Review of Melancholy and the Otherness of God (Lexington Books/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)

 

• Alina N. Feld demonstrates how melancholy relates to the questions of Being, Time, and God. She brilliantly argues that melancholic pathos is not reducible to purely social or psychological factors but is a primordial and perduring condition of human existence. Feld recommends that we fully assume our melancholic condition in a labor or self-transformation. To face the nothing concealed in the depths of the self and the abyssal otherness of God is, she claims, a crucial task for human beings. (Richard Kearney)

 

• …this is a philosophical theology incorporating psychological and imaginative realms as well, indeed, it virtually creates a truly new philosophical theology, and one that is a profound exposition of the depths of melancholy, depths otherwise wholly obscure. Thus the depths of melancholy are here unveiled as being essential for a genuine liberation or redemption, thereby our deeper fantasies about redemption are not only ended but transfigured, and transfigured by initiating us into the deeper actualities of melancholy. (Thomas J. J. Altizer)