A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt

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Why melancholia is a vital form of social critique and a catalyst for political renewal

Melancholia is wrongly condemned as a condition of withdrawal and despair that alienates its sufferer from community. Countering that misconception, A Politics of Melancholia 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 figureby turns inventive and destructive, outraged and inspiredto their rightful place as the poet of political thought.

George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek identify pivotal moments of political melancholia in ancient and modern texts, offering new perpectives on the death of Socrates in Platos dialogues, the fratricide in Hamlet, Woyzecks killing of Marie in Georg Bchners Woyzeck, the murder of Moses in Freuds 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, this eloquent book reveals how political melancholia embodies a shared condition of discontent that binds communities together and inspires change.

Author Bio

George Edmondson is associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Neighboring Text. Klaus Mladek is associate professor of German studies and comparative literature at Dartmouth. He is the editor of Police Forces and the coeditor (with George Edmondson) of Sovereignty in Ruins.