ABSTRACT
This final chapter discusses innovative uses of the language of melancholy in the 21st century. Melancholy’s demise since the 19th century, which removed it from its self-evident central place in the cultural imagination, fortunately was not complete: philosophers, psychiatrists and artists continue to engage with the melancholy tradition, finding new ways to tap into its rich potential. This chapter considers some of the most intriguing engagements with melancholy in the past decades, to give an impression of the meanings and functions melancholy can have for us today and to invite reflection on what the future of melancholy may hold. It discusses calls to reinstate melancholia as a diagnostic entity by contemporary psychiatrists, constructs concepts of melancholic subjectivity and melancholic historicity inspired by the work of Judith Butler and Walter Benjamin, and analyses the melancholic art of Anselm Kiefer and Lars von Trier. The aim of this chapter is to show that melancholy is not a mere historical artefact: the power of its language and its potential to help us in our self-understanding is still available to us and can be moulded into ever new forms.
