Authors: George Edmondson & Klaus Mladek

Melancholia is wrongly condemned as a condition of withdrawal and despair that alienates its sufferer from community.

Countering that misconception, “A Politics of Melancholia” reclaims an understanding of melancholia not as an affliction in need of a remedy but as an affirmative stance toward decay and ruination in political life, and restores the melancholic figure—by turns inventive and destructive, outraged and inspired—to their rightful place as the poet of political thought.