Melancholy presents the subject with an account for its subjectivity. The subject has to pay for what cannot be paid for. What cannot be paid for is the name for the subject’s initial encounter with loss. For there is something resembling a subject only as the subject of an original dispossessedness. The subject’s self-contact becomes the experience of a primordial expropriation of the self. The subject reveals itself as the subject without subjectivity. It is, to paraphrase Georg Lukács, the subject of an ontological or transcendental homelessness.
The subject of melancholy is the subject of the setting sun, the subject of a persistent darkening. It affirms this darkening as its ‘essence’. It identifies itself with the occidental theft of light.
Melancholy is refused reconciliation, insistence on the unredeemedness of a subject lacking any determination of its essence. The melancholy subject is displaced from itself and at an angle, interrupted or torn by an original loss. The melancholy subject is distinguished from the mourning subject by the fact that it insists on the singularity, the uniqueness and irretrievability of what has been lost. It identifies itself with this irretrievability by refusing to inscribe the singular loss into the general structure of lack (which would involve the subject as such), thus neutralizing it in concreto. Instead of universalizing the singularity of its loss by reducing it to an ontological lack, thus defusing it, it is the singularization and thus aggravation of the universal lack which constitutes the melancholy subject’s precarious self-consciousness. The subject of loss must not be confirmed as an instance of an objective rule. It itself becomes the starting-point for a new law-like regularity and attains the structural value of the repeatable, of the singular universality which is the repeatability of what cannot be repeated.
Philosophical experience is never completely free of melancholy in this sense. It destroys what it pretends to preserve in order to preserve it. It is true to itself in radical disloyalty. It betrays itself in order to continue the line of its desire. It realizes its own desire precisely at the moment it comes to grief on it. It pays more than it can pay. Its “calculation pays off only in failure” (J. Derrida).