Why melancholia is a vital form of social critique and a catalyst for political renewal
Melancholia is wrongly condemned as a condition of withdrawal and despair that alienates its sufferer from community. Countering that misconception, A Politics of Melancholia reclaims an understanding of melancholia not as an affliction in need of a remedy but as an affirmative stance toward decay and ruination in political life, and restores the melancholic figure-by turns inventive and destructive, outraged and inspired-to their rightful place as the poet of political thought.
George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek identify pivotal moments of political melancholia in ancient and modern texts, offering new perspectives on the death of Socrates in Plato's dialogues, the fratricide in Hamlet, Woyzeck's killing of Marie in Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, the murder of Moses in Freud's thought, and the betrayal of the revolutionary idea that Hannah Arendt identifies in her critique of eighteenth-century revolutions. Melancholia emerges here as a disposition that is mournful but also jubilant, a mood of unbending disconsolation that remains faithful to a scene of downfall, to events that cannot be forgotten, and to things that cannot be governed.
Recovering a tradition of thought that is both affirmative and hopeful, this eloquent book reveals how political melancholia embodies a shared condition of discontent that binds communities together and inspires change. George Edmondson is associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Neighboring Text. Klaus Mladek is associate professor of German studies and comparative literature at Dartmouth. He is the editor of Police Forces and the coeditor (with George Edmondson) of Sovereignty in Ruins. "This provocative, erudite, and carefully argued book is suffused with insightful readings of key writers and texts. Edmondson and Mladek reveal the myriad ways in which melancholia is not merely a form of failed mourning or incapacitating paralysis but rather provides the very foundation of political transformation."-Gerhard Richter, author of This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art
"Edmondson and Mladek provide an exhilarating and extraordinarily timely account of the haunting of political discourse by melancholy from antiquity to today. A Politics of Melancholia is a magnificent book, one that will be studied and referred to for years to come."-D. Vance Smith, author of Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England
