Original scientific paper

Letter from an Unknown Woman and the Melancholia of Philosophy: Cavell, Austin, Derrida

Tatjana Jukić ; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

My text analyzes the agency of melancholia and melodrama in the philosophy of
Stanley Cavell, where they labor as a sinthome of what in philosophy is memory. This
analysis hinges on a close reading of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman
as a point of access to articulating these concerns, as Cavell’s own writing on the
subject (in Contesting Tears) hinges on a close reading of Max Ophüls’s film based on
Zweig’s novella, but only after Cavell has explicitly excluded Zweig from his argument.
Moving from this exclusion to Cavell’s philosophizing of birthplace via Austin
and Derrida (in Philosophical Passages), I propose a deconstruction of that position in
inheriting and remembering philosophy today, even where it invokes the problem
of technics, which still depends on an identitarian politics.

Keywords

melancholia; melodrama; voice; promise; film; philosophy; psychoanalysis

Hrčak ID:

61576

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/61576

Publication date:

15.4.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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