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George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek's Politics of Melancholia begins with a dialogue between Socrates and a courtesan. It sounds familiar, like the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima in the Symposium. It also sounds unfamiliar, for eros has been cast as melancholia in this epigraph. Edmondson and Mladek reimagine Plato's allegory of love by swapping out love for melancholia. Instead of thinking about melancholia as a retreat inward, or a pathological manifestation of lost love, they posit a theory of melancholia as a form of love. In this book, melancholia links the political subject to lost worlds. In his 1917 essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud observes that the melancholic identifies with an ill-defined lost object and withdraws inward. The new theory posits that melancholia is not a retreat from the world, but a stance against it, or an attempt to maintain conflict between subject and object. Classic Freudian melancholia and mania become two poles conditioning this state of not wallowing and not letting go. The question that Freud leaves unanswered, as to what the lost object is, and whether it ever was, is answered by the authors in conversation with Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben and Nicole Loraux. Politics, they argue, is both lost and never was. Melancholia becomes a way to remember historical possibilities from within the mechanism of their forgetting.
In this book, the melancholic inhabits a space of seething or righteous fury that troubles ancient, medieval and modern conceptions of the condition. For instance, just like Freud's famous essay, Dürer's 1514 engraving has long conditioned the way one imagines melancholia. The authors uproot the print from its context in the Renaissance. They employ Dürer's work to illustrate their argument that melancholia is a state of conflict rather than an allegory of imaginative activity, which is what Panofsky argues in Saturn and Melancholy . In this new reading, the angel's clenched fist becomes a sign of sup