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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesErich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies

Distinguished Fellow 2022

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Die Wirklichkeit der Endlichkeit. Über eine Allianz von Melancholie und Kritik

Contemporary critical theories – from gender and queer studies to political ecology – see their contribution to the prevailing understanding of the world and of ourselves not least in identifying that which presents itself as nature as a social and thus historical construction. The figure of thought at the center of the lecture, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach: it reads the constructions of history in terms of their natural decay, i.e. as something transient. Under the heading of “natural history”, this somewhat forgotten figure of thought was of central importance in early critical theory, particularly with Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. The idea of reading the constructions of history as ciphers of their own transience also explains the close relationship that early critical theory saw between melancholy and critique. This alliance, too, has been somewhat forgotten today. Where melancholy is currently discussed, it is usually associated with depression in the line of Sigmund Freud and criticized as a pathology that is accompanied not only by a problematic internalization of conflicts, but also by a narcissistic turning away from the world. Critical melancholy, on the other hand, is emphatically turned towards the world. The melancholic gaze, to which the historical world presents itself in the light of its own transience, dissolves the appearance of stagnation in the circumstances and opens up what has become to a becoming. The perspective of change arises here not despite, but because of the insight into the finiteness of everything that exists.

Juliane Rebentisch