To Write the Body: Lost Time and the Work of Melancholy
| dc.contributor.advisor | Vallega, Alejandro | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hayes, Shannon | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-09-18T19:25:23Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-09-18T19:25:23Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2019-09-18 | |
| dc.description.abstract | In this dissertation I develop a philosophical account of melancholy as a productive, creative, and politically significant affect. Despite the longstanding association of melancholy with the creativity and productivity of poets, artists, and philosophers, melancholy is judged to be a nonpolitical mood associated with stagnancy, paralysis, and a willful alienation. If Marxist critical theory still holds true today and it remains the case we are already dismembered and distanced in our worldly relations, then melancholy is a mood that unmasks our present situation. In the fatigue and weariness of the melancholic body, there is an insight into the decay and fragmentation that characterizes social existence. Melancholy, I claim, does not produce alienation, it reveals it and exacerbates it in its unveiling. Throughout this dissertation, I draw from the works of 20th century intellectuals (Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida) in pursuit of their melancholy. I illuminate how these intellectuals put their melancholic insights to work in their texts with the intention of constructing an optics of melancholy as a critical-destructive orientation towards the progressive time of European modernity. By following the tortuous paths these thinkers take as they put their melancholy to work, I draw the figure of the body-writing in the time of melancholy, which is the time of delay and deferral. That the body-writing is an active, productive subject is not despite but because of the slow slack time of melancholy. This labor is not productive in Marx’s sense of the term, as labor that creates new value (capital) through its mechanical reproductions, but in the way melancholy work disrupts the productivity of capital and makes possible an encounter with the time that has been lost. To put melancholy to work, I claim, is to make this insight into loss perceptible, legible, to share it with others. Melancholy works to make the present account for what has been lost and, in the process, works to complete the uncompleted past. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24905 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Marcel Proust | en_US |
| dc.subject | Melancholy | en_US |
| dc.subject | Phenomenology | en_US |
| dc.subject | Poetry | en_US |
| dc.subject | Roland Barthes | en_US |
| dc.subject | Walter Benjamin | en_US |
| dc.title | To Write the Body: Lost Time and the Work of Melancholy | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Philosophy | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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