Max Pensky - Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture)
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Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture)
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Melancholy Dialectics : Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning Critical Perspectives On Modern Culture
author
:
Pensky, Max.
publisher
:
University of Massachusetts Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0870238531
print isbn13
:
9780870238536
ebook isbn13
:
9780585227016
language
:
English
subject
Benjamin, Walter,--1892-1940--Philosophy, Melancholy in literature, Grief in literature.
publication date
:
1993
lcc
:
PT2603.E455Z796 1993eb
ddc
:
838/.91209
subject
:
Benjamin, Walter,--1892-1940--Philosophy, Melancholy in literature, Grief in literature.
Page i
Melancholy Dialectics
Page ii
A volume in the series
Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture
Edited by David Gross and William M. Johnston
Page iii
Melancholy Dialectics
Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning
Max Pensky
The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst
Page iv
Copyright 1993 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 92-42229 ISBN 0-87023-853-1 Designed by Mary Mendell Set in Bodoni Book Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pensky, Max, 1961 Melancholy dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the play of mourning / Max Pensky. p. cm. (Critical perspectives on modern culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87023-853-1 (alk. paper) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940--Philosophy. 2. Melancholy in literature. 3. Grief in literature. 1. Title. PT2603.E455Z796 1993 838'.91209dc20 92-42229 CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.
Page v
For my mother and my father
Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
1
1 Trauer and Criticism
36
2 Trauerspiel and Melancholy Subjectivity
60
3 Melancholia and Allegory
108
4 Melancholia and Modernity
151
5 On the Road to the Object: Surrealism as Postmelancholy Criticism
184
6 The Trash of History
211
Afterword
240
Notes
249
Index
279
Page ix
Acknowledgments
My thanks to those who have helped me through the long life of this project: to the Fulbright Foundation for supporting a research year at the Johann Wolfgang-Goethe Universitt and to the many friends and colleagues for their ideas, suggestions, and criticisms, especially David Bathrick, Paul Breines, Susan Buck-Morss, Josef Frchtl, Jrgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Michael Mahon, Thomas McCarthy, Dennis J. Schmidt, and Gary Smith. My thanks to Clark Dougan of the University of Massachusetts Press for his unflagging patience and support. And above all else, thanks to Katherine Lucas Anderson.
Page 1
Introduction
Is this the landscape image of that one-way street That you want to walk down? I almost doubt it. But know Where you should go. There are so many streets with paths of return One doesn't see. And when direction leads to an impasse: It's not true that nothing can happen. There is no negotiating at a collision; It is the lightning strike. And finding yourself transformed utterly: It's no illusion. In ancient days all paths led Somehow to God and His Name. We are not pious. We stay in the Profane And where God once stood, stands: Melancholy. Gershom Scholem
At the close of her work on melancholy and literature, Black Sun, Julia Kristeva reveals the conception of melancholia that had implicitly guided her analysis: while the psychological-literary syndrome of melancholy is triggered, articulated, transformed, half-remembered, or suppressed by the textual dance of a cultural history, melancholy itself remains, behind its masks, "essential and transhistorical." The depressive, deathly fixation of melancholia, "the most archaic expres-
Page 2
sion of the unsymbolizable, unnameable narcissistic wound,"1 self-lacerating longing for the prelinguistic Thing, obsessive-repetitive, necessary, and impossible search for the metalinguistic in language, for the unpossessible in desire, for meaning beyond any significationthis symptomatology, Kristeva reveals, articulates itself within texts, guides the productive imagination of authors, sinks out of sight to emerge again.
Melancholy possesses an inward history. It attaches itself to the characteristic forms of literary expression of an epoch. It invades the very capillaries of the text. Its mode of erotic representation and manipulation, its grammar, its essential problematic of illness and insight, all combine into a constellation of cognitive, libidinal, and semantic regularities that, in its unhurried historical creep, "produces," creates, forms. In this way Kristeva observes an inner connection between melancholia and writing. Modernist literature is melancholy; conversely, melancholy writing bears within it something disturbingly, undeniably modern.
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