode that one has inhabited during the night.   Forgetting the dream mode of consciousness, one substitutes something less: what Benjamin calls "purposive remembering," exemplified by our urge to tell our dreams.   Yet even as we frame our words, emotions that are to a considerable degree metabolic undermine us.   That is why, Benjamin argues, we must first alter that metabolism by filling the stomach at breakfast.   The melancholy that accompanies the transition that is waking may nevertheless linger throughout the day, colluding with other forms of melancholy to open our eyes to possibilities beyond the habitual.

Éric Trudel, French Studies, Bard College
"It's an awful word: commentary." The melancholy practice of Chris Marker.

One has often held up the inimitable and singular text that comes to comment - serious, playful, or ironic - on the image in each of Chris Marker's film-essays without studying its importance. Yet it is the complex relationship of these texts to the images they commented on that should have first been investigated, before those commentaries' eventual publication by Seuil (Commentaires I in 1961 and Commentaires II in 1967). If the gesture of commentary in Marker's work often seems to be primary, existing at the origin of poetic invention and the work of meaning, it also remains endlessly imagined as simple accompaniment, a veritable afterthought, where that which repeats itself, that which does not pass - the movement of writing - would bear witness to vanished reality and an absent image. Melancholy, at least what will be proposed here, does not only inscribe itself as a motif or figure in Marker's work (although it does that, too), but must be understood as the basis of writing itself: simultaneously consolation, the melancholic's sole pleasure, and that which creates the gap, causing the lamented object's loss. To modify Maurice Fickelson's fine phrase a little, we can say that the practice of melancholy in Marker's work is the writing of commentary. This contribution looks at several of these Commentaires, with particular attention to Si j'avais quatre dromadaires.

Maurizia Natali, Art History, RISD
Reframing Ariadne. De Chirico's suspenseful melancholia.

My paper reconsiders a number of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico representing a statue of Ariadne, a figure of melancholia, in his famous piazze d’Italia. De Chirico painted Ariadne, a cherished mythological revival, about one hundred times. However I will argue for a non-melancholic vision of de Chirico’s melancholia, and I will do so in cinematic terms. In fact, even though De Chirico denied that film could be metaphysical, some art historians have used film terms for his works, and filmmakers have imitated his enigmatic decors. I will show how de Chirico created a cinematic Stimmung and why cinema is central to understand his modern metaphysica melancholica. Inspired by a philosophical project, his allegories of urban space evoke film shots and are similar to a cinematic apparatus, they are full of pictorial suspense and open to an unscripted seriality. Also, by considering this unconsciously cinematic work plan, we could reinterpret de Chirico’s notorious signature games, from his oneiric assemblages to his biographemes, from his imitations of previous artists to his copy & fake instinct. At the end, it will be easy to observe how all these modernist, postmodernist or anti-modernist games were not only uncannily cinematic but also melancholic in nature.

Elliott Colla, Comparative Literature Brown University
Postcolonial Melancholia: Loss in Mahfouz's Miramar

Although colonization has most often been experienced in terms of loss and defeat, the tone of the critical traditions that reflect on this legacy have often been buoyant and even triumphalist. There are, no doubt, concrete political and methodological reasons for this disjuncture. The exigency of political solidarity with third-world national liberation--and an interest in discovering resistance and subversion wherever possible--has led many critics to focus on the possibilities of redemption rather than loss. In postcolonial theory, the methodological strategies of post-structuralism--and in particular, its routine disbelief of all narratives and figures of "presence-absence"--have also meant that many claims about loss are rejected out of hand as mere nostalgic constructions. Together, these habits have worked to transform the problem of loss into something else--in the first instance, by renarrating colonial loss as the condition for postcolonial redemption, in the second, by denying the weight of loss on philosophical grounds. In doing so, they have not only preserved loss as the unacknowledged core of postcolonial theory, but they have restricted our thinking about its consequences--and with it, our understanding of what colonialism has meant and still means. This paper explores these themes through a critical examination of melancholia as it functions in Naguib Mahfouz's 1967 classic, Miramar, a funereal novel that recapitulates the history of the national independence movement, and Egypt's revolutions, as a narrative of compounding losses.

Nathalie Etoké, French Studies, Brown University
Melancholy and the Rwandan Genocide: How to Mend a Broken Heart in Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi, The Book of Bones

Four years after the Rwandan genocide, a group of francophone writers was invited to participate in the project, « Rwanda, écrire par devoir de mémoire »/ "Rwanda, Writing as a duty to remember." Among them was Senegalese writer, Boubacar Boris Diop, author of Murambi, The Book of Bones (2000). In Diop's novel, Cornelius Uvimana, the main character, returns to Rwanda from exile in Djibouti four years after the genocide. Cornelius endures a melancholic journey home. Employing the Freudian definition of melancholia, I argue that Diop's literary representation of the Rwandan genocide revolves around the incorporation of loss as a narrative grammar--be it the loss of loved ones or abstractions such as friendship, unity, liberty and patriotism. I contend that Diop's narrative grammar of loss signifies an attempt to hold on to Rwanda as a love object. Melancholy becomes a creative process through which a work of art--the novel, for example--is the only space to express hope and fear, oppression and freedom, love and hatred, the need for change and a will to survive. Melancholy operates as a form of psychological revolt, which enables the African writer to go beyond tragedy without undermining, romanticizing or negating the predicaments facing postcolonial Africa.

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