Hi, and Welcome to Episode 12 of Beautiful Losers: Melancholy! This episode was delayed slightly due to technical issues, apologies.

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“One pristine example of the philosophical struggle for presentation is melancholy, a word whose presence can be traced to the inauguration of thought. Melancholy’s meanings extend from the personal to the collective, from body to soul, and from pathology to inclination. Melancholy has always been marked by acute contradictions in its depiction, invoking an expansive array of meanings: it encompasses positive, creative facets— such as depth, creativity, and bursts of genius—as well as negative qualities—including gloominess, despondency, and isolation. The history of the term is saturated with different and at times conflicting articulations that, paradoxically, seem to consistently point to more or less the same set of features. Notions of closure, contemplation, loss, passivity, sloth, and genius have always been linked to melancholy in one version or another, referring to body or soul and vice versa.” -Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy 

The most dogged question that follows melancholia is “what is melancholy?” Sigmund Freud framed the concept as a perverse form of mourning. Whereas the mourner mourns something lost - like a loved one - as part of a healthy grieving process, the melancholic mourns something that she never possessed to begin with. The distinction between mourning a lost object versus mourning an imaginary object is the key difference. The mourner can eventually learn to let go. The melancholic cannot let go, because there was nothing to hold on to in the first place; in fact, the melancholic holds onto this loss to the point of internalization. The imaginary loss becomes a part of them. The melancholic thus exists in a permanent state of loss, a kind of loss that itself becomes its own kind of object or obsession. Imagine a person who desperately holds onto a memory or an idealized memory of the past they can’t let go of the past because the idealized memory never existed—a popular person from High School, 20 years after graduation, still trying to relive the old glory days. It’s a fantasy structure.

We begin with this psychoanalytic perspective because it distills some of melancholy’s key themes: loss and memory, reality and fantasy, knowledge and nostalgia.

Walter Benjamin’s work on melancholy is conceptually difficult and situated within a deep study of Baroque-era German plays. These barriers to entry ward off many readers, but intrepid readers get to enjoy one of modernity’s greatest meditations on the nature of melancholy. Benjamin’s work speaks to our present moment in a very profound way. The Baroque era that he wrote about was in a period of recovery from the 30-Years War. A world-historic event of violence and suffering on the same level as the American Civil War and WWI. Benjamin, writing in the wake of WWI, explores the baroque period in an effort to understand his own post-war moment. For readers today, in the wake of endless wars overseas, financial collapse, and global pandemics, Benjamin’s study appears especially relevant.

One key distinction for Benjamin is between forms of knowledge: knowledge from the world and knowledge from books: “The brooder’s knowing and the scholar’s learning are as intimately blended in it as in the men of the Baroque. The Renaissance explores the wide world; the Baroque explores libraries.” The Baroque, as an avatar for melancholy, only gains access to knowledge through texts, whereas earlier ages gained knowledge through empirical exploration. 

Benjamin observes that our idea of what counts and knowledge and the knowable changes when the primary metaphor for knowledge becomes the text itself. It’s no accident that his period of study follows in the wake of the reformation, a time when protestants championed the value of the literary to empower people to read the Bible, as opposed to the Catholic tradition of having the Bible read aloud (in Latin) to largely illiterate masses. Benjamin’s point is not that we ought to return to a pre-literate society, instead he offers a pointed account of how the scope of knowledge, language, literature, society, and politics change in this moment. These are the changes that define modernity: the discourse of knowledge becomes the discourse of risk management and power brokering. The “heroic” figures that arise from this age are either melancholic scholars (not sages) or political advisors (not kings) or military strategists (not warriors)—it’s in this moment that Benjamin reveals that the primary dramatic subjects are no longer kings and queens, but instead advisors who manipulate the systems of power offstage. The age of melancholy delivers unto the world A Game of Thrones.

Benjamin’s melancholic subject is burdened with knowledge. Their knowledge is twofold. First, they learn of the world and its problems, and then they learn that they and the systems of power are not up to the task of fixing the world. The gap between these two domains of knowledge creates the emblematic form of sadness that colors the melancholic. This melancholic subject is also more committed to ideas than to people or individuals. In this sense the melancholic is another version of The Beautiful Loser. The advisors to the king are not loyal to the king, they are loyal to an idea of the “the kingdom.”

“For those who dug deeper saw themselves interposed in existence as in a rubble field of half-completed, inauthentic actions. Life itself lashed out against this. Deeply it feels that it is not there merely to be devalued by faith.” Benjamin, writing in a time of national socialism, would have observed the early stirrings of nationalism, but this was a form of nationalism that refused to recognize the people of Germany, instead preferring an idealized form of the “the Aryan.” This is the irony and the tragedy of the melancholic subject. Their idealism can be committed toward some kind of utopian future, but it comes at the cost of actual people. It sees the nation as an unrealized potential, but remains blind to the fact that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individual actors, all with diverse and disparate interests.

We also look at Wendy Brown, whose essay “Resisting Left Melancholy” offers a sharp critique of the left under the aegis of melancholy. For Brown, the left has become too enamored with its own past. The halcyon days of pre-WWI workers movements and social organization that brought about important reforms and protections for people are now long gone. Those on the left who continue to trumpet these visions of an idealized past that never was fail to understand that the visions of total revolution that drove the New and Old Left can only restrict contemporary and future political imaginaries. Brown’s work partakes of a Foucaultian tradition that wants to dispense with the Marxist theories of power that are top (bourgeoisie) vs down (proletariat). This theory of power envisioned a teleological form of resistance and triumph (the communist revolution) that is incommensurate with the way that power actually works—that is, as the diffuse, micro-level force that Foucault is famous for articulating. The more we hold onto the mottos and visions of total revolution that mobilized the Old and New Lefts, the more we remain behind the ball politically and theoretically. In this way, Brown’s challenge is equal parts unsettling and damning: can any progressive movement call itself progressive if it remains mired in its own past commitments, visions, and slogans? Brown encourages a more imaginary, forward thinking program. 

Our interest in concepts like melancholy, cynicism, and the beautiful soul betrays our commitment to a phenomenological project, as opposed to an idealistic project. For us, the import of perspective and experience cannot be disentangled from any form of inquiry - be it philosophical, economic, political, or cultural. And so terms and concepts, like melancholy, help us understand and color what it means to be in the world. An idealist approach would focus more on the categories of experience. For example, a utilitarian will develop models on how to maximize human happiness, but the condition of happiness itself is treated as a given. Just as Plato himself treated eudaemonia as the given ideal of human experience. In a very basic sense, the study of melancholy requires own to acknowledge that what drives human action is not simply “the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of displeasure.” If one takes the claim that desire and drive and action are themselves complex subjects, then one must engage more directly and personally with the various dynamics that shape these experiences. Thus, phenomenology.

To our listeners committed to idealism: we hear you, we see you. But we find that the most persuasive version of idealism emerges from a pragmatic study of power, interest, and systems. Language philosophy’s ability to separate word from action from meaning from usage is an invaluable tool, especially when it comes to a topic like understanding how the system of media operate. 

But even so, as the sign of Saturn rises in the west, we ponder these parting words from Walter Benjamin: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But its persevering absorption takes the dead things up into its contemplation in order to save them. The writer concerning whom the following has been transmitted speaks from out of the spirit of melancholy.”

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