PHILOSOPHY AND MELANCHOLY

Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language

By Ilit Ferber

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8519-8

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixAbbreviations……………………………………………………..xiIntroduction………………………………………………………11 Benjamin and Freud……………………………………………….162 The Trauer-Spiel…………………………………………………673 Melancholy and Language…………………………………………..1184 Melancholy and Truth……………………………………………..163Notes…………………………………………………………….195Bibliography………………………………………………………225Index…………………………………………………………….233

CHAPTER 1

Benjamin and Freud

At the Juncture of Melancholy

Given the manifold nature of its history, the concept of melancholyhas remained curiously stable despite the dynamic transformationof the meanings it has acquired. Yet in spite of its remarkable steadfastness,a distinct moment of rupture can nevertheless be identified duringthe closing days of the nineteenth century—a moment when the struggleto “present … a limited number of words which always remain thesame” had ceased and melancholy was transfigured into melancholia. Thismoment was the emergence of psychoanalysis. My discussion begins,therefore, at this juncture, when Freud wrote his account of melancholia(1915), a moment almost concurrent with Benjamin’s preliminary workon his habilitation, The Origin of the German Trauerspiel, the main text inwhich he examines the concept of melancholy.

At this crucial moment, the discourse on melancholy is relocatedwithin the psychoanalytic discourse of depression. As Jennifer Raddenshows, the end of the nineteenth century marks a borderline in our traditionalunderstanding of the concept; it is the point where “melancholy”parts from “melancholia” and its clinical categories of depression. Thepsychoanalytic turn shifts our focus from the apprehension of melancholyas a mood or normal inclination of the mind that only occasionally takeson morbid colorations to an entirely pathological understanding in whichmelancholia comes to describe an exclusively abnormal reaction to loss.More particularly, Freud considers melancholia a state that is accompaniedby self-loathing and self-reproach, and he thereby assigns it a particularlynegative character. The implications of this rupture in the term’s genealogynot only bring about a radical change in its apprehension; they alsoobscure the vast expanse of connotations once attributed to the concept,rendering melancholy into something almost synonymous—at least intuitivelyto the contemporary mind—with Freudian pathology.

Moreover, Freud’s account effaces the powerful dialectic formerlybelieved to be inherent to melancholy and indicative of the intricacy andconvolutedness of the term, which could contain both negative and positive,normal and pathological traits. In replacing this dialectical, one might say”flexible,” nature of melancholy with a far narrower definition, Freud extendsthe rigid boundary he establishes between health and pathology. Both themotivating force and analytic strategy of Freud’s psychoanalytic project canaccordingly be traced to his insistence on distinguishing the normal or healthyfrom within the adjacent state of pathology; in other words he is keen on usinghuman nature’s pathologies to shed light on its normality.

Freud’s commitment to the idea of a perimeter separating the healthyfrom the pathological makes it difficult for him to fit melancholy’s diverseand at times conflicted history into the psychoanalytic scheme. The historyof melancholy is distinguished precisely by the fact of an inherentunwillingness of this phenomenon to surrender to any pregiven category(be it health or illness, the psychological or the somatic). Freud’s transformationof melancholy into melancholia can be seen, from this perspective,as an attempt to “tame” or at least bend melancholy to make it comply tohis system’s trajectories. Given the strength and rigor of Freud’s psychoanalytictheory, it is clear why his confrontation with melancholy marksan essential change and a deep rupture in the signification of the term.

The relationship between Benjamin and Freud has been extensivelyexplored in recent years. It has been described in terms of a “constellation,”a “long-distance love affair,” a mutual dependence, and a relation of”intertextuality”; all interpretations have stressed the indirect character oftheir correspondence while nonetheless demanding a careful reconstructionof its genealogy. Nägele argues that any serious reader of Benjaminshould question the latter’s relationship to Freud, while maintaining thatBenjamin’s resistance to Freud actually discloses a close affinity betweenthem. He proposes that resistance is at work in this relationship, a resistancepointing precisely to where Benjamin’s own thinking becomes rigorous. LeyRoff, who reads this relationship as one of “intertextuality,” claims that it ispossible to examine significant areas of contact between Benjamin and Freudunder this rubric despite the apparent lack of direct mutual influence. Applicationof such an approach may indicate that the structure of Benjamin’sattitude to psychoanalysis is that of deferral, that Benjamin read psychoanalytictexts long before he actually responded to them. Rickels maintainsthat the question of influence cannot be measured, at least in this case, bycriteria of sameness. He claims that “only what has been mutated, digestedin part—part object, part objection—resisted, disavowed, and displaced cancount as influence on the sliding scale from transference to telepathy.” Theseincisive accounts all posit, in one way or another, that direct influence shouldnot be considered the precondition for examining the relationship betweenBenjamin and Freud, a claim that I substantiate here.

In Constructions in Analysis Freud describes his work as that of liberatinga fragment of historical truth from its distorted form of appearance inthe present and leading it back “to the point in the past to which it belongs”(SE, 23:268). The task of psychoanalytic investigation is, therefore, to revealthe intimate connection between the material of present disavowal and itsoriginal repression. The effectiveness of the psychoanalytic method, as Freuddescribes it here, lies in its recovery of fragments of lost experience; the cruxof the pathology of delusion is, then, its “convincing power to the element ofhistorical truth, which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality” (ibid.).

Essential here is the lingo of liberation and freedom used to describethe attachment of the past to the present, as is Freud’s insinuation that thepresent should be relieved of the past’s sovereignty. The reason is that anyrelationship of this sort inherently entails the risk of what Freud would identifyas a pathological inhibition. This structure implies that despite the greatauthority exercised by the past over the present, this authority cannot besustained simultaneously with a healthy psyche. This structure can shed lighton the transformation initiated by psychoanalysis—melancholy’s completedeparture from melancholia and depression. For the melancholy of the past tomake room for the melancholia of the present, a new route has to be taken.This break from the past (the term’s history and those of its historical featuresthat invade the present) will henceforth be understood as the conditionsenabling the establishment of melancholia‘s new meanings and dominance.

Freud’s Distinction Between Mourning and Melancholia

In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) Freud defines two possibleand opposing responses to loss—mourning (Trauer) and melancholia(Melancholie). These responses represent two distinct types of object-relations,both of which arise in response to bereavement. The almost keendifference between the two phenomena has long since become virtuallysynonymous with the understanding of loss as inviting either a normal orpathological response. It should be noted, however, that Freud’s definitionsare not stable throughout his writings. In his early “Draft G [Melancholia],”from 1895, he writes of a much closer relationship between mourningand melancholia: both stand on the same axis of a “longing for somethinglost.” The element of work, so present in mourning, is not yet fundamentallypresent here (see “Draft G [Melancholia],” SE 1:200—206). In his laterwritings, especially in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “The Ego andthe Id,” Freud complicates the distinction between mourning and melancholia,making it much vaguer. My analysis of Freud’s view of melancholiais therefore largely based on his 1915 “Mourning and Melancholia.”

In the beginning of his essay Freud discusses loss solely in terms of thesetwo categories, while stating his intention to introduce mourning into hisargument for the purpose of shedding light on melancholia by means of theircontrast. Freud thus draws a deep dividing line between the two responses, aline placing the two on opposing sides of the demarcation separating normalityfrom pathology. This dissociation, he continues, is based first and foremoston the feature of self-reproach. To Freud, mourning is a normal, naturalresponse to loss and, despite the difficulties and great pain it engenders, stillpart of a healthy process. Comparing mourning to melancholia he writes:

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection,cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibitionof all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feeling to a degree that findsutterances in self-reproach and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectationof punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we considerthat, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning … It iseasy to see that this inhibition and circumscription of the ego is the expression ofan exclusive devotion to mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposesor other interests. It is really only because we know so well how to explain it [i.e.,mourning] that this attitude does not seem to us pathological. (SE, 14:244)

This statement is curious because it positions our understanding ofmourning as congruent with normality, suggesting that Freud deemsthe familiar and easily understood as nonpathological. Yet melancholia,also according to this passage, although intimately related to mourning istransformed by self-loathing into a pathological counteraction. The pictureis far more complex, however, since the melancholic’s self-reproachcarries far deeper implications than ate initially apparent. What clearlydifferentiates the two responses—and what gives birth to self-reproach—dependson whether the loss has been accepted and acknowledged.

Freud’s mourner and melancholic begin with a corresponding basicdenial of their loss and an unwillingness to recognize it. But soon, themourner, who is reacting in a nonpathological manner, recognizes andresponds to the call of reality to let go of his lost love-object and to freehis libidinal desire. The mourner’s recognition of the loss makes it possiblefor him to perform the work of mourning, whereas the unabridged, andtherefore unidentifiable, nature of the melancholic loss makes it almostimpossible to detach oneself from the loss, since for the melancholic thereseems to be nothing from which a detachment is at all possible. The melancholic,therefore, remains immersed in loss (with “an excessive devotion”),unable to acknowledge and accept the need to cleave to a substitute objectof attachment. In self-destructive loyalty to his lost object, he internalizesthat object and makes it part of his ego, thus circumscribing still furtherthe conflict aroused by the initial loss. The lost object continues to exist,now as part of the dejected subject, who can no longer clearly demarcatehis own subjectivity from the lost object he has embraced. Freud regardsthe structure of this response as antithetical to the ego’s basic well-being,the survival of which melancholia puts at risk.

Such a distinction does not exist in Benjamin’s texts. In fact, in theTrauerspiel book he uses mourning and melancholy interchangeably. Thisidentical use of the two terms appears often in the book, mainly at the endof the first part (entitled “Trauerspiel and Tragedy”), which centers on anexplanation and explication of the nature and structure of the Trauerspielplays. In this part of the book Benjamin concentrates on the different figuresprominent in the plays (such as the sovereign, tyrant, martyr, and creature),compares Trauerspiel to tragedy (a comparison essential to the understandingof Benjamin’s interpretative enterprise), and, finally, discusses thehistory of melancholy and its various emblematic and historical expressions.Benjamin summons melancholy to reinforce and enrich his discussion ofthe special type of sorrow and mourning expressed in the plays. He thereforeemploys melancholy to better understand mourning rather than to distinguishbetween two phenomena. Moreover, Benjamin frequently attributesa “mournful” state of mind to the melancholic individual and describesthe mournful as those suffering from melancholia. It thus appears that hisrecourse to the term melancholy expresses rather considerably its historicalaccounts. Melancholy and mourning—or, one might say, the sorrow of theTrauerspiel—stand together here, with one underscoring the other.

I suggest here that Benjamin challenges Freud’s overly assertive distinctionby rethinking the relationship between loss and affect, thus proposingan alternative view, which this chapter will elaborate. Rebecca Comaysuggests that Freud’s antithesis between mourning and melancholia echoesthe bifurcated structure of melancholia itself, a division representing a systematicoscillation between denigration and overvaluation. This structuralrift is essential to the understanding of Freud’s original, lacerated configurationof melancholia, in which the presence of divergence no longer indicatesthe initial, precise separation between the normal and the pathological buta further split, found in Freud’s very account of the nature of loss itself.By not accepting the absolute demarcation between the two responses,Benjamin restructures Freud’s ideas into an altogether different configuration,in which mourning and melancholia abide one with the other as anamalgamated mood. In the following sections I analyze the four structuralcategories we can discern in Freud’s essay as being pertinent to the understandingof Benjamin’s position vis-à-vis Freud. For each category—loss,commitment, absence of intentionality, and work—I first scrutinize the roleit plays in Freud’s account of melancholia and then show how this accountis transformed in Benjamin’s book on the Trauerspiel.

Loss

Freud: The Internalization of Loss

Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” is saturated with the questionof loss and its implications. Loss for Freud is intimately tied to love, for it isalways a loved object that is lost, be it a person, an ideal, or even a functionan object fulfills as the subject’s object of love (SE, 14:243, 245). Mourningand melancholia both emerge from loss, the first from an actual loss, thesecond (in its extreme cases) from an unidentifiable loss or, one might say,the complete absence in consciousness of any event of loss.

When opposed to the mourner’s clear and locatable loss—which”reality shows” (SE, 14:244)—the melancholic’s loss is blurred and impossibleto situate; this indefiniteness provides the main reason why such aloss initiates pathological reactions. In some cases of melancholia one feelsjustified in maintaining that a loss of this ambiguous kind has occurredwithout being able to identify what has, in fact, been lost. Such eventsmake it all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient, too, cannotconsciously perceive what he has lost even if he is aware of the loss motivatinghis melancholia. More precisely, we may say that the patient knowswhom he has lost but not what about him was lost. Correspondingly,Freud suggests that melancholia corresponds in some ways to an object-loss;however, this loss has been withdrawn from the patient’s consciousness.During mourning, however, nothing about the loss is unconscious(SE, 14:245).

Circumstances of unidentifiable loss represent extreme cases of melancholia,in which the symptoms of a painful separation manifest themselvesbut without being directed toward any specific object or event. Inaddition the preponderance of the sense of loss lies not only in the eventof separation but also in its implications. “In mourning it is the worldwhich has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (SE,14:246), writes Freud, thereby locating loss in the midst of mourning andmelancholia, albeit on entirely different levels. The mourner’s loss rendersthe world surrounding him empty. The absence of the loved object seemsto drain the world, as if the site of the loss is stretched to contain everythingbut the dejected subject.
(Continues…)Excerpted from PHILOSOPHY AND MELANCHOLY by Ilit Ferber. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.