Depression is a painful existential situation that seems to be quite widespread in our contemporary capitalist, ultra-individualistic societies. Recent and current interrelated crises, as for example the financial crisis, the climate crisis and the threat of a global war, seem to have exacerbated the phenomenon. 

But what does it mean exactly to be depressed, or to live with depression? How could we better conceive of it: as mental and bodily disorder, condition, disposition, mode of experience, habit, …? What kind of relations – to oneself, to fellow human beings, and to the world – does depression foster and is fed by? If one agrees to consider it as a pathology, is it just an individual or also a social, collective pathology? What does constitute its ‘pathological’ (i.e. ‘wrong’) character? Does depression also entail ‘positive’ aspects?

This course follows various paths for developing a critical philosophy of depression, an undertaking that finds itself, in the current philosophical landscape, at its outset. Note that the preposition “of” has a double meaning: on the one hand, we will study and articulate philosophical, conceptual and also nonconceptual tools for understanding what depression is; on the other hand, we will explore the cognitive (and affective) resources that the depressive experience disclose and unleash, what their epistemological, ethical and political values can be. 

• J. Butler, “Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification”. In J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 1997, 132–150.

• Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self. Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, 1998.

• S. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”. In L. G. Fiorini, T. Bokanowski, S. Lewkowicz (eds.), On Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, 2007, 17–34.

• T. Fuchs “Depression, Intercorporeality, and Interaffectivity” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20: 7–8, 2013, pp. 219–38.

• S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (1849). In R. Bretall (ed.) A Kierkegaard Anthology, 1943/1973

• J. Keats, “Ode on Melancholy” (1819), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44478/ode-on-melancholy 

• M. Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935), in J. Mitchell (ed.) Melanie Klein, 1986, 115–145.

• J. Lear, “Working Through the End of Civilization”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88, 2007.

• K. Marx, “Estranged Labour”. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In K. Marx and F. Engels. Collected Works, 3, 1843–1844. New York: New York International Publishers, 2005;
the version proposed as a reading here is to be retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm 

• Nersessian, A Lover’s Discourse, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2021, Chapter 4.

• Petersen, “Depression – a social pathology of action”, Irish Journal of Sociology, 2009, 56–71.

• Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. An American Lyric, Greywolf Press, 2004.

• M. Ratcliffe, “Depression and the Phenomenology of Free Will”, in K. W. M. Fulford, et. al. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press 2013.

• M. Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression. A Study in Phenomenology, Oxford: OUP 2015.