Автор: stranger
Дата: 18-03-05 00:22
Thought — Crisis — Melancholia
Nevertheless, melancholia is not French. The rigor of Protestantism or the matriarchal weight of Christian orthodoxy admits more readily to a complicity with the grieving person when it does not beckon him or her into delectatio morosa. While it is true that the French Middle Ages rendered sadness by means of delicate tropes, the Gallic, renascent, enlightened tone tended toward levity, eroticism, and rhetoric rather than nihilism. Pascal, Rousseau, and Nerval cut a sorry figure — and they stand as exceptions.
For the speaking being life is a meaningful life; life is even the apogee of meaning. Hence if the meaning of life is lost, life can easily be lost: when meaning shatters, life no longer matters. In his doubtful moments the depressed person is a philosopher, and we owe to Heraclitus, Socrates, and more recently Kierkegaard the most disturbing pages on the meaning or lack of meaning of Being. One must, however, go back to Aristotle to find a thorough reflection on the relationship philosophers have maintained with melancholia. According to the Problemata (30, I), attributed to Aristotle, black bile (melaina hole) saps great men. The (pseudo-)Aristotelian reflection focuses on the ethos-peritton, the exceptional personality, whose distinctive characteristic would be melancholia. While relying on the Hippocratic notions of four humors and temperaments, Aristotle breaks new ground by removing melancholia from pathology and locating it in nature but also and mainly by having it ensue from heat, considered to be the regulating principle of the organism, and mesotes, the controlled interaction of opposite energies. This Greek notion of melancholia remains alien to us today; it assumes a "properly balanced diversity" (eukratos anomalia) that is metaphorically rendered by froth (aphros), the euphoric counterpoint to black bile. Such a white mixture of air (pneuma) and liquid brings out froth in the sea, wine, as well as in the sperm of man. Indeed, Aristotle combines scientific statement with mythical allusions as he links melancholia to spermatic froth and eroti, with explicit references to Dionysus and Aphrodite (953b, 31-32). The melancholia he evokes is not a philosopher's disease but his very nature, his ethos. It is not what strikes the first Greek melancholy hero, Bellerophon, who is thus portrayed in the Iliad (VI, 200-3): "Bellerophon gave of-fense to the gods and became a lonely wanderer on the Aleian plain, eating out his heart and shunning the paths of men." Self-devouring because forsaken by the gods, exiled by divine decree, this desperate man was condemned not to mania but to banishment, absence, void . . . With Aristotle, melancholia, counterbalanced by genius, is coextensive with man's anxiety in Being. It could be seen as the forerunner of Heidegger's anguish as the Stimmung of thought. Schelling found in it, in similar fashion, the "essence of human freedom," an indication of "man's affinity with nature." The philosopher would thus be "melancholy on account of a surfeit of humanity."2 This perception of melancholia as an extreme state and as an exceptionality that reveals the true nature of Being undergoes a profound transformation during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, medieval thought returned to the cosmologies of late antiquity and bound melancholia to Saturn, the planet of spirit and thought.3 Diirer's Melancholia (1514) was a masterful transposition into graphic art of theoretical speculations that found their highest expression with Marsilio Ficino. Christian theology, on the other hand, considered sadness a sin. Dante set "the woeful people who have lost the good of the intellect" in "the city of grief" (Inferno, III). They are "wretched souls" because they have lost God, and these melancholy shadows constitute "the sect of the wicked displeasing both to God and to His enemies"; their punishment is to have "no
hope of death." Those whom despair has caused to turn violent against themselves, suicides and squanderers, are not spared either; they are condemned to turn into trees (Inferno, XIII). Nevertheless, medieval monks did promote sadness: as mystical ascesis (acedia) it became essential as a means toward paradoxical knowledge of divine truth and constituted the major touchstone for faith.
Changing in accordance with the religious climate, melancholia asserted itself, if I may say so, in religious doubt. There is nothing more dismal than a dead God, and Dostoyevsky himself was disturbed by the distressing sight of the dead Christ in Holbein's painting, contrasted with the "truth of resurrection." The periods that witness the downfall of political and religious idols, periods of crisis, are particularly favorable to black moods. While it is true that an unemployed worker is less suicidal than a deserted lover, melancholia does assert itself in times of crisis; it is spoken of, establishes its archeology, generates its representations and its knowledge. A written melancholia surely has little in common with the institutionalized stupor that bears the same name. Beyond the confusion in terminology that I have kept alive up to now (What is melancholia? What is depression?), we are confronted with an enigmatic paradox that will not cease questioning us: if loss, bereavement, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as they threaten it and spoil it, it is also noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated. The artist consumed by melancholia is at the same time the most relentless in his struggle against the symbolic abdication that blankets him . . . Until death strikes or suicide becomes imperative for those who view it as final triumph over the void of the lost object . . .
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
|
|
![[smilie5]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smilie5.gif)
![[smile]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smilie1.gif)
![[smilie24]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smiley24.gif)
![[smilie7]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smilie7.gif)
![[smilie3]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smilie3.gif)
![[smilie10]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smilie10.gif)
![[smilie8]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smilie8.gif)
![[smilie18]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smiley18.gif)
![[beer]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/smiley20.gif)
![[shtrak]](https://photo-forum.net/forum/smileys/shtrak.gif)
Стани фен на Фото Форум във Facebook
Фото Форум в Instagram