Melancholy and the Otherness of God: A Study in the Genealogy, Hermeneutics, and Therapeutics of Depression
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0739182072
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An impressive study that prompts the reader toward philosophical reflection on the hermeneutics of melancholy in its relation to maturing theological understanding and cultivation of a profound self-consciousness. Melancholy has been interpreted as a deadly sin or demonic temptation to non-being, yet its history of interpretation reveals a progressive coming to terms with the dark mood that ultimately unveils it as the self's own ground and a trace of the abysmal nature of God. The book advances two provocative claims: that far from being a contingent condition, melancholy has been progressively acknowledged as constitutive of subjectivity as such, a trace of divine otherness and pathos, and that the effort to transcend melancholy-like Perseus vanquishing Medusa-is a necessary labor of maturing self-consciousness. Reductive attempts to eliminate it, besides being dangerously utopian, risk overcoming the labor of the soul that makes us human. This study sets forth a rigorous scholarly argument that spans several disciplines, including philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary studies.
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
The Death of God and the Meaning of Life
Cuts and Clouds: Vaguenesss, its Nature and its Logic
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“mean” made it possible to conceive an effective equilibrium between the poles of this antithesis, a “eucrasia within an anomaly” which justified the apparently paradoxical statement that only the abnormal was great. The miracle of the man of genius remained; but it was conceived no longer as an irruption of mythical forces into reality but as nature surpassing herself by following her own immanent laws, making man, though necessarily very seldom, a superman.28 By this gesture, melancholy
represented as well as for having manifested enthusiam for my work on melancholy and suggested publication. I acknowledge my gratitude to Monique Pommier, whose depth of insight, grace of spirit, intellectual sophistication, and always unexpected vision have steadied my steps, straightened my path through uncertain terrain, and sustained my courage in the process; and Calin Vartosu, my fellow traveler in the quest for ultimate answers, whose ludic nature and mercurial spirit can instantly
transformation of pure reflection into an equivalent of the pathétique of misery cannot but remain an ever retreating horizon to be approached via a hermeneutics of the fundamental symbols of fallibility (6); ultimately, the truth of human disproportion is confirmed by the impossibility of a perfect coincidence between pure reflection and pathetic precomprehension. Once the two hypotheses have been proven correct, Ricoeur engages in the work of revising the history of thinking in light of this
being “La pauvreté du dernier dieu de Heidegger,” in Post-Theism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition, ed. H. Krop, A. Molenddijk, and H. de Vries (Leuven: Peeters, 2000). 16. Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 218–19, citing Heidegger, Besinnung, Gesamtausgabe 66 (n. 23 above), 239. 17. Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic writings, ed. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 111, cited in Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 221. 18. Richard Kearney, The God
