MELANCHOLY AS A POTENTIAL FOR POLITICAL IMAGINATION
MELANCHOLY AS A POTENTIAL FOR POLITICAL IMAGINATION

Summary/Abstract: The text will investigate the melancholia starting from the psychoanalytical discourses and their fundamental texts: Freud’s Melancholia and Mourning, Melanie Klein’s reconsideration of the psychogenesis of manic-depressive positions and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, to its potentials for political imagination and transformation. For the basis of rethinking melancholia into the political context I use the critical writings by Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotions and the manner in which they reflect the power relations and the potentials for political transformation. Furthermore, the book The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Race and American Culture) by Anne Cheng starts from the Freudian analysis of mourning and traces the dynamics of rejection and internalization which can help in explaining the American racist culture. The idea is to investigate if the model of melancholia can help understand the mourning and loss not as symptoms but as dynamic processes with forceful, but also with transformative potentials for political imagination. By investigating the melancholia of the marginalized the idea is to explore the possibility to transform the mourning into a stance against the wound. The text will look into the dynamics of the student movement in Macedonia from 2014/15 as an example of creative transformation of the marginalized position into the new political discourse that initiates the democratic processes in the society.

• Details
• Contents