Melancholy and catastrophe in a baroque mourning drama

Abstract

The subject of the investigations contained in the article is the concept of melancholy by Walter Benjamin presented in his dissertation The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The reconstruction of the main theses of this concept will be made against the background of psychoanalysis. According to Benjamin, melancholy permeates the entire universe of the baroque drama, signaling the disintegration of the prevailing order. As a symptom of a deep doubt in the sense of the world, it can lead to a catastrophe but also open the space of truth and hope. This ambivalence, or rather the dialectics of the fall and the salvation, will be the main subject of the analysis in the article. In the first part, I will present in more detail Benjamin's approach to melancholy in the context of psychoanalysis (1); then, I will discuss the main forms of reaction to the melancholic experience of the loss paradigmatically shown in the forms of the tyrant (2), the martyr (3), and ghost-phantom (4).