Melancholy

This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Richard Linklater’s celebrated Before trilogy chronicles the love of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) who first meet up in Before Sunrise, later reconnect in Before Sunset and finally experience a fall-out in Before Midnight. Not only do these films present storylines and dilemmas that invite philosophical discussion, but philosophical discussion itself is at the very heart of the trilogy.

This book, containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, explores the many philosophical themes that feature so vividly in the interactions between Céline and Jesse, including:

the nature of love, romanticism and marriage
the passage and experience of time
the meaning of life
the art of conversation
the narrative self
gender
death

Including an interview with Julie Delpy in which she discusses her involvement in the films and the importance of studying philosophy.

The loss of the beloved, the fear or experience of it, either because of death or other reasons has been a repeatedly occurring theme in the work of Julian Barnes. In Before She Met Me, the fear of loss forms the subconscious of a humorous and meticulous examination of obsessive jealousy, in Talking It Over and Love etc., it is analysed through deception, revenge and resentment. Even behind the apparent postmodernist strategies and playful tone of Flaubert's Parrot, there resides the story of a retired, bereaving narrator who is trying to overcome the recent death of his once infidel wife. Irony and humour have always been the main traits of Barnes, no matter how serious the issues he represented. However, since the publication of The Sense of an Ending in 2011, Barnes's novels have grown to be more melancholic and lyrical in tone and less humorous and playful in style. Barnes's latest novels-The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life (2013), The Noise of Time (2016) and The Only Story (2018)-all develop around an aged protagonist or narrator whose story unfolds in an ironically self-aware lyrical tone, which detaches Barnes from postmodernism. The writing style of Julian Barnes, as a mature novelist, gets plainer as his mood becomes more sentimental and melancholic. This paper examines Barnes's representation of mourning and melancholy in Levels of Life where he dedicates the last section to his bereavement process after the loss of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, and The Only Story where he offers the piercing and grim love story of Susan (48) and Paul (19). The concepts of mourning and melancholy will be analysed by reference to Freud's and Derrida's views to illustrate how Barnes subtly probes them in the two novels as an artist.

The article attempts to depict the experience of melancholy in family dramas by an Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin. With regard to their themes Levin’s domestic comedies can be divided into dramas of ‘lonely hearts’, ‘family relationships’, and ‘neighborhood’. What is common to these three groups of dramas is the gallery of the same personae – melancholy men: depressed, detached subjects, deprived of any possibility of symbolization.
Firstly, melancholy appears to be a general condition of the depicted world; secondly, it is deeply related to the inner dramas of personae of the drama – their embodiment and their perception of the world. The condition of male and female characters in Levin’s domestic comedies is determined by the longing for the past and the sadness of passive existence.
The basic purpose of the article is to provide an analysis of the selected issues in the context of psychoanalytical readings of melancholy, especially Sigmund Freud’s as well Julia Kristeva’s works. This perspective allows to elucidate the melancholic condition of dramatis personae, and also to describe some complicated relationships between them (especially the relation between mother-figure and the son).

A recent survey issued by the Pew Research Centre reveals that Asian Americans are “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States” (Pew 2013). They epitomize the neoliberal capitalist success of model minority migrants, embodying the values of economic entrepreneurship and successful mobility triggered by the 1965 Immigration Act. Asian Americans tend to be highly educated (61% of the adults aged 25-64 have at least a bachelor’s degree); they exceed American adults in median annual household income ($66,000 versus $49,800); they have a pervasive belief in the rewards of hard work; and, finally, successful marriages and being good parents play a central role in their lives.
Indian Americans, particularly, have higher shares in education and income with regard to the other Asian American subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese). Furthermore, Indian Americans place a great importance to parenting and they are less likely to see themselves as typical Americans (the Japanese tend to be the more likely). Yet, they say that they can carry on a conversation in proficient English very well. Indian Americans, together with Filipinos, are among the most likely subgroup to define themselves as “model minority”. The term, which was introduced by William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article to describe Japanese Americans, implies that they see themselves as more successful immigrants, even in comparison to Blacks and Hispanics.
Through emulation of white Americans and by drawing on notions of productive citizenship, Asian Americans tend to fill in the gap between their migrant status and the desire to adjust to the American society. They exemplify, through their neoliberal flexibility and high human capital, a model of “reproductive citizenship” that according to Susan Koshy “harnesses heterosexuality to the productivity of knowledge work to enhance national competitiveness in a globalizing economy” (Koshy 2011, 351). The obsession to accumulate economic resources and pass on human capital to second and third generations leaves a gap in the affective and filial dynamics that characterize Asian American families. Sometimes, these migrants fall in the cracks and the deal they pay is more expensive than they think. At what personal cost is such a productive neoliberal model reproduced and who bears its counter effects? Diasporic writers have focused on the tensions and contradictions that arouse from such a strict economic formula. Intergenerational conflicts are particularly strong when 1.5 and second generations tend to disrupt their parents’ expectations such as accruing economic success and neutralizing biases against minority status. The symptoms of psychic disturbance that Susan Koshy has labelled as “filial gothic” (358) convey schisms of family ties and unresolved grief, engendering simultaneously desire to escape and yearning for accommodation.
My paper intends to unveil Jhumpa Lahiri’s deep engagement with how neurotic desire and racial melancholia merge in the second generation migrants that populate her fictional world. In particular, I will explore “A Choice of Accommodation”, a story in Unaccustomed Earth, that will be investigated in dialogue with Mishra’s notion of the “diasporic imagery”, Lacan’s ideas on neurosis, and Eng and Han’s concept of “racial melancholia” as theoretical framework. Considered in this light, through the story of the protagonist Amit Sarkar, Jhumpa Lahiri reveals a multifaceted and controversial identity lying beneath silences, tacit codes and isolation.

Location: University of Essen - Bochum

Event Date: Oct 8, 2015

Organization: Postcolonial Narrations

Conference End Date: Oct 10, 2015

La mélancolie a sans cesse accompagné Kierkegaard. Sans jamais délier ce mal étrange de son expérience intime, Kierkegaard en a fait une catégorie générique capable de rendre compte de la réalité humaine. « Mélancolie » désigne ainsi une forme de l’être et un rapport au monde. Cet article reprend l’analyse kierkegaardienne de cette blessure de l’être qui fige l'existence et que rien ne semble pouvoir guérir. Il montre alors comment Kierkegaard situe le problème sur un plan spirituel, faisant du christianisme tout à la fois une source majeure de la mélancolie et sa traversée possible en ouvrant la possibilité d’un « devenir ».

http://www.instoria.it/home/melenconia_albrecht_durer_I.htm

Nell’antica teoria umorale dei quattro temperamenti la melanconia è lo stato patologico dovuto al dominio dell’atra bilis, la fredda e secca “bile nera”, sugli altri umori attivi nell’uomo (bile gialla, flegma e sangue). Secondo la mitologia astrale classica, la personalità melanconica era governata da Saturno, l’archetipo planetario più alto e remoto, tanto da definire saturnina quella maledetta indole geniale – combattuta tra “mal di vivere” e fervido intelletto – tipica di artisti e pensatori.

בקרב המסורת הפרשנית של הרומן "סיפור פשוט" מאת שמואל יוסף עגנון, חוקרים רבים ראו באהבה הרומנטית של הירשל העשיר לבלומה קרובתו הענייה כניגוד למוסכמות הבורגניות והקפיטליסטיות של החברה היהודית בתחילת המאה העשרים, שמנהגיה מגולמים בדמות אמו של הירשל, הסוחרת הממולחת, צירל הורוביץ. דיכוטומיה פרשנית זו נובעת מהגישה הרווחת לפיה בעוד הספירה הציבורית מבוססת על סחר חליפין, אינטרסים ושוויון ערך, הרי שאהבה רומנטית מצויה בספירה האישית שמושתתת על רגש, ספונטניות וסינגולריות. בהתאם, מרבית הקריאות הפסיכואנליטיות ברומן של עגנון ראו באהבה ובמכאוב הרגשי של הירשל כחתירה תחת המבנה החברתי-כלכלי המיוצג ברומן.
בניגוד לפרשנויות אלו, הקריאה הנוכחית בסיפור פשוט מניחה שפסיכואנליזה וכלכלה אינם נפרדים, אלא שלובים. באמצעות פענוח התפיסה הכלכלית המכוננת את הפסיכואנליזה הפרוידיאנית, הקריאה שלי מראה כי הפרקטיקות הקפיטליסטיות של צירל והאהבה הרומנטית של הירשל מבוססות על מודל כלכלי זהה: תשוקה לצבירה אינסופית המבוססת על גירעון שאינו ניתן לאיזון. בעוד שתשוקתה האינסופית של צירל לכסף מדגימה את טענתו של מרקס כי הקפיטליזם הוא מערכת המועדת למשבר בגלל נטייתה להתפשטות בלתי מוגבלת, קריסתו הרגשית של הירשל חושפת כי אהבתו לבלומה משמשת כפיצוי למלנכוליה, שהוגדרה בידי פרויד כפתולוגיה המרוששת את האגו. במובן זה, האהבה הרומנטית שמציע הירשל אינה משמשת מפלט מהמערך הקפיטליסטי אלא למעשה משעתקת אותו. בדומה לנוסחה הפרוידיאנית של אהבה רומנטית, פשיטת הרגל הרגשית של הירשל נובעת מתפיסתו את האהבה כמצרך מוגבל, משחק סכום אפס שבו נתינה לאחר נתפסת כהפסד לסובייקט. המודל לאהבה רומנטית שמצליח לפרוע את התשתית הכלכלית של הפסד ורווח אישי מתגלה ברומן של עגנון דווקא בעיצובה של מינה צימליך, אשתו של הירשל ואחת הדמויות המבוזות ביותר בידי מבקרי עגנון. בעוד האהבה של הירשל נובעת ממלנכוליה שמכחישה את קיומו של האחר כנבדל, מינה— שאהבתה מבוססת על היכולת להתאבל על אובדן האחר כמי שאיננו אני—מציעה כלכלה אחרת שבה הנתינה לאחר מגלמת רווח לסובייקט.

The word enthusiasm is derived from the Greek ἐνθουσιασμός/enthousiasmos and has a meaning of being possessed by a god (ἔνθεος/entheos) referring to θειασμός/theiasmos, ‘inspiration’.  The person who is possessed by a god surpasses their normal state of being and ascends to a higher plane or ἔκστασις/ekstasis. This state of being is caused by breathing in vapours, drinking elixirs, or by frantic dancing, through which the gods enter the body. During the Homeric Age in Greece, enthousiasmos was connected to ecstatic prophecies and rituals, such as the Pythia, the Dionysian bacchanals, the dances of the Maenads. In the post-Homeric Age, Plato (ca. 427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC) shifted the meaning of enthousiasmos towards the artistic inspiration of poets.
Even today, we use ‘enthusiasm’ to describe a special energy that can suddenly overwhelm us: an affect of rapture that radiates out towards the audience. Yet, through the ages, the concept has not always carried with it the positive connotations of the ancient Greeks. Along the way, enthusiasm and rapture became contaminated with (religious) fanaticism and even with manipulative deceit.
In his book Philosophie und Enthusiasmus, Bernd Bösel asks why we so often view enthusiasm as a suspicious affect in the modern-day intellectual context.  He thinks the reason is found in the Zweikampf between enthusiasm and melancholy on the one hand, and enthusiasm and reason on the other.  According to the author, the first conflict is situated on the vertical scheme of the mood, which holds the extremes of highs and lows, as with the pathological diagnoses of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and even psychosis.  The second conflict polarises enthusiasm with reason, making enthusiasm an emotion that hinders rational thought.  In both positions, enthusiasm is not seen as part of a reliable epistemology. These splits gradually started to develop from the 17th century on, although enthousiasmos was revalued during the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic Era as a positive stimulant of creativity and Ideenflucht. 
Despite a few flickers on the cultural historical time line, enthusiasm has mostly been marginalised in modern Western philosophy: as an excessive urge, or as a harmful exaggeration of emotions that leads to madness. Bösel calls for rehabilitation of enthousiasmos as a knowledge paradigm that shouldn’t be seen as the opposite of melancholy genius, nor as Besonnenheit, but as something which deserves an intrinsic place in the cultural sciences: in the Zwischenreich des Begehrens und Fühlen.
The rehabilitation of enthousiasmos as a criticised affect of the mind also interests me from an iconological standpoint. Is enthousiasmos the subject of any iconographic traditions? Is enthousiasmos an aesthetic concept within the art historical method? Can enthousiasmos be a part of a visual epistemology? I will discuss these questions in three chapters: a case on Pentecost in Christian iconography; an analysis of the Pygmalion myth within the 18th-century sparks of creative passion, and a new interpretation of Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Pathosformel as a variant of the entheos paradigm.
And finally: Anne-Louise Germaine Necker or Madame de Staël (1766-1817) will join us on our journey. After all, her De l’Allemagne (1810) is an unparalleled defence of how enthusiasm, wisdom, and sensibility go together.

*

“Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.”

Siri Hustvedt, defending the integration of emotional patterns and affects in the art sciences in A Woman Looking at Men looking at Women.

Charles Baudelaire skapte poesi ut av det upoetiske. Ved å sette ord på sjokkopplevelser, så kunne de erkjennes og erfares. Samtidig kan en hos Baudelaire lese en tro på skjønnhet og tradisjon. Denne ambivalensen kommer til uttrykk gjennom begrepsparet ideal og spleen – korrespondanser og det fragmenterte. Samfunnet og moderniteten besto for Baudelaire av begge disse elementene, som en slags dualisme mellom byens kropp og sjel. Adskilt, men likevel avhengig av hverandre.

Cílem této práce je filozoficko-antropologická interpretace Burtonova pojetí konceptu melancholie, potažmo člověka a světa tak, jak je obsaženo v jeho díle Anatomie melancholie . Primární snahou bude postupné nalezení odpovědi na otázku, jak Burton tomuto konceptu rozuměl a jakým způsobem jej využíval ve své představě o melancholickém světě . Na základě toho bude následně určeno, v čem spatřoval lék proti melancholické chorobě, která sužuje celý svět a jaké podoby nabývala jeho léčba v Anatomii melancholie . Tomuto porozumění bude předcházet rozbor pohybující se na pomezí dějin pojmů a idejí, kulturních dějin a filozofické antropologie, s malým přesahem do oblasti dějin mentalit, který nejprve odhalí rozmanitost a bohaté dějiny konceptu melancholie a tím následně čtenáři přiblíží a zpřístupní myšlenkové i myslitelské prostředí, z něhož Burton vycházel při konstituci své představy o melancholickém světě a zároveň při stanovování jeho následné léčby. Zejména závěrečná část práce se pak bude opírat o kontextuální čtení Burtonovy Anatomie melancholie , přičemž pro celkové porozumění celé záležitosti bude nezbytné je doplnit i o krátkou literární analýzu, která poodhalí záměr samotného autora, jeho stanovisko a vztah k potenciálním čtenářům. V posledku se ukáže, že Burtonova kniha není pouze studií a léčbou melancholie, ale především rozborem lidství a snahou o jeho nápravu.

Esej venujúca sa téme melanchólie na vybraných umeleckéch príkladoch.
Melanchólia je zvláštnou formou nálady. Je smútkom, ktorý si sám seba uvedomuje. Alebo  inak: melancholik  si uvedomuje vlastnú náladu a projektuje ju do sveta mimo seba.  Ako upozornil Földényi, na rozdiel od emócie, nálada nemá objekt, ale objavujeme v nej charakter ľudského bytia. Melancholik prežíva hlboké prepojenie sveta  a vlastného Ja.  Vzťah melancholika k prítomnosti je plný vedomia zániku,. Budúcnosť sa stáva minulosťou a minulosť je totožná s prítomným okamihom.

This paper weaves together two recurring themes in philosophical and political debates of recent years: the idea, loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin, that describes melancholia as a dominant structure of feeling and desire among the left; and the suggestion that we are currently witnessing a revival of debates on the question of organisation. My argument identifies not one but two left-wing melancholias, the specular relation between which precludes the work of mourning and deprives us of the conditions for thinking organisation concretely. I follows that a real return to the question of organisation can only take place if we escape this melancholic mechanism; I propose that the very idea of organisation might offer us theoretical resources with which to do so. We come to love our left passions and reasons, our analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. … What emerges is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing. Wendy Brown The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Melancholy is a distinctive feature of many of Melville’s characters, apparent from his first book, "Typee." In this autobiographical novel, both the narrator and his companion are represented as melancholy, a feature belonging to the romantic stereotype of the restless outsider. In this article, I intend to show how Melville creatively used this stereotype in Typee to present a detached and critical view of Western society. However, it is the inability of the melancholy subject to identify with the monotonous lifestyle of the Marquesas Islands that avoids reducing the book to a mere antimodern pamphlet. Melancholy appears simultaneously as a product of Western culture and modernity and as a privileged point of departure for a constructive criticism of it, affording a perspective that will prove fruitful not only in this book but also in Melville’s subsequent works.

L'affect de dépersonnalisation n'est pas uniquement une réaction psychique à un environnement défaillant. Il peut aussi être le levier de la création. L’analyse de Virginie Foloppe oscille constamment entre ces deux formes de dépersonnalisation. L'une relève donc de la création, qu'elle aboutisse ou non à une œuvre d'art, quand l'autre s'achève dans une destruction perceptible à travers la destinée tragique d'êtres privés de tout élan vital, après qu'ils aient été confrontés à des traumatismes ; deuil, envie, inceste, viol. L'art cinématographique crée une psyché flottante à même de réfléchir la mémoire sensorielle de situations traumatiques à la violence insoutenable et de nous livrer les moyens d'en sortir. Hitchcock, Vinterberg, et Kim Ki-duk, chacun avec un style singulier, composent des miroirs perceptifs capables de ne pas se confondre avec leur objet, mais de réfléchir l'autre voie de la dépersonnalisation.

La recherche de Virginie Foloppe, docteure en esthétique et sciences de l'art, est pluridisciplinaire : de la fabrique de l'écriture (article, essai, fiction) à celle des images (art digital, art vidéo) en passant par l'enseignement des arts (Panthéon-Sorbonne et Sorbonne Nouvelle) et un diplôme de psychologue clinicienne. Elle a déjà publié aux éditions Les Contemporains favoris : L’hémorragie des contemporaines, Nelly Arcan et Chloé Delaume(2015).

In biomedical and public health discourses, “chronicity” has emerged as the prevailing
model to understanding drug addiction and addictive experience. This approach is
predicated on constructing and responding to addictive experience in ways that underscore its presumed lifelong nature. In this essay, I examine the phenomenon of heroin addiction and heroin overdose in northern New Mexico’s Espanola Valley, which suffers the highest rate of heroin-induced death in the United States, and explore how the logic of chronicity is dangerously reworked through the Hispano ethos of endless suffering. Focusing on the narrative of Alma, a Hispana heroin addict who died of an overdose after many previous overdoses, I evoke a sense of the physical, historical, and institutional refrains in which she felt herself caught. By tracing Alma’s death back to these refrains, I describe the complex of entanglements in which her addiction took form and show how the discourse of chronicity provided a structure for her suffering and, ultimately, her death.

Este não é um livro sobre a experiência do fim do mundo durante a pandemia de COVID-19. O ensaio que a Zazie Edições publica agora em português, foi escrito entre setembro de 2017 e maio de 2018, em meio à proliferação global de crises migratórias insuportavelmente dolorosas, e da decisão do governo dos Estados Unidos de prender em campos de concentração com jaulas metálicas as crianças que a triagem separava de suas famílias na fronteira com o México, além do bombardeiro cotidiano de outras notícias atrozes. Eu o escrevi para tentar entender o sentido das crises migratórias no contexto do colapso dos imaginários cosmopolitas dos quais acostumamos a nos servir para elaborar uma série de discursos sobre a hospitalidade como horizonte discursivo, para procurar construir projetos políticos e culturais baseados na luta pelos direitos de imigrantes e refugiados. Mais além do abatimento e da experiência de derrota que nos invade diariamente, a ideia do fim do mundo tenta elaborar a perda do mundo entendido como a estrutura simbólica que sustentava discursos e práticas humanistas orientadas por um desejo de emancipação, igualdade e justiça universais. E preciso dizer ainda que não se trata tampouco de um ensaio sobre o sofrimento infinito de sujeitos migrantes e refugiados de carne e osso - não posso dizer nada sobre suas feridas e suas perdas, que pertencem ao âmbito do impensável para alguém como eu. Este ensaio se pergunta o que podem fazer a literatura e as artes diante do fim do mundo, o que podemos fazer com essa experiência de perda que oprime todos nós que nos dedicamos a pensar com elas.

Čitanje kriminalističkog romana "Kneginja iz Petrinjske ulice" Marije Jurić Zagorke kao ishodišta za komparativnu analizu Freudovih studija o mazohizmu i melankoliji, a naspram konfiguracija mazohizma i melankolije u knjigama "Hladno i okrutno" te "Razlika i ponavljanje" Gillesa Deleuzea.

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

https://iupress.org/9780253052001/yiddish-writers-in-weimar-berlin/

The Author would like to point out Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology which perfectly describes the experience of literature and contemporary world as haunted. Therefore, he follows closely the psychoanalytical concepts of phantom and crypt made by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Then the Author shows how the notion of specter was absorbed and could be use in literature studies (Esther Rashkin, Nicholas Royle, Jodey Castricano). Derrida's theory makes it possible to perceive literature not as homogenic and coherent but as open structure, inhabited by voices of Otherness.

When conceived as the presence of the past, memory can be said to pervade the music of Maurice Ravel. At first glance, the number and range of these acts of musical memory—including pieces modeled on the Medieval ballade, the Renaissance chanson, the Baroque tombeau, the Classical sonatina, and the Romantic poem, among others—would seem to testify to a smooth relation between past and present. Upon closer review, however, this relation is more problematic than it first appeared. One of the most complex and captivating artistic testaments to what Andreas Huyssen has called ‘twilit memory’—not only in Ravel's music, but in Western modernism as a whole—is the eighth and final waltz of his piano suite Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911). In this waltz, which Ravel entitled ‘Epilogue’, the hope to make the past present is reborn with each of its numerous thematic recollections, only to be dashed repeatedly by the melancholy knowledge of its impossibility. In the course of analysing the Epilogue, we explore affinities between its musical behaviors and philosophical accounts of memory by Bergson, Jankélévitch, and Nora, while also relating it to other memory pieces by Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Debussy.

RESUMEN Si la modernidad involucra una mirada a través de la cual leer se puede leer la continuidad histórica ininterrumpida de la utopía social y la armonía de clase y el progreso del siglo xix, resulta fundamental explorar cuál es la contracara de esta fantasía del progreso que coloca al individuo en la modernidad en una situación de depresión y deuda, en la medida en que esas promesas no son nunca enteramente cumplidas. Repensando esta herencia es que Walter Benjamin construye su idea de historia e imagina el modo en que debe actuar el historiador materialista, es decir, el que habrá de articular justicia y redención del pasado tal como proponen las tesis de Sobre el concepto de historia, ese texto de 1940 sobre el que trabajó al final de su vida para encontrar lo que Michael Löwy llama una constelación crítica, que une el pasado con el presente. A la luz de estas consideraciones, se persiguen dos objetivos principales: por un lado, delinear lo que en Benjamin sería una teoría de la modernidad; por el otro, examinar la relación entre la experiencia de la modernidad, ligada a la melancolía y la pérdida, y la experiencia estética, en tanto dispositivo privilegiado para volver pensable el hacer humano. ABSTRACT If modernity involves a view through which it is possible to read the uninterrupted historical continuity of social utopia and the harmony of class and the progress of the 19th century, it is fundamental to explore what is the other face of this fantasy of progress that places the individual in modernity in a situation of depression and debt, inasmuch as those promises are never fully fulfilled. Walter Benjamin builds his idea of history rethinking this legacy. He imagines the way in which the materialist historian must act, that is, the one who will articulate justice and redemption of the past as it is proposed on the thesis of On the concept of history, a text of 1940 on which he worked until the end of his life. In this text, we can find what Michael Löwy called a critical constellation, which links the past with the present. Regarding these considerations, we pursue two main objectives: on

Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In our estimation, the complicated reality is that, in using slightly different but related concepts, Kierkegaard is providing a unique look at acedia as it manifests differently at different stages on life’s way. Thus, on this “perspectival account”, acedia will manifest differently according to whether an individual inhabits the aesthetic, ethical, or religious sphere. We propose two axes for this perspectival account. Such descriptions of how acedia manifests make up the first, phenomenal axi...

À Berlin, deux expositions sont actuellement consacrées à Aby Warburg (1866-1929), historien de l’art allemand : Aby Warburg: Bilder­ atlas Mnemosyne – Das Original (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, jusqu’au 30 novembre 2020) et Zwischen Kosmos und Pathos. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, jusqu’au 1er novembre 2020). Ce dispositif est pensé sous la forme de deux espaces complémentaires, dans des musées situés de part et d’autre du Tiergarten, le grand parc du centre-ville.

From its invention onwards photography attributed with the ability to reveal the invisible and miraculous. During the nineteenth century Spiritualists used the medium in order to communicate the deceased, and these photographs were unique souvenirs for its owners. Although spirit photographs were used during the mourning process, these surrogate objects shall be considered as melancholy objects as they signify the resistance to mourn. This paper focuses on the definition of melancholy and discusses the spirit photograph of Mabel Warren in this realm. The photograph functions here, as a tool for meditation, persisting the desire of what is lost.  Photography's relationship with miraculous beings still exists today within religious activities and the materialization of the invisible is needed to embrace what is desired, and through emotional investment, the need for belief may be fulfilled.

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of ecstasy by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly.

In this essay, I read Moby-Dick as an allegorical description of the process of Ishmael’s healing from melancholy. Ishmael’s inane reveries at the beginning of the story evolve into a productive and self-creative narrative power. His initial melancholy reverie is represented in the novel as the narcissistic tendency of the subject to withdraw into oneself and sink into its own interiority, as well as the tendency to believe in a sentimental universal brotherhood. Ishmael manages to get free of his sterile daydreaming and regain contact with reality through a close experience of mortality and the confrontation with the power and complexity of writing.