Foreword

Orlando looking at Jaque's reverberated image: “Which I take to be either a fool or a cipher.” ( As You Like It III.ii 279)Melancholia posits the intersection of the biological and the symbolic, ambivalently motivating and undermining the imaginary (viz. for example, Kristeva's “On the melancholic imaginary”). That reverberates across history in assessments of loss, mourning and absence. “Acedia,” the radical melancholy of the Egyptian monks of early Christianity, the “noontime demon” of slot...