Melancholy and society

WOLF LEPENIES, Melancholy and society, transl. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. xviii, 253, £31.95 (0-674-56468-5). Melancholy has always been a catchall phrase as universal as the human condition: widespread, if disparate, in every epoch; an affliction of the young and old that has been virtually incapable of adequate definition; levelling almost everyone at one time or another to apathy, sorrow, dejection, inaction, even utter boredom and uselessness-a pervasive syndrome that continues to be encoded, even in our time, in abstract art forms of music and painting, as well as versified by poets and rationalized by philosophers. The depressive incapable of action is not so distant from the suicide in the melancholic worldview. Indeed, melancholy remains so proximate to the incarnate human tragedy that moralists have never known how to distinguish its borders from their profoundest tragic vision: a reason, Shakespeare quipped in King Lear, we come into this world crying, as if we already knew what lay in store for us. The natural history of melancholy has been narrated many times, each era, each generation it seems, redefining for itself the essential features of its diverse forms, especially religious, medical, and psychological versions. The Greeks inscribed melancholy (black bile) in a number of texts, though most do not survive, and Robert Burton, the polymathic Elizabethan scholar, embroidered its natural history into an anatomy of the cosmos ("What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognosticks & severall cures of it") articulated at the length of many hundreds of thousands of words. Since the 1600s, "naturalists" have been inscribing their own tomes about melancholy, in every language, discursive mode and key, recently in such diverse scientific books (to mention just a few) as Ludwig Binswanger, Melancholie und Manie (1960); Jean Starobinski, Histoire du traitement de la melancolie des origines a 1900 (1960); Hubert Tellenbach, Melancholie: Zur Problemgeschichte-Typologie-Paithogenese und Klinik (1961); R. Klibansky, Saturn and melancholy (1964); B. G. Lyons, Voices ofmelancholy: studies ofliterary treatments ofmelancholy in Renaissance England (1971); Richard Kuhn, The demon of noontide: ennui in western literature (1976); Henning Mehnert, Melancholie und Inspiration (1978); Julia Kristeva, Black sun: depression and melancholia (1989), as well as Freud's by now classic essay 'Mourning and Melancholia' ('Trauer und Melancholie'), where Freud articulated a theory of psychic regression for both these conditions through the trope of "the loss of the world". Wolf Lepenies is a distinguished and prolific German sociologist who departs from this tradition of "natural history" through exploration of the melancholy of social classes. His "melancholic science" is a philosophical construct grounded in the recent (i.e., the last hundred years) discourses of theoretical sociology. That is, if doctors are concerned with the angst and ennui of their patients, and writers with their imaginary Hamlets and Ophelias, Lepenies wants to explore how melancholy manifests itself in social classes throughout history (i.e., utopian societies of the Renaissance, French aristocracies of the seventeenth century, the middle classes of eighteenth-century Germany, and so forth). While Lepenies knows the natural history of melancholy, he grasps that its sociology-its relation to specific social milieux-has been less well understood. Lepenies grants melancholy's anatomical, physiological, psychological, psychiatric, even geochemical existence, but also believes (and he is probably right) that each generation shapes its own melancholy, its own versions of pessimism. This bending or shaping of the modern human condition is an essential feature of melancholy from which no one entirely escapes, one's own genetic predisposition notwithstanding. The approach does not amount to denial of the anatomical reality or psychiatric essence of melancholy down through the ages: Lepenies' treatment of melancholy is rather more complex than the analyses found in modern medical models because of the way it relates the shapes of melancholy's transformations. In the end this is a book about "bourgeois boredom" (a phrase apparently inspired by Saint-Simon) in modern philosophical thought from approximately 1600 to the present, rather than a treatment of its concrete historical manifestations. The product is systematic speculation about melancholy rather than historical appearances, and it is the labryinth of theoretical speculation that fascinates Lepenies.