Reclaiming Melancholy MA seminar in the Summer Semester 2022 Department of Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Thursdays between 10:00 and 12:00 Room: PEG 1.G 165 *** Please don’t forget to enrol on OLAT *** https://olat-ce.server.uni-frankfurt.de/olat/auth/RepositoryEntry/14774140928?9 Contact details Course convenor: Dr. Endre Dányi Biotechnologies, Nature and Society working group Department of Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main danyi@em.uni-frankfurt.de Teaching assistant: Paula Stiegler Biotechnologies, Nature and Society working group Department of Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main stiegler@em.uni-frankfurt.de Course description What kind of politics would be appropriate for the Anthropocene? Is it possible to engage in political practices without automatically reinforcing a modernist understanding of progress? Drawing on recent diagnoses of the present (see, for example, Latour’s Facing Gaia, Stengers’ In Catastrophic Times and Tsing et al.’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet), this MA seminar aims to articulate an alternative vocabulary of politics centred around the notion of ‘melancholy’. More specifically, it aims to ‘reclaim melancholy’ as a collective form of resistance by re-engaging with three central works in the social sciences (Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, Walter Benjamin’s The Origins of German Tragic Drama, and Claud Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques) and foregrounding three empirical cases of politics that point beyond hope and despair. Course assessment Participation (Teilnahmeschein): The seminar sessions will be held on a weekly basis; participation consists of active attendance and weekly posting of comments on OLAT. Exam (Leistungsschein): In addition to participation (see above), the full grade requires the submission of a final paper of 5000 words by the 1st September 2022. -1- Covid note Please follow campus regulations on COVID-19 and make sure you’re up-to-date on the safety plan! You can find the latest information on this website: https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/87665295/General_Information?locale=en Course outline 1) Introduction (14 April 2022) What is this course about? What are the requirements? Where does one find the readings? What happens if one needs to miss a session? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in our first meeting, which will take place on Zoom (Meeting ID: 946 9509 0392; Passcode: 940197). 2) End of progress (21 April 2022) Climate change is not simply the latest crisis in the history of modernity; it’s the crisis of modernity, in the sense that it is the very conditions of modernity that are considered to be responsible for the dramatic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. How can we come to terms with the end of progress as a grand narrative, and what are its alternatives? Required reading: Latour, B., I. Stengers, A. Tsing & N. Bubandt (2018) ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse’, Ethnos, 83:3, pp. 587-606. Suggested readings: Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Stengers, I. (2015) In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Lüneburg: Meson Press. Tsing, A. L., H. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt. (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 3) Dürer’s Melencolia I (28 April 2022) The ‘end of progress’ as an overall diagnosis is certainly not new – one could say it’s as old as modernity itself. Perhaps its most enigmatic expression is Albrecht Dürer’s engraving from 1514, titled Melencolia I. In our seminar we will compare dominant interpretations of Dürer’s image. In the afternoon, between 2pm and 4pm, we will then go to the Städel Museum, where the original engraving is held (see https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/en/work/melencolia-i-the-melancholy). Required reading: Klibansky, R., Panofsky E., Saxl, F. (1964) Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, London: Nelson: pp. 284-373. -2- Suggested reading: Muré, F. (no date) ‘Images of discordance. Configurations of tension in Walter Benjamin’s reading of Dürer’s Melencolia I vis-à-vis Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl’s Melencolia “yetto-come”’, GLITS-e, Goldsmith University College: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/glits-e/federicamure/ PART 1 4) Melancholy as an individual disposition (5 May 2022) In ancient Greece, and then in medieval Europe, melancholy was seen as a physical illness attributed to an imbalance of four bodily humours – more precisely to a surplus of black bile. Later this understanding was replaced by melancholy as a mental disorder, identified as depression and a pathological form of mourning. In this session we will discuss the latter with the help of Sigmund Freud’s classical study. Required readings: Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ In: Collected Papers, Vol. IV, 1953. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 243-258 Suggested reading: Kristeva, J. (2007) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. 5) Melancholy as a collective sentiment (12 May 2022) Melancholy understood as depression is supposed to be located in individual bodies. But what if it was the effect of various subjectification processes that aim to create and maintain ‘normal’ ways of being in the world, thereby pathologizing everything else? In this week’s seminar we will discuss melancholy as a collective sentiment with the help of Judith Butler’s work on gender and performativity. Required reading: Butler, J. (1995) ‘Melancholy Gender – Refused Identification’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5(2), 165-180. Suggested readings: Ahmed, S. (2010) ‘Melancholy Migrants’, In The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 121-159. McIvor, D. W. (2012): ‘Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning,’ Political Theory, 40(4), pp. 409-436. Winters, J.R. (2016) Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. -3- 6) Assuming political agency (19 May 2022) What are the implications of Judith Butler’s performative approach in the context of sovereignty? What roles do bodies – physical and institutional – play in the process of assuming political agency? And what are the generative effects of failure? We’ll be discussing these questions through a hunger strike organised by a group of illegal immigrants in Brussels a few years before the European refugee crisis. Required reading: Abrahamsson, S. and E. Dányi (2019) ‘Becoming stronger by becoming weaker: The hunger strike as a mode of doing politics,’ Journal of International Relations and Development, 22(4), pp. 882-898. Suggested reading: Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 87122. PART 2 7) Left-wing melancholia (2 June 2022) Melancholy has been widely associated with acedia, the cardinal sin of sloth, not only in the Middle Ages, but also in the 20th century. Most notably, Walter Benjamin accused his contemporaries in the Weimar era of ‘left-wing melancholy’ – an attitude that according to him reduced revolutionary opposition into objects of aesthetic appreciation. In this session we will discuss the relevance of this accusation in the early 21st century. Required readings: Benjamin, W. (1974 [1931]) ‘Left-Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästner's new book of poems)’, Screen, 15(2), pp. 28-32. Brown, W. (1999) ‘Resisting Left Melancholy,’ Boundary 2, 26(3), pp. 19-27. Suggested reading: Traverso, E. (2016) Left-wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press. 8) Critique and the problem of in/action (9 June 2022) While it was Benjamin who coined the term ‘left-wing melancholy’, it was also him who in other works identified melancholy as a particular form of resistance in face of a looming catastrophe. The issue, then, might be less that melancholy leads to inaction and more that it generates action that is difficult to recognise as something political. If we sensitise ourselves to melancholy’s own terms of politics, however, its critical potential may be realised. Required reading: Benjamin, W. (1968 [1940]) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ In H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations, London: Pimlico, pp. 253-264. -4- Suggested readings: Benjamin, W. (1998 [1972]): The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso. Pensky, M. (1993) Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 9) The art of living with problems (23 June 2022) In his comprehensive review of melancholy as a particular form of resistance, Enzo Traverso points at the outbreak of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s as the trauma that opened up a space for a new kind of activism: one that drew its strength from within collective loss and bereavement. One articulation of this activism is harm reduction, which was initially aimed at reducing the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users in large cities in Europe and North America. This week’s session will examine the politics of harm reduction in a needle exchange point in Budapest, and discuss ongoing attempts to identify better ways of living with drug-use-as-a-problem – even against official drug policies. Required reading: Dányi, E. and R. Csák (2021) ‘Drug Places and Spaces of Problematisation: The Melancholy Case of a Hungarian Needle Exchange Programme’, Drugs and Alcohol Today, 21(3), pp. 190-200. Suggested readings: Crimp, D. (2002). Melancholia and Moralism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (2010). Care in Practice. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. PART 3 10) Tristesse (10:00-12:00, 30 June 2022, in PEG 1G 165!) The history of Western civilisation (no matter how difficult to define) is impossible to tell without the analysis of various understandings of melancholy. Does this mean that melancholy is necessarily a Western or Eurocentric term? The answer depends on what version of anthropology we mobilise when we interrogate the complicated relationship between ‘the West’ and the rest of the world. This session will introduce Claude LéviStrauss’ understanding of anthropology as entropology, that is, the study of decay. Required reading: Lévi-Strauss, C. (2011 [1955]) Tristes Tropiques. London: Penguin Books, pp. 17-44. Suggested readings: Geertz, C. (1988) ‘The World in a Text: How to Read “Tristes Tropiques”’, in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 25-48. Sontag, S. (1994 [1963]). ‘The Anthropologist as hero’, In Against Interpretation, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 69-81. -5- 11) After the end of the world (12:00-14:00, 30 June 2022 – in SH 0.106!) Lévi-Strauss was well-aware of the ruinous effects of modernisation in Indigenous communities across the globe and anthropology’s sad position within it. Tristesse, however, is not an Indigenous response, and – as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues – it would be a shame not to recognise the (cosmo-)political potential of Indigenous attempts ‘to live better in a world that has become worse’. This week’s session will focus on Viveiro de Castro’s concept of ‘controlled equivocation’ as an attempt to examine Western and non-Western cosmologies in a symmetrical fashion. Required reading: Viveiros de Castro, E. (2004) ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2(1), 3-22. Suggested readings: Danowski, D. and E. Viveiros de Castro. (2017). The Ends of The World. Cambridge: Polity Press. de la Cadena, M., and M. Blaser. (2018) A World of Many Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 12) Toward an asymmetrical cosmopolitics (14 July 2022) Together with many anti-colonial scholars, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is arguing for a symmetrical way of treating Western and Indigenous ways of knowing. This approach is getting more and more important in the context of climate change and rapid environmental degradation. At the same time, it’s important to recognise that practical attempts to achieve symmetry constantly break down, reinforcing mostly Western political institutions. What if we took breakdowns and moments of asymmetry as our starting points for (cosmo-)politics? This is the question that informed a water management project in a Yolngu-Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory in Australia. Required reading: Spencer, M., Dányi, E., & Hayashi, Y. (2019) ‘Asymmetries and Climate Futures: Working with Waters in an Indigenous Australian Settlement,’ Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(5), pp. 786-813. Suggested reading: Verran, H. (2002). Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies. Social Studies of Science, 32(56), 729-762. -6-