Definition of Melancholia

Freud

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful

dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to
love, inhibition of all activity, and lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a
degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and
culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (244)

In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to
the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes are different one can
recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object that has not
perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love. (245)

The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable,

signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis,
a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and
which have been turned round upon the subject’s own self in the ways we
have been discussing. (251)

Brinkema

melancholia is the pathological, morbid, problematic version of mourning.

One of the most significant differences between the two terms is in their
relationships to temporality: melancholia takes an expanded duration, it
persists and continues indefinitely, adhering to time; mourning, by contrast,
because it can and will be overcome, has a finite future. (57)

Freud describes melancholia as a “state of grief”—endless,

undifferentiated, a state in its most precise sense, involving stasis and
“profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world.” In
addition to the mournful attitude toward the missing person or ideal, the
melancholic adds a supplementary loss in a subsequent depletion of “the
capacity to love” and an inhibition of vitality and engagement. (57)

melancholia is shrouded in an absorptive light because it consumes entirely

the light that illuminates the system and reflects nothing in turn. The
gamble of Freud’s first line (the speculative venture of erhellen) is that light
can be cast at all on the painful matter at hand.

Melancholia’s inability to reflect back the light cast on it by mourning means

that both terms exist at the antipode to literal and philosophical illumination.

While mourning’s pain is increasingly shrouded in peculiar darkness,

melancholia comes to contemplative light, fulfills the promise of being
illuminated from above, and takes on a certain lightness of ordinary ego-
introjecting being

“when it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite
often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a
setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia.”

Freud’s insistence in 1917 that in melancholia there are “countless

separate struggles” over the lost object has made it a contemporary figure
for an ongoing, never-ending negotiation or relationship with some missing
thing. (65)

The culmination of this trend can be seen in the anthology Loss (2003),
edited by David Eng and David Kazanjuan, in which melancholia
constitutes “an ongoing and open relationship with the past—bringing the
ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present.” (65)

In Loss, melancholia is redescribed as a rich site for rethinking losses both

individual and collective in a non-pathological, non-narcissistic manner.
“This attention to remains,” insist the editors, “generates a politics of
mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than
nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic,
militant rather than reactionary.” (66)

Melancholia in this school of thought is figured as what founds collective

politics and remembrance. (66)

This shifting meaning of melancholia means that one key trait of its
definition—its fundamental difference from mourning—is blurred.
Melancholy comes to take on every positive conceptual attribute previously
denied it: as a projective reach into the history totality that precedes an
individual or society far from the introjective ambivalence and solipsistic
suffering of Freud’s earlier treatments. (66)

Melancholia is now regarded as that which casts light on historical,

collective, and personal losses and is the politically self-evident theoretical
term. (66)

Perhaps the best description of this object of contemplation in

contemporary discourse would be something akin to the hybrid
mournincholia. (66)

A doubled form of melancholia is deployed throughout Loss: the one, a

lingering sadness and recursive loitering in the past; the other, active,
transformative, and oriented toward future possibilities. (67)

Although haunted by its depressive other, melancholia is figured in the

collection as precisely that which can overcome its other, peculiarly painful
form. (67)

As framed by the editors, “The politics of mourning might be described as

the creative process mediating a hopeful or hopeless relationship between
loss and history.” (67)

For melancholia in Freud’s version of 1917 is the anti-mediating: its

sickness to the past is precisely a recursive loop of painful attachment that
cannon renounce, that never synthesizes, that is temporally pathological for
its expanded affective duration without end or change. It does not
transform, and it is not transformative. (67)

In place of the “peculiar painfulness: of mourning, it is now a peculiar

painlessness that centers post-Freudian discourses of loss: mourning
made melancholia, or mournincholia, has been dialecticized, and it has
been anesthesized, deprived of the intensity of its affective force. (71)

“mourning” and “melancholia” have become so oversaturated, I name that

other thing grief. Grief will be the term for that which resists the relational
dimension of loss; the form for that suffering of a general economy in which
not everything can be made to mean and things escape systemacity
without return, labor guarantees no profit. As peculiarly painful dimension of
loss, grief resists mediation and ongoing processual struggle. It takes a
different form altogether. (71)

Eng (Loss)

In this collection, “loss” functions as a placeholder of sorts—what Freud

calls in The Interpretation of Dreams a “theoretical fiction.” “Loss” names
what is apprehended by discourses and practices of mourning,
melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma, and depression. In particular,
Loss focuses upon the shifting meanings of melancholia, a theoretical
concept with a long and expansive pedigree dating to classical times
(explored in the following sections of this introduction). As both a formal
relation and a structure of feeling, a mechanism of disavowal and a
constellation of affect, melancholia offers a capaciousness of meaning in
relation to losses encompassing the individual and the collective, the
spiritual and the material, the psychic and the social, the aesthetic and the
political. (2-3)

After Freud it has become ever more important to consider an intellectual

and political genealogy of loss through melancholia. In “Mourning and
Melancholia” (1917), Freud writes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to
the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has
taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”
Freud’s observations on the overlapping qualities of the lost object—a
person or an abstraction—provides the theoretical frame organizing the
three parts of this collection: “Bodily Remains,” “Spatial Remains,” and
“Ideal Remains.” (3)

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud attempts to draw a clear distinction

between these two mental states. He contends that mourning is a psychic
process in which libido is withdrawn from a lost object. This withdrawal
cannot be enacted at once. Instead, libido is detached bit by bit so that
eventually the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to move on to
invest in new objects. In contrast with mourning, Freud describes
melancholia as an enduring devotion on the part of the ego to the lost
object. A mourning without end, melancholia results from the inability to
resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved
object, place, or ideal. (3)

[W]e might observe that in Freud’s initial conception of melancholia, the

past is neither fixed nor complete. Unlike mourning, in which the past is
declared resolved, finished, and dead, in melancholia the past remains
steadfastly alive in the present. By engaging in “countless separate
struggles” with loss, melancholia might be said to constitute, as Benjamin
would describe it, an ongoing and open relationship with the past—bringing
its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present. (3-
4)

In this regard, we find in Freud’s conception of melancholia’s persistent

struggle with its lost objects not simply a “grasping” and “holding” on to a
fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and
its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for
the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future. While
mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest,
melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to
gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects (4)
Ultimately, we learn, the work of mourning is not possible without
melancholia. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud comes to this conclusion
by understanding that the ego is constituted through the remains of
abandoned object-cathexes. (4)

Butler observes that melancholia is “precisely what interiorizes the psyche,

that is, makes it possible to refer to the psyche through such topographical
tropes. (4)

In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva describes melancholia’s inexorable grief as the

“signifier’s flimsiness.” Rather than thinking about this flimsiness as the
impossibility of representation—as the signifier’s inadequacy to express its
lost referent—might we interpret it in terms of an extended flexibility, an
expanded capacity for representation? That is, can we describe
melancholia as facilitating the work of mourning by creating numerous
disparate bodies, places, and ideals composing the symbolic world? (4)

Butler (Loss)

The presumptions that the future follows the past, that mourning might
follow melancholia, that mourning might be completed are all poignantly
called into question in these pages as we realize a series of paradoxes: the
past is irrecoverable and the past is not past; the past is the resource for
the future and the future is the redemption of the past; loss must be marked
and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss
precipitates its own modes of expression. (467)

Like the lining of a dress at the hem or the lapel—mourning is thus likened
to the material of clothing, the material that is mostly hidden, that is
suddenly, even unexpectedly, felt against the flesh, the leg or the neck, and
so mourning is staged here as a certain encounter between a commodified
material and the limb that knows it only on occasion. Mourning is likened to
an “interior” region of clothing that is suddenly, and perhaps with some
embarrassment, exposed, not to the public eye, but to the flesh itself. This
is a presence, a proximity, that undoes what appears, that is counter to the
effect of appearance, but is also part of the realm of appearance itself:
mourning emerges as the lining of the dress, where the dress is, as it were,
laughing. It tinges the appearance; it suggests an “underneath,” but it is still
part of appearance, its frame, its artifice, its suggestiveness and potential
undoing. And mourning is, ineluctably, an encounter with sensuousness,
but not a “natural” one, one that is conditioned by the proximity of the
artifact to flesh. That mourning is subjected to a metaphorical identification
with the artifice that brings the body into view suggests the very process by
which mourning works. It displays, and it displays the body in a certain
sensuousness, without purpose, without direction, but not, therefore,
without movement. (470)

Benjamin then makes this connection clearer when his discussion of

mourning blends into a discussion of melancholia. In the early Freud, of
course, melancholia was defined as the failure of mourning, as its
disavowal, and something of that distinction clearly also works for
Benjamin. But his exposition also allows the slide of mourning into
melancholia. (471)

Mourning is the state of mind in which feeling revives the empty world in
the form of a mask [das Gefühl die entleerte Welt maskenhaft neubelebt],
and derives an enigmatic satisfaction in contemplating it. Every feeling is
bound to an a priori object, and the representation of this object is its
phenomenology. Accordingly, the theory of mourning, which emerged
unmistakably as a pendant to the theory of tragedy, can only be developed
in the description of that world which is revealed under the gaze of the
melancholy man. The world is revived in a masked form, in a masked way,
not as a mask, but through a form of masking and as its result. The
masking does not precisely conceal, since what is lost cannot be
recovered, but it marks the simultaneous condition of an irrecoverable loss
that gives way to a reanimation of an evacuated world. (139; German, 318)

The laws governing the Trauerspiel are to be found in the heart of

mourning, but mourning is not personal: it is not the mourning of a
particular poet or individual: this is “a feeling that is released from any
empirical subject and is intimately bound to the fullness of an object” (139).
(471)

Benjamin can and does write that “the deadening of emotions in mourning
can produce a pathological state, but this state, it will turn out, will
characterize our relation to history; a symptom of depersonalization,
alienation from the body, and then, in which the most simple object appears
to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks any natural,
creative relationship to us” (140). (471)

It may be that the distinction finally between mourning and melancholia

does not hold, not only for the reasons that became apparent in Freud, but
also because they are, inevitably, experienced in a certain configuration of
simultaneity and succession. Many of the essays here refer to the
sensuality of melancholia, to its form of pleasure, its mode of becoming,
and therefore reject its identification with paralysis. But it probably remains
true that it is only because we know its stasis that we can trace its motion,
and that we want to. The rituals of mourning are sites of merriment;
Benjamin knew this as well, but as his text effectively shows, it is not
always possible to keep the dance alive. (472)