In preparation for the Frascari VII Symposium on Melancholy (Marywood University Department of Architecture, Spring 2024), a zoom seminar was held to both diversify and consolidate ideas about the historic symptom of melancholia. In anticipation of the second stage, where presenters will be writing down their thoughts on the subject, a Melancholy II zoom seminar is proposed. This session will involve specific questions and short responses, followed by a focused critique and open discussion.
- Melancholy II zoom seminar proposal
- Readings: Aristotle, Problema XXX.1; Panofsky, Klibansky, Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy
- Submitted questions [TBA]
- Background: Melancholy and the method of errors
- Critiques [TBA]
melancholy’s irrational remainder
Thanks to Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholy,” we have a puzzle about unhappiness. The two depressive feelings resemble each other outwardly, but their structure is different. Mourning focuses on a specific object of loss; melancholy focuses on the loss itself.
A descriptive-comparative approach produces general observations but does not address issues of cause or structure that would explain how melancholy works as a symptom particularly afflicting genius. Strachey’s word for the investment of feeling, cathexis, doesn’t seem to work for the melancholic. If mourning could be written algebraically, it could be x-y=z. The loss of an object of our love, x, can be relieved by finding a new object, y, but there will be a residual, z, that will only gradually dissipate. Melancholy’s algebra is different. The attempt to replace the lost object will involves an irrational component, y + b√-1, because there is no object to be lost in the first place.
Melancholy is about the frame through which the world appears as melancholic, but the contents inside the frame transfer and transpose elements of the frame itself, creating the irrational element if i, √–1. Melancholy is more of an optics than an objective condition. This makes it a symptom rather than a response.
The feedback loop between the frame and the framed makes melancholy irrational but, at the same time, durable. It abides as one of the four classic humors that, since antiquity, have based human character on a circular model connecting behavior to physiology (choler, blood, phlegm, black bile). Black bile has the peculiar property of the pharmakon. It can be either a poison or elixir, inducing death or eternal life. This is another circular function. But, just as melancholy prevents the cycle of humors from “closing properly,” melancholy is itself a problematic circuit, where the √-1 element appears as a double twist.
Is the double twist a fractal that appears at every scale? In topology, this is the phenomenon of non-orientation: the twist of the Möbius band that is evident but can’t be located at any one point. The √-1 that resists scale change and can’t be located makes melancholy mysterious, but it also gives it the keys to many other structural puzzles afflicting the human subject.
The second Melancholy zoom will focus on the irrational remainder and other structural issues. These return to the question of the mystery story by introducing the strange connection between the Type One Error (the accused innocent) and Type Two Error (the wrongly exonerated whodunit). The condition known as the forced choice makes the two error types obverses of each other: TF>FT>TF …, a circulation of antipodes that, out of sheer opposition, creates the double circuit.
This first Melancholy zoom used the analogy of the mystery story. Payne and Kunze provided essays.
- Andrew Payne: “Architecture and Melancholy: A Few Inconclusive Thoughts in the Aftermath of our Discussion”
If, following psychoanalytic doctrine, melancholia would consist in the rerouting of libido from object to ego, then our question may be put as follows: to what extent might that reversal of libidinal fortunes play a role in the creation and reception of (some? all?) works of architecture? This formulation demands a caveat, however, for the transference of libido from object to ego, far from being peculiar to melancholia, is according to Freud an everyday feature of psychical life, so it remains for us to clarify what distinguishes this redirection of libido in the case of melancholia. Indeed such a clarification is just what is promised in the title to Freud’s essay. With that in mind, permit me to say a word about how Freud distinguishes melancholia from normal mourning in that work. - Don Kunze: (Not about the Mystery Story either): “Melancholy and Jouissance” This is a story of oldest and first. Melancholy is a part of the oldest medical system in the world (humoristic); although the version we know comes from Empedocles, there was undoubtedly an older, shamanistic version that was based on seasonal change, not logical opposition. This would position melancholy between the death of the phlegmatic humor and the rebirth of the sanguine. This position is confirmed by melancholy’s key motif, the theme of the two deaths, the literal death and symbolic death, separated by a period of wandering, known to all cultures. This paper argues for a a broad expansion of melancholy, as a program for knowledge … the need to go beyond the formula of “justified true belief ” to add a small amount of black bile.