Melancholy

Summary

Dominique Pagani distinguishes two senses of melancholy. In the clinical sense, it is a severe form of depression, close to psychosis, a "black mood" from which one does not emerge1. Speaking of Nerval, he links it to bereavements and takes up the pairing of mourning and melancholia, which Nerval senses and Freud establishes2. He sets against it the "voluptuousness of melancholy", which appears in Rousseau3: man lives on his sorrows and still loves himself in the feeling of his own ruin4. In his view, no era before the mal du siècle had explored this enjoyment of reaching the bad season. He also follows melancholy in music. In Mozart, he hears a new, non-morbid melancholy, the languor of children who have played too much, which announces the Romantic voluptuousness5. In Chopin, it expresses the disenchantment of an era, not the life of the individual6. Pastoral music, played by a shepherd far from everything, is in his view always melancholic.

1. 1#4.2 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Nov 2017 · 33:10
2. 2#4 Nomad and sedentary: the case of Nerval4 Oct 2021 · 1:02:35
3. 3#5 Harnessed to confinitude18 Apr 2020 · 9:38
4. 4Sickness, misfortune, evil20 Sept 2024 · 1:14:40
5. 5Polymorphously perverse Mozart1 Jun 2022 · 12:44
6. 6#8 Happiness and unhappiness in music11 Jan 2021 · 24:28

Summary produced automatically from 11 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.