Melancholy, or the Metaphysics of Fictional Sadness

Abstract

In relation to Badiou’s “metaphysics of real happiness”, the essay explores psychoanalytical (Freud) and philosophical (Benjamin) accounts of melancholy with a view to developing a complementary metaphysics of sadness. It argues that melancholy is not restricted to the suffering of an individual confined to his or her finitude, but is itself, like Badiou’s real happiness, related to infinity, subjectivity, and truth. The essay shows this by demonstrating how the principle characteristic of the melancholic object is not its status as being lost, but rather its indeterminacy and its monadic structure. Melancholy generates such objects, which seem, on the one hand, alien to reality, and yet, on the other, which enable the subjective and fictitious development of other possible worlds.