Mnemosyne o la costruzione del senso n° 18 – 2025

Acedia, melancholy, spleen, depression, anxiety are all forms of a malaise that humanity has known since Antiquity. While its deleterious dimension is well known, melancholy also possesses a fertile power. Embraced by the individual, it can become a driving force for creation and knowledge. The winged figure, very thoughtful, in which Dürer represents himself in Melencolia I (1514), looks far away, not stopping its gaze at the disjecta membra, even as it questions the meaning of the scientific tools
scattered around it, in a premonitory Faustian consciousness. Lacan, perhaps drawing inspiration from the distinction made by Spinoza between affectus (a variation in the power to act, a driving force of the human being) and affectio (an effect), argues that anxiety can be seen as a psychological tension, as a lever. For Nietzsche, The Gay Science (from Provençal gai saber) is a blend of nostalgia, sadness, and a taste for a temporality aware of the relativity of life, as was the autobiographical poetry of the troubadours. Love and the distance from the desired object generate poetic joy, in stark contrast to the melancholic individual who, as theorized by Freud (1917), is unable to part with the lost object which he identifies with his "self". This eighteenth volume of Mnemosyne contains essays on poets, historians, playwrights, and painters who have consciously fed off melancholy.