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Melancholia for Modernity. Notes on Walter Benjamin

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 Melancholia for Modernity
(Notes on Walter Benjamin)

Tatjana JUKIĆ

1
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) belongs among the authors whose work has
decided the profile of critical theory in recent decades. This is largely due to The
Origin of the German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), where
he presented the mourning play of the German literary Baroque as an intellectual
situation for an insight into the relationship of philosophy and modern history,
and therefore for a contemplation of modernity.
The Ursprung is Benjamin’s early text, his Habilitation in fact, which he
drafted in 1916 and completed in 1925.1 Mourning and melancholia are one of
its prominent themes, but also one of its critical instruments. Melancholia will
remain integral to Benjamin’s critical apparatus, so that acedia is mobilized for
a critical approach to history as late as his testamentary Theses on the Philosophy
of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte). The Ursprung, however, remains the
point of departure for a discussion of Benjamin’s grasp of mourning and melan-
251
cholia; it is also Benjamin’s only text whose coherence is that of a book, and not
that of a set of fragments.2
The book is divided into three parts. It opens with the »Epistemo-Critical
Prologue«, followed by chapters on the mourning play (Trauerspiel) in compar-
ison to tragedy, and on the mourning play analyzed against allegory. Benjamin
focuses on melancholia, and on mourning, towards the end of the middle section
of the book; this means that analyzing mourning and melancholia serves to con-
nect his attempts to define the mourning play against tragedy, in the first part of

1
W. BENJAMIN, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Frankfurt am Main, 1978., 6.
2
George Steiner points out that the Ursprung is Benjamin’s »only completed book,« even though
his legacy consists of »eight sizeable tomes« of essays, translations, short notices, and scripts. It is in
this sense that the reader whom Benjamin »envisaged for the serious part of his work was, literally,
posthumous«. G. STEINER, Introduction, in: W. BENJAMIN, The Origin of German Tragic Dra-
ma, London, 2003., 7-24, here 11. This suggests that mourning dictates the intellectual format of
fragment to Benjamin or, more to the point, that mourning commands fragment as an intellectual
format–a command which originates in the intellectual labor Benjamin invested in the Ursprung. Put
otherwise, what mourning seems to dictate to Benjamin is the structure itself of his thought.
 the book, and against allegory, in the concluding section. As a result, discussing
Melancholy Between Creativity and Depression

melancholia is how Benjamin generates a critical interval between the intellectual

horizons of tragedy and allegory, but also between philosophy and modern histo-
ry, this being felt as essential to understanding modernity.3
It is therefore symptomatic that Benjamin should conceive his study of
mourning and melancholia as a cultural history of the two, but a history in reverse:
it is a history which begins with the moment that concerns Benjamin the most–
the Reformation–and then proceeds in reverse towards melancholia in antiquity,
to finally make a retour to the Reformation and the Baroque.
2
Benjamin first addresses the structure of everyday life in the Reformation,
when Lutheranism, by divesting of meaning everyday deeds and actions, generat-
ed an empty, vacant world, whose contemplation revealed it to be but the debris
of partial, inauthentic acts–a spectacle of irrevocable loss. A strict sense of duty
resulted from this divestment and this contemplation, and brought about mel-
ancholia in the great men of the Reformation. (Benjamin diagnoses melancho-
lia in Luther himself, in the last two decades of his life.) Death came to inspire
a most profound fear and terror, while mourning became a state of mind, with
the world perceived as a mask to be contemplated and deciphered. This is why
the mourning play of the Baroque »does not concern itself with the emotional
condition of the poet or his public, but with a feeling which is released from any
empirical subject and is intimately bound to the fullness of an object.« Moreover,
252
mourning does not denote a feeling so much as »a motorial attitude« which is
»determined by an astounding tenacity of intention«; among the feelings, such
a tenacity of intention »is matched perhaps only by love.« Benjamin attributes
to mourning »a special intensification, a progressive deepening of its intention,«
which is but a step away from the stoic apatheia, but »a step which only becomes
possible in Christianity.«4
The distance between the self and the world around it increases in the Ba-
roque, to the point where the self is estranged from the body; it is a depersonaliza-
tion which designates a high degree of mournfulness.5 Benjamin notes that Albre-
cht Dürer’s Melencolia I is exemplary of this state of mind: Dürer shows the tools
of an active life which are strewn around on the floor and are now the objects of

3 Steiner notes that, »[b]y virtue of its title and numerous textual echoes, the Ursprung aligns itself
immediately« with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie). G. STEINER, Intro-
duction, 12.
4 W. BENJAMIN, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 119-121; The Origin of German Tragic Drama,

138-140.
5 Ibid., 121.
contemplation of his melancholy angel. Hence Benjamin’s interest in the mourn-

Tatjana JUKIĆ, Melancholia for Modernity

ing play, whose world is comparable to that of Dürer’s Melencolia I. The prince
of the mourning play, he says, is paradigmatic of melancholia, because nothing
testifies to the frailty of creaturely life so much as the fact that even princes are
subject to this frailty.6 Benjamin quotes from the Baroque authors in support of
his argument: »Die traurige Melankoley wohnt mehrenteiles in Pällasten«–the
sad melancholy dwells mostly in palaces.7 Hence also Benjamin’s appreciation of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the exemplary Trauerspiel; in the words of Rebecca Co-
may, Hamlet »has a status of an exception« for Benjamin, because »it both ex-
ceeds and confirms the basic parameters« of the genre.8
The frailty of creaturely life to which even princes are subject explains why
physiological explanations of melancholia were so important to the Baroque;
Benjamin remarks that the Baroque »had such a clear vision of the misery of
mankind in its creaturely estate.« The phrase Benjamin foregrounds is kreatürli-
ches Leben, creaturely life, which will be important to later discussions of biopol-
itics and bare life. Interestingly, Benjamin notes that melancholia is »the most
genuinely creaturely of the contemplative impulses« whose »power need be no
less in the gaze of a dog than in the attitude of a pensive genius,« while Adam,
»the first born, a pure creation, possesses the creaturely mournfulness.«9 It is at
this point that Benjamin turns more exclusively to melancholia, whose creaturely
character can be traced back to antiquity. Benjamin finds it preeminent to empha-
size the dialectical potential of melancholia. He says that melancholia designates a
dialectical tension between madness and clairvoyance, also between that which is
extremely near and that which is extremely distant. In antiquity, melancholia mo- 253
bilizes the semiotic potential of stone and earth, stone and earth being extensions
of creaturely life, just as it mobilizes the semiotic potential of Saturn, the most
distant planet. Everything that is saturnine, claims Benjamin, points down into
the depths of the Earth; this is how the nature of the ancient god of agriculture is
preserved. It is logical, therefore, that melancholia should designate both the labor
of agriculture and the labor of contemplation, just as it is logical that melancholy
wisdom should be »secured by immersion into the life of creaturely things«–»it
hears nothing of the voice of revelation.«10 This is why dog is exemplary of mel-
ancholia in antiquity too, not only in the Baroque, because dogs are dominated

6
Ibid., 123.
7
Ibid., 124.
8 R. COMAY, Paradoxes of Lament: Benjamin and Hamlet, in: I. FERBER, P. SCHWEBEL (eds.),

Lament in Jewish Thought, Berlin, 2014., 257-275, here 266-267.

9 W. BENJAMIN, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 126; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 146-

147.
10 Ibid., 132; 152.
 by the spleen, the seat of black bile. Even so, melancholia does not reside in a
Melancholy Between Creativity and Depression

single place, just as it does not privilege a single position, but is a constellation of
thought, concentration, earth and gall. Because it partakes of earth and its inert
mass, stone is emblematic of melancholia.11 Melancholia in turn is also acedia,
designating »dullness of the heart, or sloth.«12 Benjamin remarks that the indeci-
siveness of the prince in the Trauerspiel is »nothing other than saturnine acedia.«
The same seems to apply to the cunning courtier, his dramatic counterpart: the
courtier’s inconstancy in human affairs is reciprocated by his hopeless dedication
to the world of things–he is lost in the contemplation of the crown and the scept-
er. »The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning, is born of its
loyalty to the world of things,« says Benjamin. Melancholia, on the other hand,
»betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption
it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.«13
3
Benjamin’s ambition was evidently to embrace and exhaust the pre-modern
descriptions of melancholia. This, however, coincides with exhausting melancho-
lia for history: melancholia remains blocked for history in its potential as an event,
just as it remains blocked for philosophy in its potential as a concept (because of
its contamination with creaturely life). Put differently, melancholia according to
Benjamin is not thinkable as an event, just as it is not thinkable as a concept; it
is always already in the domain of preconception and pre-disposition–now as an
interval between the intellectual regimes of history and philosophy.14
254 It is in this light that Benjamin’s narrative strategy should be understood–
his decision to organize the account of melancholia as a history in reverse, so that
mourning the loss of the world, which is at the heart of the Reformation, is both
a chronological destination of melancholia and its metaphysical point of depar-
ture. His narrative maneuver suggests that melancholia of antiquity needs to be
aufgehoben into mourning for it to become functional to the Baroque, and con-
sequently to modernity: melancholia of antiquity appears to be functional to the
Baroque, and to modernity, only as an object of subordination, while mourning
is always also a structure of its disciplining. It follows that melancholia demands

11
Ibid., 133; 154.
12 Ibid., 134-135; 155.
13 Ibid., 136; 157.

14 Ilit Ferber compares melancholia in the Ursprung to how Heidegger mobilizes mood for philosophy.

I. FERBER, Philosophy and Melancholy. Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language, Stan-
ford, 2013. It should be noted, however, that Heidegger privileges anxiety (in relation to fear), while
Benjamin privileges mourning and melancholia.
mourning as its signifying context only in modernity; it is only in modernity that

Tatjana JUKIĆ, Melancholia for Modernity

melancholia relates primarily to the dead and to death.
Benjamin imagines melancholia in antiquity as a thought which is invested
in expansion and contraction; it resembles microphysics. Melancholia designates
the capillary character of the relations which define humoral bodies, the bodies
in flows (the bodies implicated in that which Benjamin calls creaturely life), as
well as cosmic bodies, the planet Earth equally as the planet Saturn. Benjamin
describes this particular aspect of melancholia as concentration, and explains it as
a constellation which comprises thought, concentration, earth and gall. Interest-
ingly, he emphasizes that these elements should not be imagined as a chain, and
thereby implies that concentration, or diffusion for that matter, better capture the
character of the relationship between thought, earth and gall than, say, transfer or
transition.
Even so, Benjamin insists that melancholia in antiquity is dialectical in char-
acter. At one point he yokes it into a Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung): after he has
described melancholia around concentration, and consequently around diffusion,
he proceeds by isolating it in three distinct figures, which is how the flow is inter-
rupted and, with it, the idea of concentration and diffusion. The three figures are
the stone, the dog and the planet Saturn, which then serve him as footholds for a
Hegelian Aufhebung, from the stone, via the dog, into Saturn. (Tellingly, Benja-
min is affirmative about Hegel’s philosophical apparatus in the »Epistemo-Crit-
ical Prologue«, even though his appreciation of Hegel was decidedly critical.)15
By isolating melancholia in three distinct figures, Benjamin translates the 255
metonymic melancholia of antiquity into the regime of metaphor: so that the
stone, the dog and Saturn become the metaphors of melancholia, while melan-
cholia itself becomes metaphorical. His procedure reveals that metaphor is prem-
ised on a certain fundamental isolation or isolationism of thought processes, simi-
larly to the world of the Baroque. Furthermore, by having isolated melancholia in
the stone, the dog and the planet Saturn, Benjamin himself assumes the position
of Dürer’s angry contemplative angel, to whom melancholia is a toolbox whose
pieces are strewn about on the floor as the objects of contemplation. It thus turns
out that melancholia metaphorized equals melancholia objectified. This of course
relates to Benjamin’s appreciation of allegory, allegory being traditionally associat-

15
Howard Caygill points to Benjamin’s marked and explicit critique of Hegel, and argues that Ben-
jamin’s invocation of a dialectical cultural history is never simply a return to Hegel’s philosophy of
history. Instead, the relationship itself of philosophy and history is subjected to a reassessment, so
that philosophy no longer secures the rationale of history, but, confronted with history, suffers a dis-
ruption of its own rationale. H. CAYGILL, Walter Benjamin’s concept of cultural history, in: D. S.
FERRIS (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge, 2006., 73-96, here 73-74.
 ed with metaphor; it also suggests that the Hegelian Aufhebung may be premised
Melancholy Between Creativity and Depression

on metaphorization.
4
In antiquity, as noted, melancholia invoked the imaginary of metonymy
(in humoral pathology, for instance), similarly to the Epicurean ideation of at-
omism. To the Epicureans, the movement of atoms was decided always also in
metonymic terms (clinamen); Erich Auerbach draws attention to the fact that Lu-
cretius defined atom as a figure, so that figurae in Lucretius can also be translated
as »atoms.« Even though this particular understanding of figurality was never
dominant in philology, Auerbach argues that Lucretius’s remains one of the most
brilliant contributions to the study of figure.16 This is important, because both
metonymy and melancholia betray an affinity with the imaginary of physics, at
a remove from metaphor, whose structural affinity seems to be with metaphysics
and mathematism. The affinity of melancholia with the imaginary of physics per-
sists in the Renaissance too, in the studies of Marsilio Ficino for example, whose
explanation of melancholia dovetails with the the second law of thermodynamics.
To Ficino, the melancholy persons are overly susceptible to the cold and to heat:
being unable to govern the hot and the cold, they are governed by them. (The
second law of thermodynamics explains the inevitable loss of energy which is sus-
tained when heat is transferred from one body to another.)
Given a long history of explaining melancholia against a similar thermo-
dynamics, modernity could hardly afford to repress it altogether. Symptomatic
256 in this sense is how Michel Foucault describes the practices of representation in
the nineteenth century: because the nineteenth century was dominated by his-
toricism and obsessed with the dead, which ultimately threatened to freeze the
world, Foucault compares the nineteenth-century modernity to the second law
of thermodynamics.17 The cold traditionally attributed to melancholia designates
precisely one such chilling loss of heat in its transfer from one body to another;
this however why the act of transfer cannot be imagined as absolute or supreme.18

16 E. AUERBACH, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, Minneapolis, 1984., 17-18.
17
M. FOUCAULT, O drugim prostorima (Of Other Spaces), in: Glasje 6(1996.), 8-14, here 8.
18 See also T. JUKIĆ, Revolucija i melankolija. Granice pamćenja hrvatske književnosti (Revolution and

Melancholia. Limits of Literary Memory), Zagreb, 2011., 126. Benjamin cultivated a keen critical
interest in the nineteenth-century modernity, with Paris as its intellectual focus. What Foucault
says about the nineteenth century forges a link between Benjamin’s affinity for the Baroque and his
affinity for the nineteenth-century modernity, because the nineteenth-century obsession with the
dead, which threatens to freeze the world, seems to proceed, almost too logically, from the planetary
chill implicit to melancholia in the Baroque. It is certainly symptomatic that Foucault’s nineteenth
century and Benjamin’s Baroque share the obsession with the dead; Jacques Derrida, in Specters of
Marx, identifies a similar obsession in Marx’s philosophy. Derrida argues that Marx sidestepped the
 The cold persists in Benjamin’s description of melancholia like an unpro-

Tatjana JUKIĆ, Melancholia for Modernity

cessed residue. Benjamin keeps pointing to the cold aspect of melancholia, but
fails to explain it away as part of the allegorical (metaphoric) logic that melan-
cholia assumes in the Baroque, so that the cold keeps pressing on the world of
Benjamin’s Baroque without a functional link to semiosis. The melancholia of
the Reformation and of the Baroque is thus in a position to sacrifice its old met-
onymic take on the world, with the implication that sacrificing metonymy is a
precondition for the melancholia of antiquity to evolve into the Baroque mourn-
ing. The melancholy cold and the metonymicity of this cold are finally attached
to the objects in the modern world and to this world’s creaturely junk: the cold is
attached to the ruins, the waste, the debris.
5
It follows that the world of the Baroque is mobilized as significant and as
signifying only as an object of mourning, while creaturely life, kreatürliches Leben,
begins to demand death as a metaphysical position from which to derive sense and
meaning.19 This is how creaturely life itself becomes the object of mourning and
the object of spectacle. (So that mourning, as explained by Benjamin, explains
also how the reflection of the modern world relates to the spectacularity of the
modern world.)
An interesting configuration comes to light: while the modern world can-
not be processed except by mourning, melancholia in this world cannot be pro-
cessed except in the relation it traces to mourning and to death. It is for this reason
that the subject of mourning becomes fully functional only with the Reformation, 257
now as an exemplary modern subject. For the same reason, there are no functional
modern subjects of melancholia.
This implies that the point of departure of Benjamin’s history of melancho-
lia is not simply the Reformation, or the Baroque, but mourning. In other words,
mourning, rather than the Reformation or the Baroque, links the chronological
destination of Benjamin’s history of melancholia and its metaphysical point of
departure. This narrative maneuver is how melancholia of antiquity is ultimately
aufgehoben in order to become functional to modernity, suggesting that narra-
tion is instrumental to Aufhebung in Benjamin, and that history cannot escape the

nineteenth-century historicism in order to engage the obsession with the dead from within the secu-
larizing aspect of Abrahamic messianism. Similarly to Benjamin, Derrida describes this messianism as
»an obstinate interest in a materialism without substance« ( J. DERRIDA, Spectres de Marx, Paris,
1993., 266-7; Specters of Marx, New York, 1994., 212).
19 Alenka Zupančič assumes a similar argument for comedy, when she says that constituent to comedy is

the following proposition: not only are we not infinite, we are not even finite. A. ZUPANČIČ, Ubaci
uljeza. O komediji (The Odd One In: On Comedy), Zagreb, 2011., 78.
 constraints of Aufhebung as long as it remains implicated in narration. Interest-
Melancholy Between Creativity and Depression

ingly, this coincides with Benjamin’s later description of the storyteller as the one
who borrows his authority and his sanction from death.20 Like Benjamin’s story-
teller, Benjamin-the-storyteller, in his history of melancholia, borrows his author-
ity and his sanction from death–from the end–which he has reinvented into the
Ursprung of narration and interpretation. This also means that Benjamin’s narra-
tive theory proceeds from his early presentation of mourning and melancholia;
Benjamin’s Ursprung is also the Ursprung of Benjamin’s later narrative theory. To
be sure, Benjamin insists that the storyteller–the true, formulaic narrator of oral
traditions, not the narrator of novels–is extinct in modernity, just as modernity,
especially the nineteenth-century modernity, no longer knows death as a public,
everyday experience. Yet, if the storyteller borrows his authority and his sanction
from death, as Benjamin argues, this implies that narration signifies fully only in
modernity, when death itself is granted unlimited significance, precisely because
it is no longer an everyday experience. It therefore comes as no surprise that Ben-
jamin should attach death as a semiotic imperative to the modern narrator too; it
is a post-Baroque, metaphysical death now, not the metonymic, everyday death of
pre-modern melancholia and the pre-modern storyteller. Put differently, Benja-
min’s modern narrator seems to borrow himself from death – the modern narrator
seems reduced to one such loan.21
6
As noted, the shift from melancholia of the ancients to mourning in the
Reformation and the Baroque coincides in Benjamin with the shift from the
258
metonymic logic to the logic of metaphor. If metonymy corresponds to the im-
aginary of physics, most completely perhaps to the world as imagined by the sec-
ond law of thermodynamics, metaphor demands a cut or an interruption as a
metaphysical position from which it derives meaning, similarly to death in the
Reformation and the Baroque; it is a cut or an interruption comparable to the
loss of the world.
The metonymic profile of melancholia is translated by Benjamin into a pre-
mature metaphor as it were: metonymy keeps pressing on metaphor from within,
now as the interpretive debris inside the metaphor, a contemplative debris, never
20
My reference here is to Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows (1936). W. BENJA-
MIN, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften 1, Frankfurt am Main, 1977., 396.
21 The modern subject as the subject of mourning surfaces also in Benjamin’s testamentary Theses on the

Philosophy of History, in fragment IX, about the angel of history. W. BENJAMIN, Illuminationen,
255. Benjamin describes the angel of history as a winged figure caught in the storm mobilized by the
debris of the past; it is this storm that propels him into the future. Even though Benjamin borrows
this late angel from Paul Klee, the figure is reminiscent of the winged creature from the Ursprung,
taken from Dürer.
to be fully processed. What Benjamin calls allegory designates in fact this pecu-

Tatjana JUKIĆ, Melancholia for Modernity

liar state of metaphor and interpretation. To Benjamin, allegory does not seem to
denote simply the supremacy of metaphor, but also the unresolved relationship
of metaphor and metonymy, in a position where metonymy does to metaphor
what the world does to Dürer’s angry figure of contemplation. This is also how
Benjamin’s problem with Hegel figures out: the occasional Hegelian Aufhebung,
not unknown to Benjamin, like the one with the stone, the dog and Saturn, is
reinvented into a tension between two figural logics, of metaphor and metonymy,
where metaphor designates an incomplete dialectical processing of the metonym-
ic debris or excess.22
Benjamin relates the loss of the world in the Reformation, and the crea-
turely life of this world, to the Biblical figure of Adam.23 Yet, the Biblical figure
that appears to come closer to this position may be Abraham. While Adam loses
the world because he has committed a transgression, so that his loss is the loss
after the fact, Abraham’s loss in the story of Isaac’s sacrifice is the loss to begin
with, before the fact; it is a loss by which man’s relation to God is decided before
the fact is even possible. This is why Abraham’s loss is always already assumed. It
is a loss even when no losses are eventually sustained in a story or a history: even
though Abraham ended up not sacrificing his son Isaac, whom he loved more
than himself, he had actually sacrificed him as soon as he had pledged to do it
to God.24 This is how sacrifice precedes the covenant and is implicit to it, just as
Abrahamic mourning shows to be absolute mourning, mourning before the fact.
And that is why Abraham’s world, not the world of Adam, is always already the
world of loss, always already a heap of debris to which mourning is the condition 259
of understanding. It follows that Benjamin’s Ursprung may be an attempt to trans-
late melancholia of pagan antiquity into modernity from within the register of
Abrahamic sacrifice. Benjamin’s focus on the Reformation and on Protestantism
is functional to this translation insofar as it secures a relative secularization of the
Biblical register, for politics in modernity, with mourning as a lynchpin between
the Protestant logic and the logic of the Old Testament.25

22
Benjamin’s fascination with debris is reminiscent of the world of the plays of Samuel Beckett; Beck-
ett’s hero, says Zupančič, may not be immortal, but is indestructible (A. ZUPANČIČ, Ubaci uljeza,
78).
23 W. BENJAMIN, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 126.

24 This point is argued most forcefully by Jacques Derrida, in: The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret

(2008).
25 A similar point is argued by Carl Schmitt in Hamlet or Hecuba (Hamlet oder Hekuba, 1956.). Schmitt

acknowledges his intellectual debt to Benjamin and to the Trauerspiel, and emphasizes the seculari-
zing aspect of the Reformation as crucial for politics in modernity.
 7
Melancholy Between Creativity and Depression

While it is true that Benjamin in the Ursprung makes no remarkable dis-

tinction between mourning and melancholia, and tends to use them as synonyms,
a close reading has revealed that, in the Baroque, mourning becomes a term supe-
rior to melancholia. It is a tension which remains implicit to the Ursprung, and
keeps pressing on the very constitution of Benjamin’s argument. This is consistent
with Freud’s perspective on mourning and melancholia. In Freud’s »Trauer und
Melancholie« (1917) mourning and melancholia traverse many similar positions;
Ilit Ferber (2013) has dedicated an important part of her book on early Benja-
min to comparing mourning and melancholia in Benjamin and in Freud. I would
like to add that Freud and Benjamin intersect most productively where Benjamin
could be said to have amplified Freud’s argument by insisting on a structural, not
occasional, association of death and mourning in modernity, as the association
which concerns the formation of the modern subject. In turn, Freud’s distinction
between mourning and melancholia, anything but occluded or implicit, amplifies
Benjamin’s arrangement of the pair insofar as Freud insists on a structural, not
occasional, distinction between mourning and melancholia, and thereby exposes
the hidden logic of Benjamin’s argument. What I find even more interesting is the
proposition that Freud’s own argument about mourning and melancholia finds its
resolution in the position where death in psychoanalysis is taken one step further,
to mean and designate precisely that which death means and designates in Ben-
jamin’s Ursprung. This happens with Freud’s discovery, or invention, of the death
drive (Todestrieb), in 1920, so that Freud’s explication of the death drive resonates
260 in fact with the semiotic format that death defines for Benjamin in the Ursprung.
It so happens that, while Freud sheds light on how mourning and melancholia
are different, in Benjamin too, Benjamin indicates that Freud’s invention of the
death drive is predetermined by the semiotic operation that Freud has already per-
formed on mourning and melancholia. With Benjamin as an intermediary, one
could hypothesize that Freud’s work on mourning anticipates his discovery of the
death drive, just as melancholia is functional in this operation as that pathology
which needs to be cancelled if a functional subject of psychoanalysis is to be es-
tablished.26

26
It is symptomatic that Freud published his essay on mourning and melancholia in 1917, and his sem-
inal Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)–where he discovered the death drive–in
1920; this coincides with the timeframe of Benjamin’s Ursprung (1916-1925). It is equally sympto-
matic that, by inventing the death drive, Freud resolved the inconsistencies of psychoanalysis to which
he had openly admitted in »Trauer und Melancholie«, the implication being that Freud’s discussion
of mourning and melancholia had been a preparatory work for the invention of the death drive–that
his discussion of mourning had been the Ursprung of the death drive. Finally–and this is the propo-
sition that interests me the most perhaps, but the one that I open for discussion–the death drive may
be that juncture where the subject of psychoanalysis turns out to be an exemplary Abrahamic subject.
 8

Tatjana JUKIĆ, Melancholia for Modernity

While a comparative analysis of Benjamin and Freud seems a fitting con-
clusion to an essay on Benjamin’s grasp of mourning and melancholia, I propose
to conclude with a brief analysis of Benjamin’s Ursprung alongside the philolo-
gy of Erich Auerbach. Auerbach and Benjamin had similar intellectual forma-
tions; their biographies, each in its own way, testify to the transformation of
the world that had its Ursprung in the Weimar and Nazi Germanies. Auerbach
is best known for Mimesis, his study of the history and the logic of representing
reality in Western literature. This is important, because Benjamin too privileges
literature as the language from which to launch a study of the world as rep-
resentation.
Auerbach opens Mimesis with a chapter on the narrative styles of the Old
Testament and of epic poetry in Greek antiquity: he mobilizes the very pair whose
melancholies Benjamin attempts to yoke into a single intellectual figure. Auer-
bach observes that Greek epic poetry is constituted around parataxis, a narrative
style I propose to associate with metonymy, while the stories of the Old Testa-
ment are dominated by hypotaxis, a style comparable to metaphor. In Homer,
parataxis means that phenomena are »externalized« and »connected togeth-
er without lacunae in a perpetual foreground.« Hypotaxis, on the other hand,
means that »the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies
between is nonexistent,« so that »the whole, (…) directed toward a single goal
(and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with
background.’«27 While hypotaxis is determined by that which is causal or at least
temporal, says Auerbach later, in a chapter about Amianus Marcellinus, parataxis 261
is defined by its mobilization of »and«; in brief, parataxis is words and phrases
added on rather than subordinated to each other–subordination is the aspect of

Which, in the final analysis, could be taken to mean that the modern subject, in psychoanalysis and in
critical theory, is consistently Abrahamic. (While it is true that Benjamin makes no reference to Freud
in the Ursprung, he does invoke Freud in »Capitalism as Religion«, a fragment he wrote in 1921,
which resonates with the tenor of the Ursprung. This is how the two configurations of mourning
and melancholia come to constitute an assemblage, and invite to be analyzed together. It is already
in this instance that another insight may be anticipated: that the intellectual horizon of mourning
in Freud, not only in Benjamin, may be predetermined, or overdetermined, by religion, and that the
death-drive, insofar as it derives from Freud’s processing of mourning, may be implicated in the same
overdetermination. In other words, what Benjamin foregrounds in this fragment is not merely the
possibility of analyzing capitalism as religion, but also the possibility of analyzing the Freudian death-
drive along the same lines.)
27 E. AUERBACH, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Bern, 1959.,

16; Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton, 2003., 11-12.
 the hypotactic grammar.28 This is why »Homer can be analyzed,« says Auerbach,
Melancholy Between Creativity and Depression

»but he cannot be interpreted,« the interpretation being a fit for Biblical, hypo-
tactic narratives.29
Benjamin’s history of melancholia, styled around the Baroque mourning,
corresponds to the Biblical, hypotactic model; the melancholia of antiquity, how-
ever, keeps pressing on that model with its paratactic logic. (Indeed, melancholia
as it was explained in antiquity, by humoral pathology, may be the position where
the paratactic logic of the ancient world came most fully to the fore.) This is why
Benjamin’s decision to surrender the melancholia of antiquity to the Baroque
mourning, with mourning being granted the status of a narrative, historical and/
or hermeneutic imperative, is tantamount actually to the hypotactic subordina-
tion.
Auerbach notes that there is a political aspect to hypotactic subordination:
»The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter
us that they may please us and enchant us–they seek to subject us, and if we refuse
to be subjected we are rebels.«30 There is a similar imperative to Benjamin’s de-
scription of the Baroque mourning, when he insists on the tenacity of intention
in mourning. This tenacity is reminiscent of the obstinacy in Derrida’s description
of Abrahamic messianism, when Derrida describes this messianism as »an obsti-
nate interest in a materialism without substance.« Fritz Saxl, Erwin Panofsky and
Raymond Klibansky point to a similar juncture in their famous analysis of Dürer’s
Melencolia I, which was overwhelmingly important to Benjamin as a point of ref-
erence. They draw attention to the clenched fist of Dürer’s melancholy figure:
262 while the motif itself predates Dürer, this fist, now pressed against the head as the
seat of thought, merges with the pensive face into one single stretch of concentrat-
ed power, which is also where the strongest contrast of light and shade is obtained,
absorbing all physical and mental life of Dürer’s motionless figure.31 In The Theses
on the Philosophy of History, where Benjamin has replaced Dürer’s angel with the
angel from Klee, the tenacity and the subordination are not dropped, but merely
suffer a redistribution. The angel here wants to wake up the dead, but the whirl-
wind of the debris is stronger, and subjects the angel to its drive: the paratactic

28
See also E. SAID, Introduction, in: E. AUERBACH, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in West-
ern Literature, i-xxiv, here x.
29 E. AUERBACH, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 18; Mimesis.

The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 13.

30 Ibid., 19-20; 15.

31 R. KLIBANSKY, E. PANOFSKY, F. SAXL, Saturn i melankolija. Studije iz povijesti filozofije prirode,

religije i umjetnosti (Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and
Art), Zagreb, 2009., 269.
 structure, implicit to the image of the debris, is subordinated to the hypotactic

Tatjana JUKIĆ, Melancholia for Modernity

tenacity of the storm, which is carrying them all off and away.32
That Benjamin’s focus on mourning may indeed be consistently hypotactic
can be evinced from Auerbach’s decision to privilege Abraham’s as the specimen
story of the Old Testament. Auerbach’s focus on Abraham’s as the specimen story
of hypotaxis allows for mourning to be conceived into an absolute category, so
that every particular mourning is pre-subjected to the Abrahamic absolute and to
the hypotactic imperative. Put otherwise, Auerbach suggests that there may be a
structural complicity between hypotaxis and the Abrahamic logic, which is to say
a structural complicity between hypotaxis and absolute mourning.33
Benjamin’s modern subject overlaps significantly with Auerbach’s Abra-
ham: both are subjects of absolute mourning, to whom the world is accessible
only as the world always already lost. Yet, melancholia keeps pressing on Benja-
min’s Abrahamic logic as its unprocessed residue, just as Auerbach cannot– and
does not attempt to–process Odysseus’s scar into an Abrahamic sacrifice, in the
opening chapter of Mimesis. Melancholia and Odysseus’s scar keep pressing on
the subordinating, hypotactic drift of the Old Testament like an excessive scar
tissue: a paratactic, metonymic excess in the very position where the world comes
to mean and designate as the world always already lost. While Benjamin, in the
Ursprung, allows that this unprocessed excess may be significant, even as he denies
it full signification (in the instances, say, when he speaks of creaturely life), Auer-
bach points out that there is a semiosis to this material which is equal to hypotaxis.
This is why Auerbach is not a mere footnote to a discussion of Benjamin’s ideation
of modernity, but may turn out to be its point of departure.34 263

32 Adorno detects a similar procedure in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin. According to Adorno, Höl-
derlin’s references to Greek antiquity are paratactic. In order to mobilize Hölderlin’s as the poetic
language which corresponds to his work in philosophy, Heidegger needs to repress this parataxis,
the implication being that Heidegger’s philosophy is premised on the repression of parataxis. T. W.
ADORNO, Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt am Main, 1974.
33 When Comay observes that Benjamin’s reading of Hamlet is unbearably elliptical and hermetic, even

more so than the rest of the Ursprung, she seems to allude to the hypotactic core in Benjamin. R.
COMAY, Paradoxes of Lament: Benjamin and Hamlet, 267.
34 Research for this essay was supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation funding of the

project A Cultural History of Capitalism.

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