Melancholia

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title = “Melancholia”
author = [“Jacob Little”]
date = 2021-12-24
draft = false
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> One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge. Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies—for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. Hamlet does not ask merely to whom the skull belonged (“Whose was it?” the question that Valéry quotes). He demands to know to whom the grave belongs (“Whose grave’s this, sir?”). Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where—and it is necessary (to know—to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more! (Derrida, Specters of Marx).

From our standpoint of the 21st century, the history of the Left seems to be a history of loss. Each subsequent failure of the left, from the failed revolutions in Eastern Europe to the triumph of liberalism in former communist countries, culminates in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The 20th century failure signifies a certain death of traditional marxist communism that we must wrestle with.

It’s interesting that Derrida chose to write his great political work, Specters of Marx, only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is concerned with ghosts in this work. Marx haunts us after his death, and we cannot seem to get rid of him despite the academy’s zealous attempts to do so. The problems of Capitalism are still apparent to us leftists, and as such we are still indebted to Marx.

Derrida’s work offers a starting point for discourse on how best to interact with Marx after his death, but like all critical theory, Derrida fails to offer a serious solution to the problems he raises, that of the specters of Marx, the points at which capitalism comes up short and Marx’s critique shines through.[^fn:1] His intervention into the world of politics demands us to think about such specters ourselves.i

Derrida relates the current academic relationship with the specters of Marx to Freud’s idea of mourning that he develops in Mourning and Melancholia. To Freud, mourning is the simple reaction to the death of a loved person. One may go through a period of depression, or lose interest in the outside world, but the psyche eventually comes to a position that it must abandon its investment in the lost object. But the radical idea in Freud’s paper lies in his discussion of melancholia. Melancholia is a relationship to loss very similar to that of mourning, but what is distinctinve about melancholia is its prolonged effects. The melancholic continues to mourn due to some fidelity towards the lost object. But to Freud, it is not all bad for the melancholic. Freud notes that the melancholic subject has “a keener eye for the truth”[^fn:2] than the subject in mourning.

Heartbreak seems to be the most common example of the radicality of melancholia. As Mari Ruti says, in a heartbreak — especially one that occurs abruptly — “we know the identity of the person we have lost, but not the details of the future we could have had with that person.” As a result, we stay invested in this lost object, “for the melancholic … even a sad recollection of the lost object is beter than the irrevocable loss that would ensure from replacing that recollection by … a new object of desire.”[^fn:3] Perhaps the death of Marx represents the great heartbreak for the left of the 20th century. The great implicit lesson of Derrida’s Specters of Marx is that the left must abandon its position of mourning towards Marx and instead embrace the radical ethics of melancholia. We must stay faithful to this “sad recollection” of Marx in order to imagine a new 21st century form of communism.

Thus the true problem for a new leftism is not, as Zizek says,[can one be a Hegelian today](https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/can-one-be-a-hegelian-today), but can one be a Marxist today? It is tempting to focus on where Marx comes up short. The Marxist conception of history remain’s caught in a confused notion of incremental progress, Marx has a very limited conception of the state, Marxist politics has an affinity with an eschatological conception of communism as an “end of history”, he is not without failures. Indeed, the position of the melancholic involves a sort of ambivalence towards the lost object. We love marx, but we also recognize his faults. In Freud’s dealings with melancholics, he noted that they are often very critical of themselves, but they don’t seem to show any sort of shame. In Freud’s view however, such criticisms instead apply towards the lost object, “the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego.”[^fn:4] In this way, the left’s criticism towards Marx ought to be self-criticism. We are no longer above Marx. His problems are our problems insofar as Marx is the foundation for any leftist thought, implicitly or explicitly.

As for the question of can one be a Marxist today, the psychoanalytic answer is that one can be a Marxist today with the notion of repetition compulsion: that repetitive drive we have to desire the things that hurt us. The emergence of the New requires the mechanics of repeating Marx, not the same Marx of the past, but a new Marx at a higher level. We here arrive at the idea of repetition that Deleuze comes to as the mechanism for which the New emerges from the Old coming back to haunt us. A truly authentic New is nothing more than a radical repetition of the old. The way we come to understand the New is such that “the minimal definition of the New is as an Old which gets stuck and thereby refuses to pass away.”[^fn:5] The new Marx must emerge out of the melancholic act of holding onto a stuck Marx. “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost” as Derrida remarks about Hamlet.

A truly 21st century Marx must not stand on his own, however. That old intellectual triad of Hegel, Marx, and Psychoanalysis is crucial still.[^fn:6] When we repeat Marx today, we must understand that he is “standing on the shoulders of giants.” No investigation into the logic of capital is complete without a rigorous reading of the Hegelian system implicit in Marx’s work.

Furthermore, a new Marx must extend outside of the world of theory. Marx’s insights extend into the world of practice. To repeat Marx is not to simply “learn from the failures of the 20th century and do better”, but to fail again. Marx himself grasped that great idiom that “to act is to err”. One must expect to fail because failure is exactly what creates the space for new possibilites. We are speaking here of the logic of Hegel’s notion of retroactivity from which an act creates its own ground. In history, the impossible is done all the time. It is just that the act retroactively creates the necessary notions of causality to make it seem possible the whole time. The great Marxist act is precisely this. To fail, and thereby create a new form of success. This is exactly the form that the October Revolution took. It was only through Lenin’s failure that his success was possible.

Repetition offers a way out for the melancholic, but one must nonetheless, as Lacan says, “traverse the fantasy” of melancholia to understand Marx in the 21st century. The crucial lesson of traversing the fantasy is precisely that there is nothing behind this phantasmal marx. There is no other option. In short, the logic of capital that Marx exposes is unmatched and fundamental. Our task is to hold on to Marx, and to repeat him as the New.

[^fn:1]: Derrida names a few in particular such as problems with immigration, nuclear proliferation, and trade wars.
[^fn:2]: Sigmund Freud, _Mourning and Melancholia_
[^fn:3]: Mari Ruti, _Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings_, p.g. 144-145.
[^fn:4]: Sigmund Freud, _Mourning and Melancholia_.
[^fn:5]: Slavoj Zizek, _Less Than Nothing_, p.g. 483.
[^fn:6]: The highly influential work of Slavoj Zizek and others is what I refer to here as perfectly weaving these three intellectual traditions together.