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A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt

Online ISBN:
9780691251448
Print ISBN:
9780691251295
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt

George Edmondson,
George Edmondson

Associate Professor of English

Dartmouth College
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Klaus Mladek
Klaus Mladek

Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature

Dartmouth College
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
12 March 2024
Online ISBN:
9780691251448
Print ISBN:
9780691251295
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

Melancholia is wrongly condemned as a condition of withdrawal and despair that alienates its sufferer from community. Countering that misconception, this book 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. The book identifies 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, the book reveals how political melancholia embodies a shared condition of discontent that binds communities together and inspires change.

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