About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
Bezna #5 – Dead Thinking – Florin Flueras
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A minimum optimism can be maintained for a while, with great costs of energy, but slowly the effort needed to maintain the hope of life cannot be sustained anymore. The obsession with life is just a cramp, a short-time stiffness in front of the unknown, an insignificant small blockage on the path to annihilation. Whatever we are doing, death is inside every action, it is the reality and the final aim of everything. Everything is dead or on the path to death. From this point of view the obsession with life looks like a strange disease. We have to do amazing cognitive acrobatics to be able to maintain for a while our normal ‘irreality’, our petit healthy thinking. It is a great effort to keep holding it in this way, why not just let go? It seems that we are in a good time for a release, for a departure from the bright perspective of life. The protective skin of life is very thin nowadays. Because of the three main aspects of contemporary thinking – materialism, scientific rationalism, and the idea of progress – “there is a sense of the meaninglessness of a purely materialistic and mechanistic world and an accompanying awareness of the nihility that lies concealed just beneath the surface of the world.”
But the decisive factor that disturbs our healthy thinking is the event of extinction. Extinction functions as a new gravitational force which affects everything and bends thought differently. Everything that was normal and ordinary now becomes totally ridiculous. A lot of what was pathological becomes the new reasonable. In the movie Melancholia, Justine is the sister who allowed for the coming extinction to do its work on her thinking and feelings. From the perspective of healthy thinking she behaved madly, whilst she was the only one attuned to the reality of extinction. Shaviro (via Dominic Fox) calls this pathological move “militant dysphoria”, which is a ‘state of being that no longer sees the world as its own, or itself as part of the world. As Fox puts it, “the distinction between living and dead matter collapses. The world is dead, and life appears within it as an irrational persistence, an insupportable excrescence.”
If the shadows of Melancholia grow too big, a time comes when the optimistic alive thinking cannot hide anymore the fact that existence is sorrow, that ‘life is evil’. What in the eyes of a healthy thinking seems madness and depression is in fact just a dissipation of the veil of healthy thinking. There is a sorrow which is not related to particular aspects of ‘my life’ but a sorrow of existence itself, a sorrow that is constitutive of the workings and matter of the Universe. A sorrow that is the ground of being. “Everyone has something to sorrow over, but none more than he who knows and feels that he is. All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is.”
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