ABSTRACT
Scientific apocalypticism also differed from its religious Doppelganger in its preference for statistical extrapolations over symbolic signs of God's wrath. Insofar as apocalyptic thought remains caught in the cycle of depressive anxiety and manic release, it can thus justly be called the inability to mourn. Melancholy seems to follow the logic of what Sigmund Freud calls elsewhere disavowal or foreclosure, in which inassimilable material seems to be cast out of the psyche and reappears in the realm of a hallucinatory real. The most elaborate attempt to explain melancholy in terms of the inability to mourn the death of the mother has been made by Julia Kristeva in her recent meditation on depression entitled Black Sun. For Kristeva, the alternative to melancholy requires negotiating two stages in which a relation with an object is substituted for one with the ineffable Thing.
