The Fixed Gaze of Melancholy

Abstract

The stanza allows a “conscious representation” of an enigma that consists in the fact that philosophy is not able to enjoy what it possesses, while poetry is not able to know what it enjoys. Hence the figure of the Angel’s perfumed corpse, a sense of enjoyment that can never be correlated with a sense of presence or possession. In other words there is a scission that keeps joy apart from knowing, but the bond between pleasure and scientia is available in the form of the stanza, which creates a new space of reality and human culture. Thus the problem is as much a topographic or cartographic one as it is anything else, in that the locus of cultural and intellectual activity conditions the results. Ultimately, as we will see, it has everything to do with the ‘black sun of melancholy, which emits paralyzing rays, as Julia Kristeva testifies: “Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?”¹ (And here we would have Georges Bataille respond that “The sun is black” and that, such a solar icon goes hand in hand with the image of “the beauty of an Angel at the bottom of the underground”([“L’Archeangélique” 1944]).