Modernity and Melancholia

Jonathan Flatley
Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan, USA)
jonathanflatley@wayne.edu
Abstract

This essay proposes that the sense of a collective melancholia as a shared experience of difficult loss may be paradigmatically modern,
but that it may or may not be depressing. Indeed, such a melancholia might be the basis for extraordinary actions or events. It pursues this proposal
by placing what I see as the two key modern thinkers of melancholia—Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, both of whom connect melancholia to loss —
in relation to the long history of thought about melancholia.

References
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