MODERNISTICKÁ MELANCHÓLIA

The first chapter of the paper provides a selective overview of the modern concepts of melancholy (e.g. S. Freud, J. Kristeva, S. Žižek, L. Földényi) as well as some of its literary forms (e.g. Chateaubriand, Amiel, Baudelaire etc.). The concepts contain a certain invariant of an existential melancholy mood, which is the state of a subject being attached (often unconsciously) to a certain historical idea of death seen as the ultimate end of an individual, nothingness. This attachment leads to the loss of meaning. For a melancholic person, the „benefit“ from a finite ephemeral life as, for example, once formulated by V. Jankelevitch, is just unacceptable. On the contrary, the ultimate end deletes the lived life in reverse order: if an individual autobiographic memory of this life ceases to exist, this life is deleted as if it had never existed – and the end deletes it as a life being lived rather than one already been lived, past, finalized. Therefore life cannot be lived at present any more. And because life has an inevitably ultimate end, it becomes unbearable, always already lost for a melancholic person. The next two chapters analyse the modalities of Modernist melancholy in two pieces of writing by Slovak Modernist authors.