engleski

The reduction of melancholy to depression: what is being lost?

The cultural history of melancholy reveals melancholy as always stretched between two poles: redemption and self-annihilation. The psychiatric and social reduction of melancholy to depression has deprived melancholy of its redemptive, creative pole to produce depression as chemical imbalance, but also as a disposition which is non-productive, non-profitable, and, therefore, very anti-capitalist. In his book Capitalist realism (2009) Mark Fisher points out how other than indicating some fundamental kind of affective problem with late capitalism, depression is a specific form of the privatization of stress as there is no availability of cultural language of disaffection and discontent, i.e. of productive boredom. My paper tackles upon the paradox that the becoming of the ‘proper’ subject in capitalism necessary involves the acceptance of immoderation, self- destruction and counter- depressive intensity gone astray, as capitalism knows no moderation, but subsists due to the surplus – economic and psychological.

Melancholy ; depression ; manic defense ; introjection

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