Notes on Love and Melancholy: From the Structure to the Resistance

Abstract

Michel Foucault, in the text “Un Plaisir si Simple”, shows us that the misery of the modern love is based on the psychoanalytic resignification of the Christian remorse. On the other hand, Judith Butler explains, when she problematizes the relation between the psychoanalysis and the heterosexual matrix, that love is melancholic and that the mechanism of the melancholy constitutes the gender identity. According to Butler, the melancholy seems to have two dispositions, one structured and another deviant. The structured melancholy ensures the “healing” of the sexual deviations by applying the phallic codes to the desire of the subject. Conversely, the deviant melancholy would be linked to the subversion of the heteronormativity. On this basis, we are interested in questioning in what extend the Foucauldian interpretation of the pleasure concerning to the love transgressions is articulated to the deviant disposition of the Butlerian melancholy; and, finally, we would like to indicate some links between the creative melancholy and the ancient ethics of the care of the self.