Urbe melancólica: espectros de Eros na metrópole

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze some aspects of the term "melancholy" in contemporary times. This word that has a historical tradition from Greece in the field of medicine and philosophy survived for centuries as the main diagnosis of mental disorder, when in the twentieth century, with the rise of psychiatry, came to designate certain more specific symptoms. In philosophy she was partially supplanted by the notion of "anguish." We believe, however, that these specifications and substitutions represent a loss of the dimension that the term contained historically. And that pointed in the direction of what fails at the time of representation. It seems that where the term "melancholy" best survives nowadays as reflective practice seems to be in the inflection of art history towards the kind of nameless science thought by Aby Warburg. This means that thinking melancholy is a thinking about images. Its effect is to make ghosts talk in a time of absolute phantasmagoria, in which, faced with the numerous fractures of what is presented as reality, the risk of widespread collapse of structures presents itself as a real threat.