Judith Butler writes page 23:
"Significantly, Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-beratement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. The foreclosure of certain forms of love suggests that the melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief...."
Doyle I was sensitized to depression and what it means by reading Kristeva's book, "Black Swan" the other day. That book seems to focus upon depression as a special Freudian element in power. I have a problem with the lack of detail to the term, melancholia, in Butler's book. It is an old fashioned word which refers to deep and probably chronic depression (though someone with an event triggered depression may experience very deep symptoms). In that way usually grief is understood as not depression, and not as melancholia. Freud I believe talks about uncompleted grief as some kind of reference to childhood experiences that provide a ground for neurosis. However, I myself, do not really take seriously Freud's analysis, because talking therapy has so little impact on real depression. And that is important in my estimation. There are reasons to eschew medical models, but I think Freud would no longer qualify as a medical model.
Doyle It is very confusing to read about serious depression in this way since Butler seems even less sensitive to the actual disability than was Kristeva.
What seems to hold Butler's attention is to use or reference a state of feelings as a means to talk about subjective states of mind. Additionally I have problems with using the word "subjective" in the sense that we can say the mind is apart from reality. But be that as it may, Butler is inclined to talk about states of feeling. This tends to be, despite using Freudian analysis of the mind, very vague. Really to clarify things just a bit the word melancholia means chronic depression. Melancholia has qualities quite different from reactive or episodic and temporary depression which most of us might encounter in life. Especially in the sense of degrees of heightened states of fear and anger. Characteristic of these chronic states are sleep disorders, and anxiety. They are states of feeling always present in every waking moment for someone who has melancholia.
Doyle Butler is then using these things not so much in a scientific sense, but as a metaphor for social relations. Really what is standing in here is how we "feel" about being in a class society. In this sense then Butler speculates that we absorb our oppression. I don't think that understanding states of feeling, and I mean by states; that feelings that motivate us are always there and not temporary heightened sensations, I don't think we can focus upon say one state of feelings like melancholia as being special to oppression. Although, I think Butler might think of depression as being a passive vessel of subjugation and perhaps a central state of feelings related to oppression.
Doyle In order to address how feelings might shape things from my point of view, I will contrast Butler's book, The Psychic Life of Power, as we go through the chapters, with a book that I find quite parallel, but more informative, and transparent, "What Emotions Really Are", by Paul E. Griffiths, University of Chicago Press, 1997. The point being to clarify to some degree what feelings and emotions are and to deepen this extensive discussion of consciousness that Butler demands. regards, Doyle Saylor