boethius with freud

For Freud the difficulty of melancholia lies in the way loss appears to be something of an enigma. Karl Abraham had ventured in 1911 to explain “neurotic depression” in terms of a subject’s resignation of gratification: “A neurotic will be attacked with anxiety when his instinct strives for a gratification which repression prevents him from attaining; depression sets in when he has to give up his sexual aim without having attained gratification.”¹ By the time Freud turns to the subject in “Mourning and Melancholia,” though, he’s noticed a difference between those subjects whose symptoms could be attributed to a loss that was conscious – the grief over losing a loved one, or even for a time in which things were different – and those for whom it could not. Even in those cases where a conscious cause for grieving could be found, the significance of what had been lost wasn’t self-evident: “He knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”² The distinction ultimately hinges on identification: “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself,” as the thing which has been lost – and around which strong feelings of both love and hatred have gathered – is unconsciously identified with.³

If this all sounds rather abstract it’s because melancholia doesn’t have one form or cause: the problem Freud begins from is the question of why there are those who demonstrate many of the same symptoms of someone who has experienced some great tragedy or loss but doesn’t themself know what the cause of those feelings may be. Depression may begin from grieving but it isn’t identical with it. It helps to describe when the perfectly “normal” response to some sort of loss becomes “pathological,” that is, when it persists beyond the reckoning with loss itself (“real” or otherwise) and may even become deadly. The melancholic ego is an open wound and a libidinal vacuum: it confronts us with the possibility that loss may not be all there is to loss. When my affective investment in my object – necessarily ambivalent – has nowhere to go upon losing (or losing interest in) that object, I turn that investment inwards. The question of loss now opens out onto questions of identification and the object itself: if there is a sense in which I “identify” with that object – that is, incorporate the elements of that object that elicited such strong feelings into my own ego – we may well wonder if that “object” is identical with the one that may have been lost or let go of in the first place.

It’s because melancholia brushes up so closely to questions of desire, identification, and even pleasure that subjects (and narratives) often go to very great lengths to avoid it. What Freud called melancholia’s ambivalence – the way the melancholic internalizes their repressed scorn for the loved object – offers, I think, an illustrative case of what Lacan would later refer to as jouissance. In melancholia enjoyment appears not only as the “beyond” of pleasure – that is, the point at which physical stimulation risks tipping over from pleasure into displeasure (as in an orgasm) – but also reveals itself in the melancholic’s ambivalent attachment to their own symptoms and to the less dramatic ways a subject might take pleasure in their own displeasure. In both Abraham and Freud’s early observations about melancholia we find the observation that the patients derive a kind of perverse enjoyment of their own suffering.⁴ I become habituated to my own despair; I attach myself to it. It’s the sense of what Lauren Berlant would perhaps refer to as stuckness that’s of interest here: the problem of melancholia comes into view alongside the observation that I may become attached to my own suffering in such a way that it begins to feel like home, so that to abandon it becomes unthinkable because it is, in a sense, unbearable.⁵ Perhaps this is why melancholia is, in the middle ages, so strongly associated with acedia, with sloth generally being understood as not so much a sin against “work ethic” as of a certain perversion of desire, as a mismanagement of jouissance.

In the medieval moral imaginary, concerns over money, anality, and sloth are ultimately economic: what’s at stake for so many texts that concern themselves with the ethics of these subjects is the question of how one ought to manage one’s own enjoyment, and the ways in which falling into and out of sin is less a question of epigenetic causality or a subject’s failure to conform with a specific model or type than it is a kind of libidinal balancing act. What these particular anxieties ask again and again is whether one’s enjoyment of an object that one doesn’t sacrifice and dis-identify with is really enjoyment at all. It’s the prickliness of this question that “Nature” is so often mobilized to smooth over, to provide an anchor point by which a subject might find its balance. In order to parse the antimony between “Nature” and “Nurture” (or habitus) in this imaginary, then, I think it’s important to account for how Nature is already a kind of supplement to the deeper state of ambivalence and uncertainty that marks the depressive position.

While by the later middle ages sloth’s “innocent mixture of unwillingness and laziness” that we may at times be wont to understand as “a sin against the capitalist work ethic” is certainly something that we might trace coming into view in such expressions as the fourteenth century English preoccupation with waste, Giorgio Agamben reminds us that for the church fathers it named something far graver.⁶ If the affliction manifests itself as a “withdrawal from the divine good,” it is because this “recessus of the slothful does not betray an eclipse of desire but, rather, the becoming unobtainable of its object: it is the perversion of a will that wants its object, but not the way that leads to it, and which simultaneously desires and bars the path to his or her own desire.”⁷ When, for instance, Augustine recalls the ways in which his youthful love of the theatre was connected to a love of suffering – “I was allured all the more by the actor’s interpretation when it moved me to tears”⁸ – part of what’s sinful about this form of jouissance lies in its banality. Augustine’s appetite for suffering wasn’t for one that would “penetrate [him] deeply” but for a kind of suffering which would ultimately amount to an accretion of sickly little pleasures, “a seething, swelling putrefaction and revolting pus” of sinfulness.⁹ What begins to come into view in such an account is the precariousness of the relation between enjoyment and desire: I take pleasure in suffering not because it’s suffering itself that I desire but because what that suffering occasions is my continued desiring. It’s here where sin enters the picture: ultimately, my desire is not, or not only, my own, and if that is the case than neither is the satisfaction which I withhold in my effort to continue desiring without end.

The state Lady Philosophy finds Boethius in when she casts out the poetic muses in the beginning of the Consolation of Philosophy is not so dissimilar. These “chorus girls” (scenicas meretriculas), as they are described, substitute reason for the “useless thorns of passion” (infructuosis affectuum spinis), habituating the mind to illness rather than liberating it (mentes assuefaciunt morbo, non liberunt).¹⁰ The narrator’s ailment is all the more grave for how comfortable he has become in occupying it. Melancholia is a habitus that extends beyond whatever may occasion it, a practice of suffering for its own sake, of digging one’s own heels into your grief. As the Consolation continually insists, however, such a state carries with it a “responsibility,” as Vance Smith puts it, for there “to be something that resolve[s] or transcend[s] it – that would terminate it.”¹¹ Answering such a demand is anything but straightforward. The cure for melancholia isn’t to be found in the mere rejection of suffering in order to aspire towards happiness and “good” pleasures. In fact, happiness – that is, fortuitous happiness, the kind that one generally pursues – can be in its own way cruel and capricious:

[A]sk of a man who has been having a run of good luck whether he knows or doesn’t know that it can be taken away. If he doesn’t know, then he can’t be happy but only ignorant; and if he does know, then he can’t be happy because he is worried about losing everything at any moment, and this continual fear will keep him from being happy. Or there is a third possibility, which is that he thinks it won’t matter when he loses it all. But in that case, he doesn’t value it very much and doesn’t care about what he can so calmly imagine losing.¹²

The problem with pursuing happiness in good fortune is that this sort of contingent, temporary satisfaction will always be predicated on a kind of cruel optimism insofar as it is predicated on whether or not one possesses it, and possession is always accompanied by the possibility for dispossession. A privileged case for this is money. “Are riches ever really yours?” Lady Philosophy asks, observing that “money is precious not when you have it but when it passes on from you to somebody else, in which case you don’t have it anymore.”¹³ The paradox of wealth is that we only aim to accumulate it in order to spend it, we can only enjoy it by losing it.

This doesn’t mean that a state of total dispossession is desirable or morally superior, though. The hypothetical existence of a “single man who had all the money in the world” so that “the rest of mankind would have to live without it” demonstrates that money “can’t be possessed without making others poorer.”¹⁴ The question of value is also a question of enjoyment: just as the melancholic goes against nature in refusing the satiation of their own suffering, the hoarder of wealth accumulates gold at the expense of their own enjoyment of it, and makes everyone around them impoverished in the process. In Lady Philosophy’s thought experiment, the existence of even one person who has abundant wealth while everyone else has none doesn’t amount to the abolition of money: rather than his money being worthless because it can’t be exchanged, the presence of wealth is always accompanied by its own lack. What should be noted in this account, though, is that this critique of wealth isn’t a critique of money itself: what’s importantly retained is a sense that there can be such a thing as a just exchange, and that the existence of money doesn’t in itself inevitably pave the way for the unequal accumulation of wealth. It’s possible, that is, to imagine a world in which we all lack equally.

This dynamic is played out more fully in the dialogue on happiness. If worldly happiness doesn’t necessarily preclude suffering, it’s because people go to irrational, self-destructive lengths in order to pursue it: “we know that many men have looked for happiness even through pain and suffering. How, then, can this present life make them happy when the prospect of its end does not make them miserable?”¹⁵ If there’s something cruelly optimistic about happiness, then, it isn’t our desire for happiness itself that obstructs our own flourishing – the problem isn’t, in other words, that happiness is an object of our desire – but rather that we fetishistically mistake some aspect of happiness for Happiness qua Happiness. What Boethius grapples with in the first two books of the Consolation is the ethical impasse that accompanies just this realization. We may well ask if the mistake of the melancholic – the morbus mens – is, then, not only in mistaking fortuitous happiness for Happiness as such, but, moreover, because they know better than to be happy. In justifiably turning away from the false and momentary happiness of fortune, the melancholic also casts out God.

The melancholic situation, then, always demands some sort of supplement. To the extent that it (like death) can’t ever be thought in terms of pure negativity or lack, it follows that the notion of a subject who has no will or who wills their own death is a kind of aporia, understandable only in terms of logical fallacy or (self-)deceit. That the depressive position registers an impasse wherein the subject is opportunely positioned to discern between the way their desire and their knowledge join hands to negate that subject is just what makes this impasse so productive for medieval writers. Melancholia has a telos in the sense that it produces the terms for its own dissolution, it demands a supplement by which its impasse can be traversed.

Towards what, though? For Boethius, at least, the endpoint of consolation is perpetually deferred. As Mark Miller has pointed out, at the center of the Consolation’s dialectic is its collapse of two contradictory accounts of action, that is, between an essentially Aristotelian account according to which “everything an agent pursues is under the aspect of some good” and a stronger Platonist claim that “all action aims at one thing, which is ‘the good’ as such.”¹⁶ It’s this failure to satisfactorily reconcile these two viewpoints, however, that makes the Consolation a compelling account of subjectivity, because it’s precisely in his attempt to conflate these two versions of agency in accounting for the human capacity for self-destruction that he introduces a split between will and desire.

One of the more powerful moments where this split comes into view is in Book III, when upon demonstrating that “everything that exists endures [manere] and perseveres [subsistere] as long as it is a unity [quam diu sit unum] but is destroyed as soon as it ceases to be a unity” Lady Philosophy asks Boethius if, when acting “naturally,” if any living thing ever “abandons its appetite for existence and survival.”¹⁷ When Boethius denies this, with the possible exception of “plants or trees or things that are in no way alive,” Philosophy interjects that the same is true of them too, for “Nature gives each plant what is appropriate for it and keeps it alive for as long as possible.”¹⁸ This “love of survival” unites both willing subjects and the natural world:

“We are talking here not of voluntary motions of intelligent souls but of the workings of nature, in which we also participate. We digest the food we have consumed without any conscious thought and we breathe in our sleep without being aware of what we are doing. Even in living things, then, the love of survival [manendi amor] is not something that is willed but a consequence of natural principles. Indeed, there are times when the will may decide it is better to die, while nature fears and avoids death. Or although nature always wants it, there may be occasions when the will decides to refrain from the act of procreation that perpetuates all mortal things. You see, then, that this love of self comes not from the will but from nature, as a gift of providence, so that all things desire to persist and endure for as long as they can.”¹⁹

The existence of free will introduces the possibility that the subject may act against their own desire, which, she explains, is always a desire for “unity” [Omnia … unum desiderant], which is not only “the same thing as the good,” but also both the “end and the object of all things.”²⁰ The culmination of this argument is found in the next book – when Lady Philosophy explains that since everyone desires the Good whether they realize it or not, “the wicked are actually happier being punished than they would be if there were no retribution to restrain them.”²¹

This split between will and desire is necessary for the Consolation’s dialectic to establish God as both the telos and object of all desire. That is, in order to maintain that the subject falls under the swing of an the ontologically primary “life drive” – that is, of an erotic “desire to be one” that inheres to the “love of survival” – it is necessary to ontologically abolish from “nature” and from desire any suggestion of a division within desire itself. The subject can will their own death, but in doing so they are acting contrary to their own desire and, it follows, against nature and the good: “Nam saepe mortem cogentibus causis quam natura reformidat voluntas amplectitur” (the will [voluntas] often, with good cause [cogentibus causis], embraces death while nature recoils from it).²²

The split between desiderium and voluntas on the one hand preserves the rationality of both terms. For even when the will embraces death, it doesn’t do so without cogentibus causis, that is, without compelling grounds or cause for doing so. But why should this account of the will emerge first from an observation about procreation? What’s striking in this account is the will’s negativity: it appears here in the act of refraining from procreation, “the act that perpetuates all mortal things.” Given the Consolation’s lack of concern with the more overtly theological entanglements of things like carnal desire and sinfulness, it’s notable that here there should be some urgency in establishing its account of the will by introducing a point of divergence from it and a deeper, more authentic, desire that is coterminous with the natural imperative to reproduce. This would appear to be an interesting contrast to a thinker like Augustine, for whom the division between carnal and spiritual desire is a point of productive contradiction, because sexuality itself is the punishment for sin – “God had blessed them with the words, Increase and multiply and fill the earth (Gn 1:28), but it was by sinning that their bodies incurred mortality, and sexual union is possible only for mortal bodies.”²³ As Alenka Zupančič has argued, this notion – that prior to the Fall there were possibilities for reproduction that wouldn’t involve sexual union – can be seen as part of a larger ideological project of Christianity to “separate sexuality from enjoyment,” insofar as sin inscribes a lack in nature. If we are naturally compelled to reproduce, then, the thing that makes the actual carrying out of this imperative unbearable lies in nature itself: sex reminds us that “nature lacks something in order to be Nature (our Other) in the first place.”²⁴ The symptom of this predicament is the shame that accompanies knowledge: the awareness of one’s own nakedness, of the necessity of the sexual act in order to fulfill this procreative imperative is itself a reminder of a loss: “‘knowing the other in the biblical sense’ is to engage with the point in the Other where knowledge is lacking.”²⁵

For Boethius, though, the division between will and desire speaks to the myriad ways the subject is prone to misrecognizing or misreading their own desire. The result is that this constituent negativity is less characteristic of knowledge than it is of the will. Perhaps this is why Lady Philosophy only addresses the issue of reproduction by way of a digression on plants – to address human reproduction would mean locating negativity within knowledge itself rather than within the will. This may be where the ideological kernel of the Consolation begins to come into view: not, perhaps, so much in the explicit unstitching of sexuality from jouissance as in the unconscious need to preserve the wholeness of “Nature” as a bedrock of certainty against which I might discern the truth of my desires. Such an account remains coherent only so far as sexuality and enjoyment remain outside of the picture, but it’s in such moments as this one when their absence is most felt. Insofar as the Consolation is a text about discerning one’s desires, perhaps it is this elision that allows the text’s dialectic to take on its curative function when it introduces its melancholic supplement in the form of discourse.

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