This blog post delves deeply into how melancholy preserves loss not as mere absence but as a living emotion, and what significance this dreamlike force holds for modern subjectivity and world perception.
Melancholy, one of the key critical concepts in modern literature, originates from an ancient Greek medical term meaning ‘black bile’. At the time, black bile was understood as the cause of a ‘temperament prone to gloom and sorrow’, while lethargy, laziness, and daydreaming were classified as expressions of ‘melancholic temperament’ and attributes of melancholy. These attributes share a commonality: they are not emotions that erupt actively like passion, but rather relate to a state where the very capacity to feel emotion has declined—a lack of passion. Regarding the mental incapacity melancholy induces, Kierkegaard remarked, “Melancholy is the disease of our time, echoing in our carefree laughter, robbing us of the courage to act and hope.”
Melancholy is an attitude of recognizing loss and voluntarily immersing oneself in that sense of loss. It arises from the loss of things that are singular, fleeting, and irretrievable. Yet melancholy is not merely a dark mood; it possesses a captivating aspect. This relates to a desire not to turn away from the unknowable otherness of life and death, love and separation, but rather to imprison it within oneself. Melancholy functions less as a regressive reaction to loss and more as a dreamlike capacity to bring the lost object back to life. Thus, those who seek to imprison alterity within themselves, contemplate it, and withdraw into their own world—the melancholics—do not truly pursue the lost object itself, but rather its absence. Characteristically, it is only when the object is not present that the force driving the desire for possession is activated.
This dreamlike capacity of melancholy has yielded diverse interpretations regarding attitudes toward reality. Benjamin stated, “The melancholic’s solitude and immersion, that is, their outward immobility, symbolizes not mere inertia but profound contemplation that penetrates things,” viewing the melancholic’s solitude as revealing the depth of insight into objects. In contrast, Freud described melancholy as “an emotion in which the lost object and the self become one,” differing from mourning, which returns to daily life after sufficient grief. He emphasized that this emotion isolates the self from everyday existence. Such listless sorrow was a trait unwelcome in modern society, which highly valued rational restraint. Heidegger’s assertion that the only passion remaining in modernity is “passion for the extinction of passion” is also deeply connected to the rationalistic character of modern society.
In this context, melancholy inevitably becomes the shadow cast by modernity’s progressive worldview, built upon optimism about the future and confidence in innovation. The social modernity created by modernity has, within the realm of public institutions centered on the nation-state, capitalism, and civic values, mass-produced what Weber termed ‘soulless specialists’ and ‘heartless hedonists’. In contrast, cultural modernity—an attitude resisting the dominant values of social modernity—nurtures melancholics within the private spaces concealed by the bourgeois public world. Cultural modernity is not the modernity of the bourgeoisie, but the modernity of those drifting on the periphery of the world: the fallen aristocracy, the lumpenproletariat, the failed artist, the floating intellectual. Whereas the subject of social modernity confronts the world through calculative rationality, imposes order upon it through strict discipline, and seeks to become its master, the melancholic is preoccupied not with mastery but with wandering in search of whatever it feels it has lost. For this reason, the melancholic often appears as an explorer or collector.
Social modernity sought to demystify external nature through the power of science and technology, and to liberate even human inner nature from the tyranny of emotion by substituting passion with self-interest. However, cultural modernity, within the paradoxical consequences of this liberation, instead seeks to preserve lost things through the emotion of melancholy. Thus, melancholy positions itself as a kind of civilizational critique. Melancholy preserves within the realm of cultural modernity the fundamental values and objects that social modernity has rapidly eliminated. We become melancholic before things that no longer exist on earth, but to be precise, these values survive in a paradoxical manner as an ‘absent presence’ only for the melancholic. Those who still believe in lost values and objects are not melancholic, nor can those who believe they have been completely extinguished be melancholic. The melancholic occupies neither position, remaining at the midpoint, an entity endlessly pursuing ‘something alive through its extinction’.
