TO WRITE THE BODY: LOST TIME AND THE WORK OF MELANCHOLY by SHANNON HAYES A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Philosophy and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Shannon Hayes Title: To Write the Body: Lost Time and the Work of Melancholy This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Philosophy by: Alejandro Vallega Chairperson Rocío Zambrana Core Member Ted Toadvine Core Member Jeffrey Librett Institutional Representative and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2019. ii © 2019 Shannon Hayes This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Shannon Hayes Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy June 2019 Title: To Write the Body: Lost Time and the Work of Melancholy In this dissertation I develop a philosophical account of melancholy as a productive, creative, and politically significant affect. Despite the longstanding association of melancholy with the creativity and productivity of poets, artists, and philosophers, melancholy is judged to be a nonpolitical mood associated with stagnancy, paralysis, and a willful alienation. If Marxist critical theory still holds true today and it remains the case we are already dismembered and distanced in our worldly relations, then melancholy is a mood that unmasks our present situation. In the fatigue and weariness of the melancholic body, there is an insight into the decay and fragmentation that characterizes social existence. Melancholy, I claim, does not produce alienation, it reveals it and exacerbates it in its unveiling. Throughout this dissertation, I draw from the works of 20th century intellectuals (Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida) in pursuit of their melancholy. I illuminate how these intellectuals put their melancholic insights to work in their texts with the intention of constructing an optics of melancholy as a critical-destructive orientation towards the progressive time of European modernity. By following the tortuous paths these thinkers take as they put their melancholy to work, I draw the figure of the body-writing in the time of melancholy, iv which is the time of delay and deferral. That the body-writing is an active, productive subject is not despite but because of the slow slack time of melancholy. This labor is not productive in Marx’s sense of the term, as labor that creates new value (capital) through its mechanical reproductions, but in the way melancholy work disrupts the productivity of capital and makes possible an encounter with the time that has been lost. To put melancholy to work, I claim, is to make this insight into loss perceptible, legible, to share it with others. Melancholy works to make the present account for what has been lost and, in the process, works to complete the uncompleted past. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Shannon Hayes GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Philosophy, 2019, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Philosophy, 2012, State University of New York at Stony Brook Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy, 2009, University of California at Santa Cruz AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: AOS: 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Aesthetics, Social and Political Philosophy AOC: Feminist Philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, 19th Century Philosophy GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Paideia Prize, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, 2017 Travel Award, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Oregon, 2014, 2015 Teaching Fellowship, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Oregon, 2017-2017 PUBLICATIONS: Hayes, Shannon. “Can Melancholy Be Heroic? Walter Benjamin and the Vicissitudes of Melancholy.” In Faces of Depression in Literature, edited by Josefa Ros-Velasco. New York: Peter Lang. (forthcoming) Hayes, Shannon. “Merleau-Ponty’s Melancholy: Phantom Limbs and Involuntary Memory.” Epoché: Journal for the History of Philosophy. (forthcoming) Hayes, Shannon. “The Historico-Poetic Materialism of Benjamin and Celan. Critical Horizons: Journal of Critical and Social Theory (2018): 1-15. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have come into being without the people around me and for the many conversations, interactions, events, and surprises that they have brought into my life. Each word bears the traces of these encounters with others. I thank my dissertation chair, Alejandro Vallega, for teaching me lessons that I have incorporated into this dissertation about how to think, how to write, and how to teach. I thank my committee members, Rocío Zambrana, Ted Toadvine, and Jeffrey Librett for their questions, suggestions, and concerns, which helped me direct/re-direct the movement of my thinking throughout the writing process. I am grateful for the ways they supported and engaged the project. To my friends—especially, Bonnie Sheehey, Anna Cook, Sarah McLay, Martina Ferrari, and Tye Ripma—with whom I have spent countless hours laughing, talking, playing, thinking, working, and being in their company. I am equally thankful for the small moments shared—for the intimacy of being-bored-together, being-alone-together, of sharing in each other’s joy, grief, despair, excitement, and curiosity. They teach me all the time about the pleasures of being-with. I am thankful for Nicole Brulé and the midwifery skills that she shared with me, which helped me bring this project into being. I am also thankful for the co-habitants that I get to spend my days with. I thank Willie, the Schnauzer, for never letting me forget that I am a relational being who has responsibilities and obligations to others. I thank Barbara, the cat, for teaching me that one does not have to be liked all the time to be loved and to be loving with others. I am so thankful for my partner Sean whose love and support affords me the possibility to think of something else. Through my intellectual activity I try to emulate his way of being in vii the world: the compassion, creativity, and attentiveness that he brings to the world everyday inspires me. I thank my grandmother, whose presence was the ground of my existence and whose absence continues to ground me. The shapes and rhythms of her world make up the architecture of my dreams. In this work, the thought of her reverberates. viii To my mother, for her melancholy. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Melancholy and the Work of Mourning ................................................................ 2 Melancholy and Modern Psychiatry ...................................................................... 11 Melancholy and Poetry .......................................................................................... 22 Alienated Labor and Melancholy Work ................................................................ 32 Chapter Outlines .................................................................................................... 39 II. BETWEEN FREUD AND LACAN: NACHTRÄGLICHKEIT AND THE TIME OF MELANCHOLIA ....................................................................................... 44 Freudian Nachträglichkeit: Trauma, Mourning, Anxiety ..................................... 47 The Time of Trauma ................................................................................... 47 Theory of Mourning ................................................................................... 52 The Work of Melancholy? ......................................................................... 56 Nachträglichkeit and Mourning ................................................................. 59 Melancholy and Anxiety ............................................................................ 62 Lacanian Après Coup……………… ..................................................................... 68 Anxiety and l’objet a ................................................................................. 72 The Object of Mourning ............................................................................. 75 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 81 x Chapter Page III. TOWARD A MELANCHOLIC PHENOMENOLOGY: MERLEAU-PONTY AND PROUST ON PHANTOMS AND INVOLUNTARY MEMORIES ................. 84 Re-reading Merleau-Ponty’s “Phantom Limbs” .................................................... 87 The Paradox of Consciousness ........................................................................ 87 Phenomenology of Phantoms .......................................................................... 90 Deleuze on Stuttering ....................................................................................... 96 Proust and the Phantoms of Involuntary Memory ................................................. 101 Perception, Memory, and the Frustrations of Love ......................................... 101 The “Petite Madeleine” as Involuntary Memory ...........................................