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Politics and Melancholia C R I S I S & C R I T I Q CRISISU & E / Volume 3 / CRISIS & CRITIQUEIssue 2 CRITIQUE POLITICS AND MELANCHOLIA CRISIS & CRITIQUE Volume 3/Issue 2, 2016 Dialectical Materialism Collective 1ISSN 2311-5475The Concept of Structural Causality in Althusser C 4 C R Justin Clemens and Dominiek Hoens, R I I S Introduction S I I S 20 S Sami Khatib, Melancholia and Destruction: & & Brushing Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of C History” Against the Grain C R R I 40 I T T I Rebecca Comay, Hypochondria and Its I Q Discontents, or, the Geriatric Sublime Q CRISISU & U E 60 E / Marc De Kesel, Controlled Melancholy: / How to Purely Love Political Power Volume 3 / Volume 3 / Issue 2 80 Issue 2 Karel Vanhaesebrouck, The King is Tired. A Few Notes About Politics, Theatre and Melancholy 94 Lieven De Cauter, Small Anatomy of PoliticalMelancholy 114 CRISIS & CRITIQUEKlaas Tindemans, The Failed Politician Melancholia, Crisis and Political Agency 147 Jon Roffe, Notes on a Deleuzean Theory of Melancholia: Object, Cinema, World 164 Sigi Jöttkandt, Bile/Pale Fire: Benjaminian Allegory and Nabokovian Melancholy 166 Peter Goodrich, Melancholegalism: Black Letter Theory and the Temporality POLITICS AND EDITORIAL COMMITTEE: CRITIQUEMELANCHOLIA Slavoj Žižek of Law Étienne Balibar CRISIS & CRITIQUE Joan Copjec 207 Volume 3/Issue 2, 2016 Adrian Johnston ISSN 2311-5475 Ted Stolze Alexi Kukuljevic, The Happy Melancholic Robert Pfaller EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Gabriel Tupinambá Agon Hamza Sead Zimeri Frank Ruda Catherine Malabou Domenico Losurdo EDITORS Jelica Šumič Justin Clemens & Roland Boer Dominiek Hoens Yuan Yao 3 The Concept of Structural Causality in Althusser Srdjan Cvjetićanin At first sight, politics and melancholia can only appear as an odd C R couple. Whereas the realm of politics evokes enthusiastic activity and I strategic interests, melancholia is generally associated with passive S contemplation and a lack of worldly engagement. If politics connotes I Politics and S vital, future-oriented struggles over the divisions of the community, melancholia suggests individual incapacitation, even dissolution, by & predatory hangovers from the past. Hence, if one were to identify a C relation between both terms it would seem to be an inversely proportional R one: an increase of politics would be concomitant with a decline of I Melancholia: T melancholia, and vice versa. I Such an opposition is at once supported and complicated by the Q astonishingly extensive modern scholarship regarding the history of U E melancholia, which ranges across the fields of philosophy, literature, art Introduction and medicine. As Giorgio Agamben points out in an important study of / the condition, the ancient analyses of the operations and implications of Volume 3 / black bile – which find a locus classicus in the Aristotelian Problemata, Issue 2 whose author invokes hoi melancholikoi – come to be associated by the Middle Ages not only with philosophy, poetry and arts, but with a moral malady as well.1 We subsequently discover periodic plagues of melancholia troubling the history of Western life, attested to by all sorts of evidence, not least that provided by the most outstanding creative types, Albrecht Dürer and William Shakespeare among them. As J. L. Koerner proposes Justin Clemens of Dürer’s own famous image of Melencolia I, in the wake of such eminent commentators as Saxl and Panofsky, Warburg, and Walter Benjamin: Melencolia seems designed to generate multiple and contradictory Dominiek Hoens readings, to clue its viewers to an endless exegetical labour until, exhausted in the end, they discover their own portrait in Dürer’s sleepless, inactive personification of melancholy. Interpreting the engraving itself becomes a detour to self-reflection, just as all the arts and sciences whose tools clutter the print’s foreground finally return their practitioners to the state of a mind absorbed in itself.2 Multiple, contradictory, sleepless, inactive: when attempting to address melancholia, the oxymorons seem to concatenate inexorably, and, in this concatenation, further disseminate and compound the condition itself. Melancholia is as catching as it is caught; it is as if its 1 See Agamben 1993, passim. 2 Koerner 1997, p. 23. As Koerner continues: ‘the account [by Panofsky and Saxl] of the 1514 engraving as a self-portrait is illuminating, for it is consistent with a notion of melancholy as the dangerous foregrounding of self. Dürer’s pensive angel, assuming a posture of inwardness that she shares with the artist in the Self-Portrait in Erlangen, provides the occasion wherein, exemplarily, the historiography of art can link the visual image to the person of the artist,’ p. 27. See also Benjamin 2015, pp. 55-94. 5 Politics and Melancholia: Introduction putative analysts and epidemiologists render themselves susceptible to C or as one of melancholy’s effects.’6 Ranjana Khanna notes that ‘one of C R R melancholia’s multifarious blandishments in their very approach. I the reasons psychoanalytically conceived melancholia is a compelling I If Romeo and Juliet famously begins with its eponymous male S rubric for an analysis of postcoloniality is that it is anti-identitarian while S protagonist suffering a flagrant and parodic bout of melancholia – to the I compelled by a situation and is affective without sentimentality. It is also I S S extent that he becomes the butt of diegetic humour from characters such highly self-critical.’7 The reader will immediately note that all of these as Mercutio – it is undoubtedly Hamlet who provides one of the greatest & accounts, whatever their differences, suggest that melancholia, in its & early modern figures of (perhaps simulated) melancholy. As Hamlet apparent detachment from all existing objects through its unreasonable C C complains to his mother: R refusal to mourn the lost, thereby offers precisely a radical chance not R I only for personal, but also for political renewal. I T T ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.” I Under such descriptions, politics and melancholia would find their I ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Q attenuated and antagonistic articulation regarding the point of the sense Q Nor customary suits of solemn black, U of the world: politics being a communal practice that strives to effect U E E Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, another sense of the world or even create another world, characterized by No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, / affects of enthusiasm; melancholia would be a form of individual inaction / Nor the dejected ‘haviour of the visage, correlated with a suspension of any sense of world, and characterized Volume 3 / Volume 3 / Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, Issue 2 by singular affects of anhedonia and despair. Yet at the same time, Issue 2 That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, melancholia becomes at once an essential goad and a threat to political For they are actions that a man might play; activism, as well as a reminder to politics of the perils of totalisation, But I have that within which passes show, that actualization can undermine its own raisons d’être, and that the These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’3 claims of temporality cannot simply be effaced by the passing of the past. Both politics and melancholia would therefore also engage – if through While putting on a show that both truly expresses and truly irreducible operations – a kind of torsion of depersonalization, politics dissimulates the metamorphic disorder beneath, the Prince of Denmark exceeding the will from above, as it were, and melancholia evacuating the maniacally asserts the withdrawal of the real of melancholia beyond any will from below. possible figure of action in the world. Yet we all know what happens when Yet can this contemporary critical concordance regarding the the madman’s mask of melancholia finally falls: the escalating execution paradoxical import of melancholia for politics be persuasively sustained? of foes, friends, and family, up to the fall of the state itself. After all, we are experiencing something perhaps unheralded in previous Such a violent and paradoxical assertion of the inassertability of the forms of political governance and medical diagnosis. Politics proper inwardness conjured by the melancholic sufferer returns, moreover, in its seems to have become the object of a deracinated, privatized corporate multiple avatars. technocracy, for which communal action does not designate a project or It is surely the abiding paradoxes of such a condition that have program founded on a struggle over social divisions and distributions, led to melancholia’s astonishing efflorescence today as a crucial but only for ‘sustainable’ ‘profitability’ under conditions of ‘global’ category for much self-consciously critical philosophy. Let us give a few ‘competitiveness,’ which simultaneously requires an extraordinary significant indications. As Julia Kristeva puts it in her own famous study security and surveillance apparatus. To give some key indicators of the of the condition: ‘there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, former, it will hopefully suffice here to list a variety of recent geopolitical melancholy.’ 4 Slavoj Žižek, while denouncing the garden-variety cultural events: the causation of the financial sector with regards to the Global studies valorisation of ‘melancholia’ over ‘mourning,’ can still end up Financial Crisis of 2008, and its ongoing effects; the replacement of affirming that ‘melancholy (disappointment at all positive, observable elected governments in Italy and Greece with interim placeholders; objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) effectively is the beginning the recent signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the of philosophy.’ 5 Judith Butler proposes ‘gender as a kind of melancholy, ongoing discussions regarding the Transantlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Examples could easily be multiplied. 3 Shakespeare, 1.2.76-86. 4 Kristeva 1989, p. 6. 6 Butler 1997, p. 132. 5 Žižek 2000, p.
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