Sensibilidade melancólica, uma epistemologia de afronta

Abstract

From Byung-Chul Han (1959-) to Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), passing through Slavoj Žižek (1949-) and Laura U. Marks (1963-), it is possible to find approaches to wistfulness that are different from a pathological perspective. These are perspectives that think of it as sensibility, an awakening to the other, taking a new path: now, an affect of the order of mobilized thought (which drives us to action), starting from a first degree of oppression and moving towards a gesture of resistance. Despite this, in these theoretical currents, the “myself” – the researcher – does not appear on the scene as someone awakened to the other. This thesis, however, is based on this exercise: as a subject-researcher, I start to analyze certain follies of my wistfulness, the visual records I have in family photographic albums, to also think about it through sensibility, proposing its conceptualization via such images and personal reports based on them, both empirical records of this work. This is because when I faced with the deaths of my maternal grandmother and my father, which occurred during the course of my PhD, I rescued our photo albums to deal with the loss and the passage of time, which had been crossing me wistfully for a long time. The photos heightened the sadness and threw me into the inexorability of the arrangement and occurrence of things in the world – everything will pass and get lost. However, they also said that suffering would not interrupt something or even made it go back, but rather that the ways of acting in the face of it would produce new meanings, taking the initial events in a different way. Soon, wistfulness changed its face: it was not just sadness for passages and losses, but another awakening to the world. In this research, this works as an epistemology of affront: bypassing more stagnant theories by raising wistfulness to the idea of the communicational process of the sensible (a wistful sensibility), breaking with a classical science that orders the researcher to separate himself from what he investigates and also tells him to remaining neutral – illusion or fetish of positivist science. With this, we can see that sensibility reveals ways of not concealing the other from memory, what Walter Benjamin describes when he thinks of the melancholic as someone who has some difficulty to forget. And it points to different attempts to recover the other, of dedication or devotion to them – the way in which wistfulness is defended by philosopher Laura U. Marks. As much as wistfulness is a catastrophe, it is because of this apocalyptic phenomenon that the future is fabled, assure Byung-Chul Han and Slavoj Žižek.