A critical phenomenology is paired with qualitative data in order to understand the character of subjective experiences of uncanniness through the encounter with art. We are confronted by art as the beings we have been, without recourse to the use of art as a way in which our beings might concretely improve themselves, either through rewriting themselves as part of the larger world or by giving ourselves a dedicated auto-history. It is this feeling of insubstantiality, borne on the currents which (...) move us away from all solid projects or monuments, that disconcerts us the most. The experience of this non-presence in art uncovers the absence of presence in being and world. We have been absented from ourselves in some ethically culpable manner, and to be fully present as beings who live on in the face of death, is to take into an interiority of being the Nothing which stands as our alterity. (shrink)

Melancholia is a hybrid concept, deployed in feminist and philosophical theories politics and aesthetics, but ‘properly” belonging to neither. This heterogeneity of melancholia as both an aesthetic and a political category allows us to interrogate the interrelationship between gender politics and aesthetics without, however, abolishing their differences. Reinterpreted in the context of a feminist aesthetics, melancholia not only points to art’s origin in the unjust and gendered division of labor and power but also to the ethical and political task of (...) art to bear witness to the mute suffering of women cut off from the signifying possibilities of language. Moving beyond the entrenched oppositions between historicism/subjectivism, subject/object, or formalism /materialism, my own approach to an aesthetics of melancholia in women’s modern novels stresses unpredictable, conflicting migrations of pain between subjects and objects, political oppression and autonomous art, language and affect. (shrink)