t For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have Ineaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I anl trying to address an abyss of sor row, a noncornmunicable grief that at tinles, and often on a long-tenn basis, lays dainls upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would irnply nlY being capable of des ire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if Iny existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic-it appears obvious to rne, glaring and inescapable. Where does this black sun conle froln? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargie rays reach nle, pin ning me down to the ground, to Iny bed, cOlnpelling nle to silence, to renunciation? The wound I luve just suffered, SOlne setback or other in my love life or my profession, SOlne sorrow or bereave ment affecting Iny relationship with dose relatives-such are often the easily spotted triggers of Iny despair. A betrayal, a fatal illness, SOlne accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seerned to nle the [ 3 ] norrnal category of normal people or else falls on a one with the same radical effect, or yet . . . What more could I mention? An intlnite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day ... All this suddenly gives Ine another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair , scorching at tünes, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I rnake to prolong is ready at any mOITlent for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of my despondency, the irnpossible mean ing of a life whose burden constantly seems unbearable, save for those moments 'Nhen I pull myself together and face up to the dis aster. live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow ... Absent from other people's rneaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysicallucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings. My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne's statement "To phi losophize is to learn how to die" is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred-which came to a head in Heidegger' s care and the disclosure of our "being-for-death." Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play. Nevertheless, the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhehns me. Wh at is rnore, the disenchant ITlent that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echo es of old traumas, [ 4 ] to which realize luve never been able to resign can thus disco ver antecedents to my current breakdown in a 10ss, or grief over son1eone or something that once loved. The disappearance of that essential being con tinues to deprive me of wh at is most worthwhile in me; live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the sarne that n1Y grief is but the defennent of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I mlrture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned rne. depression points to Iny not knowing how to lose-I have perhaps been un able to find a valid cornpensation for the loss? It follows that any 10ss entails the loss of my being-and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist. Melancholia--Somber Lining of Amatory Passion A sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication rnake up the hUlndrurn backdrop against which our ideals and eu phorias often stand out, unless they be that fleeting clear mindedness shredding the amorous hypnosis that joins two persons together. Conscious of our being doomed to lose our loves, we grieve perhaps even n10re when we glimpse in our lover the shadow of a long lost former loved one. Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, the face that is to bear hirn away into death, but of which he is unaware while he adrnires hin1self in a nlirage. Talking about depression will again lead us into the marshy land of the Narcissus myth.1 This time, however, we shall not encounter the bright and fragile an1atory idealization; on the contrary, we shall see the shadow cast on the fragile self, hardly dissociated frOln the other, precisely by the 10s5 of that essential other. The shadow of despair. Rather than seek the rneaning of despair (it is either obvious or metaphysica1), let us acknowledge that there is [ 5 ] only in des pair. The child beconles irre- deen1ably sad before lütering his first words; this is be cause he has been irrevocably, desperately separated from the ITlothe1', a loss that causes hirn to try to find her again, along with other objects of love, first in the imagination, then in words. SelTliology, concerned as it is with the zero deg1'ee of synlbolisrn, is unavoidably led to ponder over not only the arnatory state but its coroHary as weH, mel ancholia; at the sal11e ünle it observes that if the1'e is no writing other than the arnorous, there is no inlagination that is not, overtly or secretly, nlelancholy. Thought-Crisis-Melal1ch0 lia J\J evertheless, ITlelancholia is not French. The ngor of ProtestantiSlTl or the n1atriarchal weight of Christian or thodoxy adnüts n101'e readily to a COlTlplicity with the grieving person when it does not beckon hiITl or her into delectatio morosa. While it is true that the French Middle Ages rendered sadness by means of delicate tropes, the Gallic, renascent, enlightened tone tended toward levity, eroticism, and rhetoric rather than nihilism. Pascal, Rous seau, and Nerval cut a sorry figure--and they stand as exceptions. For the speaking being life is a meaningful life; life is even the apogee of n1eaning. Hence if the meaning of life is lost, life can easily be lost: when n1eaning shatters, life no Ion ger ITlatters. In his doubtful mon1ents the depressed person is a philosopher, and we owe to Heraclitus, Socra tes, and l110re recently Kierkegaard the ITlOSt disturbing pages on the meaning or lack of n1eaning of Being. One must, however, go back to Aristotle to find a thorough reflection on the relationship philosophers have ITlain tained with rnelancholia. According to the Problemata (30, I), attributed to Aristotle, black bile (melaina kole) saps [ 6 ] refl.ection focuses on crn,rpI1'H, the ethos-perittofl) the exceptional personality, whose dis tinctive characteristic would be Inelancholia. While ing on the notions of four hUlnors and ten1- peraments, Aristotle breaks new ground by ren10ving n1elancholia frOln pathology and locating it in nature but also and rnainly by having it ensue frorn heat) considered to be the regulating principle of the organism, and mesotes) the controlled interaction of opposite energies. This Greek notion of rnelancholia rerrlains alien to us today; it assurnes a "propC'rly balanced diversity" (eukratos anomalia) that is Inetaphorically rendered by froth (aphros)) the euphorie counterpoint to black bile. Such a white n1ixture of air (pneuma) and liquid brings out froth in the sea, wine, as weIl as in the sperrrl of Inan. Indeed, Aristotle con1bines scientific statC'n1ent with m ythical allusions as he links rrlelancholia to sperrnatic froth and eroti, with ex plicit references to Dionysus and Aphrodite (953 b, 3 1- 32). The n1elancholia he evokes is not a philosopher's diseasC' but his very nature, his ethos. It is not what strikes the first GrC'C'k ll1elancholy hero, Bellerophon, who is thus portrayed in the Iliad (VI, 200-3): "Bellerophon gavC' of fense to the gods and became a lonely wanderer on the Aleian plain, eating out his heart and shunning the paths of men." Self-devouring because forsaken by the gods, exiled by divine decree, this desperate rrlan was con derrlned not to mania but to banishll1ent, absence, void ... With Aristotle, rnelancholia, counterbalanced by ge nius, is coextensive with man's anxiety in Being. It could be seen as the forerunner of Heidegger's anguish as the Stimmung of thought. Schelling found in it, in similar fashion, the "essence of human freedorrl," an indication of "man's affinity with nature." The philosopher would thus be "111elancholy on account of a surfeit of hurnanity." 2 This perception of rnelancholia as an extreme state and [ 7 ] as an that reveals the true nature of undergoes a profound tranSfOrITlation during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, medieval thought returned to the cosrnologies of late antiquity and bound melancholia to Saturn, the planet of spirit and thought.3 Dürer's Melan cholia (1514) was a masterful transposition into graphie art of theoretical speculations that found their highest expres sion with Marsilio Ficino. Christian theology, on the other hand, considered sadness a sin. Dante set "the woeful people who have lost the good of the intellect" in "the city of grief' (It~ferno) They are "wretched souls" because they have lost God, and these melancholy shad ows constitute "the sect of the wicked displeasing both to God and to His enemies"; their punishment is to have "no hope of death." Those whorn despair has caused to turn violent against themselves, suicides and squanderers, are not spared either; they are conden1ned to turn into trees (Injerno) XIII). N evertheless, Inedieval monks did pro rnote sadness: as mystical ascesis (acedia ) it became essen tial as a rneans toward paradoxical knowledge of divine truth and constituted the major touchs tone for faith. Changing in accordance with the religious climate, Inelancholia asserted itself, if I Inay say so, in religious doubt. There is nothing n10re disrnal than a dead God, and Dostoyevsky himself was disturbed by the distressing sight of the dead Christ in Holbein's painting, contrasted with the "truth of resurrection. " The periods that witness the downfall of political and religious idols, periods of crisis, are particularly favorable to black moods. While it is true that an unemployed worker is less suicidal than a des er ted lover, rnelancholia does assert itself in times of crisis; it is spoken of, establishes its archeology, generates its representations and its knowledge. A written melan cholia surely has little in comlnon with the institutional- [ 8 ] ized bears the same nalne. the confu- sion in terrninology that have kept alive up to now 1S What is depression?), we are confronted with an enignntic that will not cease questioning us: if 10ss, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as threaten it and spoil it, it is also noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated. The artist consumed by melancholia is at the same time the most relentless in his struggle against the symbolic abdication that blankets hin1 ... Until death strikes or suicide becomes imperative for those who view it as final triurnph over the void of the lost object ... Melancholia/Depression I shall eall melancholia the institutional sympton1atology of inhibition and asymbolia that beeomes established now and then or ehronieally in aperson, alternating more often than not with the so-ealled manie phase of exaltation. When the two phenomena, despondeney and exhilaration, are of lesser intensity and frequeney, it is then possible to speak of neurotie depression. While aeknowledging the differenee between melaneholia and depression, Freudian theory deteets everywhere the same impossible mourning Jor the maternal object. Question: impossible on aceount of what paternal weakness? Or what biologieal fraiIty? Mel aneholia-we again eneounter the generie term after hav- ing demareated psyehotie and neurotie symptomatologies --admits of the fearsome privilege of situating the ana lyst's question at the interseetiol1 of the biologieal and the symbolieal. Parallel series? COl1seeutive sequenees? A dan- [ 9 ] gerous crossing that needs to be another relation- ship that needs to be thought up? The ternlS ITlelancholia and depression refer to a corn posite that l11ight be called nlelancholy/depressive, whose borders are in fact blurred, and within which psychiatrists ascribe the concept of "melancholia" to the illness that is irreversible on its own (that responds only to the adnlin istration of antidepressants). Without going into details about various types of depression ("psychotic" or "neu rotic," or, according to another classification, "anxious," " ag.l tated, " " retar d ed, " or "1l OS tl' 1e" ) ,or concern.m g 111Y- self with the pron1ising but still inlprecise field in which one studies the exact effects of antidepressants (mono al11ine oxidase inhibitors, tricyclics, and heterocyclies) or th YI11ic stabilizers (lithiunl carbonates), I shall exarnine ITlatters frorn a Freudian point ofvieuJ. On that basis, I shall try to bring out, fi-Ol11 the co re of the nlelancholy/depres sive conlposite, blurred as its borders Inay be, what per tains to a COITllnOn experience of object loss and of a modifi cation ofsignifYing bonds. These bonds, language in particular, prove to be unable to insure, within the melancholy/de pressive cOlnposite, the autostiInulation that is required in order to initiate given responses. Instead of functioning as ,~ "rewards systern," language, on the contrary, hyperac tivates the "anxiety-punishment" pair, and thus inserts itself in the slowing down of thinking and decrease in psychOITlOtor activity characteristic of depression. If tem porary sadness or ITlOurning on the one hand, and melan choly stupor on the other are clinically and nosologically different, they are nevertheless supported by intolerance jor o~ject loss and the signifier's jai/ure to insure a cOlnpensating way out of the states of withdrawal in which the subject takes refuge to the point of inaction (pretending to be dead) or even suicide. Thus I shall speak of depression and [ 10 ]