ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the essay “How Much Home does a man need?” (Améry, 1977 [1980], “How Much Home does a man need?” In At the Mind's Limits (trans: Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld). Indiana: Indiana University Press.), analéry’s essay through Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud, 1917), pointing at Améry’s relation to his lost homeland as illustrating Freud’s claim concerning the melancholic’s loss of ideal rather than real object. Améry’s melancholic position is further analyzed in terms of Kristeva’s concept of “pre-objectal depression” (Kristeva, 1987, Black sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans: Leon S. Roudiez. New-York: Columbia University Press.(. The last part of the chapter focuses on the tragic paradox in which both agreeing with and refusal of exile are revealed as types of collaboration with the erasure of the speaking and witnessing subject.
