Can despair play a positive role in our modern world?
In their new book, professors George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek make the case for melancholia as a vital form of social critique and political renewal. A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt, published this fall by Princeton University Press, recovers the tradition of the heroic melancholic figure in literature and philosophy—a despairing visionary who seemingly has no place in today's era of wellness and self-care.
Edmondson, an associate professor of English, and Mladek, an associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, go against the grain in their collaboration too, prizing joint authorship in a field that champions solo authors.
In a Q&A, the two discuss in their "third voice" the challenges and inspirations of co-authored work, Hamlet as a case study of melancholia, and their take on Lars von Trier's prophetic 2011 film, Melancholia.
You two collaborated on an edited volume published in 2017, Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, which came about through an institute you co-led at Dartmouth funded by the Leslie Center for the Humanities. How did that inform this new book?
We wouldn't go so far as to say that the edited volume was merely a prelude to the book, but working on it did help us to understand that one of the stratagems of the melancholic is to make a crisis and deploy it across the political field.
Natural history, an important concept for Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno that has been given new urgency in an age of climate crisis, is the common thread here. Think of it as the other side of human history, its unconscious. That is what most absorbs the melancholic: the crisis that unfolds where history and nature intersect at the point of their mutual transience, their mutual inability to congeal into an invariant totality. The melancholic's fidelity to the power of natural history is what links a universalizing politics of melancholia to a common politics of crisis.
That conceptual breakthrough aside, though, what working on Sovereignty in Ruins also taught us was a valuable lesson on the importance of style. We liked the ideas that we developed in the edited volume, but their presentation was strained. We were determined not to repeat that mistake when developing a voice for A Politics of Melancholia.
How do your respective areas of expertise enrich this new project in ways that make it more compelling than a solo work would have been?
In a sense, the question gets our experience with the book exactly backwards. We didn't set out to demonstrate our individual or combined mastery. We set out to develop an idea together—a much riskier proposition. Strictly speaking, our expertise in Middle English literature and modern German literature influenced the project mostly around the edges, or in the corners. What enriched the project was our mutual interest in psychoanalysis, the (unfinished) work of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, political theory, Hamlet, and, to state the obvious, rehabilitating melancholia as an immemorial mood of unbending disconsolation. Plus, we are both very invested in the practice of close reading.
The critical analysis of literary, philosophical, and legal texts is a decisive exercise, today more than ever, and two heads can be better than one. If you put a book between us, let us start scrutinizing it, picking it apart, brushing it against the grain, exchanging ideas, improvising—do that, and nine times out of ten the results will be, if not revelatory, then at least surprising. Had either of us attempted to write the book in isolation, the results would have been a lot less adventurous, a lot less layered. The style, too, would have been more restrained. There is a lot to be said for pushing your collaborator to their breaking point.
It's unusual for humanities scholars from different fields to co-author a book. What did your collaboration look like, day to day? For example, did you each take the lead on certain sections of the book?
Highly unusual, unfortunately. Why do we lock ourselves away in our offices for years on end rather than developing common themes and novel concepts in concert with others? Particularly considering the importance of the Socratic tradition and of dialogic thinking for the history of the liberal arts, and of the humanities specifically. Ideas and thoughts emerge from the risky business of engaging with others.
The reason for the rarity of co-written books might be that collaboration is genuinely hard work! And the results of that work are not honored at the institutional level to the same extent as are single-authored books. Why? Because there is a fetish of the author and an apparently unquenchable desire to assign credit to one individual who can then be held accountable. Which is ironic, given how much accountability is built into the collaborative process already. You would be surprised how often your coauthor will tell you, "No, that's just not good enough. Try again." It's not just a trial, it's a tribunal! Two scholars writing one book is really twice the work of writing one alone. You must constantly readjust, do extra research, and negotiate with your partner to find that extra pitch, that distinctive voice that is more than what each writer could ever express on their own.
As for our specific collaboration, it varied. In the project's early phase, we would sit together in a room, common text in hand, and generate raw material, whether by one of us talking our way through a reading while the other one typed, by dictating our ideas using Word, or by recording our conversations (or monologues, depending). As fun and inspiring as that method could be, though, it proved impractical as a way of getting a book done. So when we were awarded a year-long ACLS fellowship, we took the opportunity to sit down and transform all of the raw material we had produced into coherent chapters, while also continuing to read, think, draft, revise, revisit. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that one or the other of us "took the lead" on this or that section, but it would also be misleading, since it was in the nature of our collaboration neither to lead nor to follow, but to go where our research took us.
And sometimes it took us the long way 'round! The Arendt chapter, for example, sat unfinished for years until finally, after an intense discussion conducted on a long hike, we were able to sit down and, channeling the memory of that discussion, commit to paper our reading of Arendt's thinking on Achilles, wrath, mourning, and the legacy of the Trojan War. That, however, proved easy enough to do, since by that point we had forged, over many years of discussion, correspondence, and continual revision, a common conception of a politics of melancholia and, more important perhaps, a "third voice" for the book that belonged to both of us and neither of us.
Developing that third voice is perhaps our greatest stylistic achievement, since it makes the book sound like it was written by one person instead of two—which in a way it was. At this point, we really don't know where one of us ends and the other begins.
You argue that melancholia exists in the realm of politics, rather than psychology, and energizes social change. What's an example from the book that encapsulates this interpretation and challenges readers to reexamine their own conclusions about melancholia?
Yes, we make a distinction between melancholia and depression; between a common, political form of discontent, fury, and despair, and a merely personal, interiorized affliction that needs to be monitored and healed. As the COVID-19 pandemic made clear, our current mental health crisis is likewise not reducible to a series of individual problems but speaks to our collective situation and to the profound political crisis that we are all living through together.
Contrary to the idea that melancholia means someone is suicidal, tired of life, we recover the condition's other side. In this tradition, which descends from ancient Greece by way of the Renaissance, melancholia is understood as visionary and transformative. It is a desperate affirmation of life, a fidelity to a form of politics rooted in unforgetting rather than in amnesia and its cognate amnesty. The melancholic urges politics beyond the limit of how it is conventionally understood, as good governance, policymaking, and conflict resolution—political economy and the police rather than genuine politics. The melancholic cannot be enlisted in the wellness movement, is not interested in the servicing of goods, and refuses the demand for happiness. At stake is the heroism of the melancholic, their capacity for despair in the face of enforced healing.
Take Hamlet, for example; he ticks all the boxes for us. His father's ghost demands that he set the world right by avenging his, the father's, death, while his murderous uncle wants him to be a docile prince who waits patiently for his moment in the royal succession. But Hamlet is having none of it. Yes, he is despairing and mournful; but he is also furious, cunning, madcap. He can't believe that everyone else continues to play their usual role when the court of Elsinore stinks of rot—of rot and plots. Hamlet is not merely the hesitant self-doubter that theatrical tradition has made him out to be. Unlike, say, Polonius, Hamlet is keenly aware that whatever passes for "politics" in Elsinore is but a spurious compensatory object for a lost politics. And out of that disbelief in what is—a disbelief easily mistaken for doubt—he devises a melancholic counterplot, mortal and destructive, but also tender, faithful, and caring.
Prince Hamlet is attuned to natural history as the objectification of his own critical consciousness. He is in league with the depersonalized and the transitive. By allowing himself to be preoccupied by subterranean forces and decaying objects, he is able to effect stasis—that is, bring about a standstill in the workings of the polis—and return the master's enjoyment—the obscene way the master gets off on dread, intrigue, and spectacle—as deadened and drained of vitality. He is neither depressed nor in need of behavioral modification. The manic side of melancholia, which Hamlet enacts to such great effect, was venerated in the classical world. (Freud is in awe of it, too.) It is the mania of love that conquers depression, misery, and indifference.
What's your take on one of the most famous 21st-century references to melancholia, the 2011 film Melancholia, written and directed by Lars von Trier?
One of the crucial ideas of our book is that we are losing the capacity for despair by subordinating it to the paradigm of therapy. One must become a functioning member of society again. You could add Abraham Lincoln to the list of thinkers we focus on in the book. Today, Lincoln would be diagnosed with a depression. It is well known that Lincoln had a clinical case of "melancholy," as people called it back then. But it was not despite but because of this melancholy that he found the political strength and vision for which he is known today.
Lars von Trier's magnificent film Melancholia, arguably one of the best and most prophetic this millennium, similarly appears in a new light after the pandemic. The movie displays how various characters deal with an imminent catastrophe that envelops the world. What would you do in the last days before the world collides fatally with the wandering planet called Melancholia?
Predictably, a panic breaks out, depression and anxiety spread, and while the husband assures his family that everything will be fine, he secretly is doing all the doomsday prepping and stocking up on antidepressants. There are of course also those who continue doing business as usual. Perhaps the best course of action would be to open a bottle of wine on the front porch and watch the planetary catastrophe unfold? Paradoxically, Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, the quintessential melancholic, wants none of that. She finds the strength to confront the truth of the disaster, without resorting to sugar-coating or escapism. And the situation is hopeless. But there is only hope for the hopeless, because hope stands in the way of authentic poesis. The worst is the best: such is the dialectic of disaster.
Perhaps the movie is indeed one of the most empathetic films about depression and mental illness ever made, as some have claimed. It is Justine who in the face of disaster escapes from the swamp of self-satisfaction and narcissism. She is the one who transforms from a depressive into a lover, caring tenderly for her nephew and sister. When the collision with the planet is about to happen, she gathers tree branches in the surrounding woods to build a "magic cave," not to escape or protect, but as a desperate—that is, melancholic—affirmation of life.
The melancholic we envision in our book is, like Justine in von Trier's movie, able "to look up," unlike the politicians and decision makers in the more recent disaster movie Don't Look Up. Melancholia in this regard is a capacity and can never be reduced to a pathology.
