PHYSIOLOGY OF MELANCHOLIA AND THE BIRTH OF THE BLACK SUN
PHYSIOLOGY OF MELANCHOLIA AND THE BIRTH OF THE BLACK SUN

Summary/Abstract: The "black sun" of Julia Kristeva inaugurates a new paradigm in understanding "melancholia" as mourning, and the incapacity to process the loss. Related by Aristotle to paralysis, depression and phobia, but also to madness and epilepsy - melancholy was always connected with the "black bile" and Saturn. For Gérard de Nerval's poem "El Deschidado", as well as for Mihai Eminescu's "Ode (in antique metre)" melancholy and depression are rewriting a subjective eschatology, where identity turns into its own negation. Like Saturn devouring its sons, the "black sun of melancholy" abolishes the present and the future, convicting the Being to its own past.

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