Freud's "Mourning and Melancholy" is seminal to Freud's conceptualization of melancholy as an affect which is an effect on the ego of the loss of a highly cathected object that becomes identified with the primal lost object. In his return to Freud, Jacques Lacan stressed that the stakes of this affect are real, that is, pertaining to what is beyond the pleasure principle and beyond representation, while also pointing out this affect's ethical dimension: it's being an instance of ethical cowardice. Literature throughout the ages bears traces of melancholic suffering, Lacan himself using the literary example of Hamlet to theorize melancholy at the conclusion of his tenth seminar. In this seminar, we will articulate Freud's theorization of melancholy in "Mourning and Melancholia," in its resonance with the metapsychology of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Lacan's comments on mourning and melancholy (in seminar 10 and in seminar 6 on Desire and its Interpretation, which includes an extensive reading of Hamlet), together with the Shakespearen texts and other examples from the arts (e.g. the novels of Virginia Woolf, the visual art of Van Gogh) in an effort to learn in what way the melancholy impacts the structure (not content and theme) of the artistic object, i.e. what is a melancholic art object, and in what ways can the aesthetic specifics of art objects enrich the psychoanalytic conceptualization of the structure of melancholy and its relation to the signifier and the real.
Requirements: five responses to the theoretical material, referat or seminar paper