Under the Sign of Saturn

An interesting review in the TLS of an exhibition and some books on melancholy. (Let me also put in a word for Agamben's Stanzas, which deals with the same subject in a suitably fragmentary and eccentric manner). And here's something I prepared earlier:




Melancholy, says Freud, is the withdrawal of interest from the external world, due to the prolonged and exhaustive investment in a love object (a person) irrecoverably lost. With emotion fixed on this absent centre, circumscribed in its passive embrace, intervention in reality is rendered pointless, and pleasures and activity other than mourning are prohibited from ever getting off the ground:

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity.

Yet the object lost can not be acknowledged, so painful has its absence become, and - leaving behind a deposit of inconsolable sadness - it disappears from conscious reach. Instead, the melancholic’s gaze is arrested by the racked eloquence of his own empty hands, he is left with the cadence of loss in itself, a sound disembodied from it originary sense, which distributes its sad and Lethean vibration over the vacant things of a once enjoyed world. Deprived in this way of its proper object, memory dwindles to its own elusive ghost. This memory of memory, this afterlife of grief, flickers over the surface of the visible world, attempting to discover some trace, glimpse or reflection of what is buried too deep ever to be recalled. This vagrant yearning seeks out some emblem befitting its state. All that is sorrowful and abandoned, discarded objects and physical remains, the parched chaos of a world in ruins: these are all suitable images for melancholic contemplation, and through them - through their myriad, shattered, partial surfaces - is dreamt that whole which was originally lost.