Facettes de la mélancolie

The paper aims to grasp the concept of melancholia at the intersection of historical, cultural and sociological perspectives. After providing a brief history of the concept, the article focuses on the relationships between melancholia and nostalgia, drawing particular attention to the temporal regime triggered by the melancholic process and underlining its critical impact in regard to the dominant values of neoliberal society. The paper then aims to map the major inflexions of contemporary melancholia, namely left melancholia and ecomelancholia. Coined by Walter Benjamin, the first emerges from the political defeats of socialism and the failures of any revolutionary inspiration through the history of the twentieth century. The second is triggered by the awareness of the irremediable destruction of a large part of our natural environment. Left melancholia and ecomelancholia are intermingled since they testify to a critical sensibility to the losses caused by the neocapitalism system, whether social loss or environmental loss, the two being linked