Melancholy and the Eye of the World

Abstract

This essay investigates melancholy as a fundamental mode of relating to the world tied to the problem of meaning itself, moving beyond its understanding as a merely psychological condition or social symptom. Through readings of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Paolo Godani, melancholy emerges as an experience in which the symbolic coherence of the world collapses and objects lose their immediate intelligibility. Benjamin’s theory of allegory, Freud’s account of the melancholic identification with the lost object, and Lacan’s concept of the gaze all point toward a weakening of the distinction between subject and object. The essay concludes by examining this visual dimension of melancholy through a comparison between Tokyo Story and Andrei Rublev. While Ozu’s cinema reinscribes loss within a symbolic process of mourning, Tarkovsky’s wandering camera inhabits a zone of indeterminacy where subject and object, activity and passivity, viewer and world become increasingly inseparable like in the Lacanian concept of the gaze.