Depression og/eller apokalypse

Resumé

The article sets out by investigating how depression is represented in Lars von Trier’s disaster movie Melancholia with the specific intent to detach mental illness from classic, somewhat romantic notions of metaphoric and epistemological connections between psychopathology and deeper “truths” about the world. Employing what one could call a symptomatological view on the depression of the main protagonist Justine, the article concludes that her depression should be seen as a temporal disorder in the sense that she lacks the ability to project and plan a future. From here, the article turns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of a “reparative praxis” as a possible ethico-practical way out of the depressive situation, arguing that such a reparative praxis is exactly what ends up pulling Justine out of her depression and enabling her to act. In a concluding step, the article relates depression and the reparative praxis to more general questions about temporality, imagination, and disaster based on Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s concept of “loop time”.