CHAPTER 1

Benjamin and Freud

At the Juncture of Melancholy

Given the manifold nature of its history, the concept of melancholyhas remained curiously stable despite the dynamic transformationof the meanings it has acquired. Yet in spite of its remarkable steadfastness,a distinct moment of rupture can nevertheless be identified duringthe closing days of the nineteenth century—a moment when the struggleto "present ... a limited number of words which always remain thesame" had ceased and melancholy was transfigured into melancholia. Thismoment was the emergence of psychoanalysis. My discussion begins,therefore, at this juncture, when Freud wrote his account of melancholia(1915), a moment almost concurrent with Benjamin's preliminary workon his habilitation, The Origin of the German Trauerspiel, the main text inwhich he examines the concept of melancholy.

At this crucial moment, the discourse on melancholy is relocatedwithin the psychoanalytic discourse of depression. As Jennifer Raddenshows, the end of the nineteenth century marks a borderline in our traditionalunderstanding of the concept; it is the point where "melancholy"parts from "melancholia" and its clinical categories of depression. Thepsychoanalytic turn shifts our focus from the apprehension of melancholyas a mood or normal inclination of the mind that only occasionally takeson morbid colorations to an entirely pathological understanding in whichmelancholia comes to describe an exclusively abnormal reaction to loss.More particularly, Freud considers melancholia a state that is accompaniedby self-loathing and self-reproach, and he thereby assigns it a particularlynegative character. The implications of this rupture in the term's genealogynot only bring about a radical change in its apprehension; they alsoobscure the vast expanse of connotations once attributed to the concept,rendering melancholy into something almost synonymous—at least intuitivelyto the contemporary mind—with Freudian pathology.

Moreover, Freud's account effaces the powerful dialectic formerlybelieved to be inherent to melancholy and indicative of the intricacy andconvolutedness of the term, which could contain both negative and positive,normal and pathological traits. In replacing this dialectical, one might say"flexible," nature of melancholy with a far narrower definition, Freud extendsthe rigid boundary he establishes between health and pathology. Both themotivating force and analytic strategy of Freud's psychoanalytic project canaccordingly be traced to his insistence on distinguishing the normal or healthyfrom within the adjacent state of pathology; in other words he is keen on usinghuman nature's pathologies to shed light on its normality.

Freud's commitment to the idea of a perimeter separating the healthyfrom the pathological makes it difficult for him to fit melancholy's diverseand at times conflicted history into the psychoanalytic scheme. The historyof melancholy is distinguished precisely by the fact of an inherentunwillingness of this phenomenon to surrender to any pregiven category(be it health or illness, the psychological or the somatic). Freud's transformationof melancholy into melancholia can be seen, from this perspective,as an attempt to "tame" or at least bend melancholy to make it comply tohis system's trajectories. Given the strength and rigor of Freud's psychoanalytictheory, it is clear why his confrontation with melancholy marksan essential change and a deep rupture in the signification of the term.

The relationship between Benjamin and Freud has been extensivelyexplored in recent years. It has been described in terms of a "constellation,"a "long-distance love affair," a mutual dependence, and a relation of"intertextuality"; all interpretations have stressed the indirect character oftheir correspondence while nonetheless demanding a careful reconstructionof its genealogy. Nägele argues that any serious reader of Benjaminshould question the latter's relationship to Freud, while maintaining thatBenjamin's resistance to Freud actually discloses a close affinity betweenthem. He proposes that resistance is at work in this relationship, a resistancepointing precisely to where Benjamin's own thinking becomes rigorous. LeyRoff, who reads this relationship as one of "intertextuality," claims that it ispossible to examine significant areas of contact between Benjamin and Freudunder this rubric despite the apparent lack of direct mutual influence. Applicationof such an approach may indicate that the structure of Benjamin'sattitude to psychoanalysis is that of deferral, that Benjamin read psychoanalytictexts long before he actually responded to them. Rickels maintainsthat the question of influence cannot be measured, at least in this case, bycriteria of sameness. He claims that "only what has been mutated, digestedin part—part object, part objection—resisted, disavowed, and displaced cancount as influence on the sliding scale from transference to telepathy." Theseincisive accounts all posit, in one way or another, that direct influence shouldnot be considered the precondition for examining the relationship betweenBenjamin and Freud, a claim that I substantiate here.

In Constructions in Analysis Freud describes his work as that of liberatinga fragment of historical truth from its distorted form of appearance inthe present and leading it back "to the point in the past to which it belongs"(SE, 23:268). The task of psychoanalytic investigation is, therefore, to revealthe intimate connection between the material of present disavowal and itsoriginal repression. The effectiveness of the psychoanalytic method, as Freuddescribes it here, lies in its recovery of fragments of lost experience; the cruxof the pathology of delusion is, then, its "convincing power to the element ofhistorical truth, which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality" (ibid.).

Essential here is the lingo of liberation and freedom used to describethe attachment of the past to the present, as is Freud's insinuation that thepresent should be relieved of the past's sovereignty. The reason is that anyrelationship of this sort inherently entails the risk of what Freud would identifyas a pathological inhibition. This structure implies that...