-Samuel Beckett

From Freud:

Let us now apply to melancholia what we have learnt about mourning. In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love. In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. 

And further elucidation from Zizek:

[T]he melancholic is not primarily the subject fixated on the lost object, unable to perform the work of mourning on it; he is, rather, the subject who possesses the object, but has lost his desire for it, because the cause which made him desire this object has withdrawn, lost its efficiency. Far from accentuating to the extreme the situation of the frustrated desire, of the desire deprived of its object, melancholy stands for the presence of the object itself deprived of our desire for it - melancholy occurs when we finally get the desired object, but are disappointed at it. In this precise sense, melancholy (disappointment at all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) effectively is the beginning of philosophy.

I was reading Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-enclosure today and ran across this passage.

This affirmation that existence is experience: that it does nothing else, cut loose from the goal for the project of the will--does nothing else but expose itself to the unforeseeable, the unheard of of its own event. Experience simply--we should say--"events" ["s'evenir"] "comes forth of itself." This evenir opens within the world an outside that is not beyond-the-world, but the truth of the world. (link)

Elsewhere Nancy refers to this opening up of the world to an other that is not beyond but within as "transimmanence." This opening or disclosing from within is precisely the sort of movement required of an eschatology that is resolutely dissociated from teleology (as Derrida puts it in his text on Marx). Not only ateleological but also and especially anti-teleological in the classical -- and flatfooted -- Hegelian sense. (I quite agree, I should add, that the old reading of Hegel as that master of teleogy is, perhaps, a misunderstanding of his work, that is, that the dialectic "works," so to speak, by not working at all, but instead revealing the tears in the fabric of reality. So there is thus a different between Hegel and Hegelianism on this point). But how, then, to think the impossible, i.e., the future, the unknown future as absolute mystery, risk, danger, and indeed surprise, from within such a space or opening? 

there are times when those eyes inside your
brain stare back at
you;
it is always sudden.
sometimes when you come in
and lie down on the bed
it happens--
2 eyes that have nothing to do with
you
stare back at you from inside your
brain.
you sit up
until they go away.

or say you scream at a child
or slap a woman--
as you walk into the kitchen
the eyes appear in the back of your brain
hand there
as you drink
water.

or somtimes you are at peace
sitting on a park bench
reading a newspaper--
here come the
eyes:
fat red golden eyes,
a pair.
you get up and
walk
away.

or the phone rings and as you answer the
phone
the eyes arrive again--
"yes, of course. no, I'm not doing
anything. yeh, I feel
o.k."
then you hang up, go to the bathroom and
throw water on
your face.

I would gladly give these eyes to the
blind or to anybody who
would take them.

o, o, there they are
again.

I don't understand it.
what do they
want?

-Charles Bukowski, "what do they want?"

(link)

From his autobiography:

From "Theses on the Philosophy of History":

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position against Fascism. One reason why Facism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that give rise to it is untenable.

No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.

(link)