Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

validity of qualifying racial or ethnic subjects as “melancholics.” The discussion starts
with Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he defi nes melancholia as
the result of a narcissistic choice of object, an identifi cation that cannot be easily severed
after the actual withdrawal of the object, which in turn hinders the subject’s capability to
make new identifi cations (248). One should not loose sight of the quantifying judgment
implied in the diagnosis of melancholia. Excessive compulsion to play out fantasies – i.e.
the imagined presence of an absent object – incur an expenditure of time and energy that
are no longer available for securing ties to the social. A person’s excessive inner turmoil
must be addressed to prevent the unraveling of his or her social bonds. In this sense, the
pathological narcissism described in melancholia is not a permanent psychical subjective
structure but a state of mind susceptible to transformation. As such, Anne Anlin Cheng’s
The Melancholia of Race considers the larger contemporary problem of diagnosing
melancholia in subjects who, for ethical reasons, will not or cannot let go of the sociopolitical
past. In a further elaboration on this discussion, David Eng and Shinhee Han in
their article “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” argue for “depathologizing melancholia”
to accommodate their minority politics of racial subjectivity (363-367). I disagree with such
a project because it only amounts to a shift in terminology. The problem of melancholia
will remain, but sociopolitical fi elds of inquiry will have deprived themselves of a valuable
conceptual tool. There must be better ways of promoting socio-historical awareness as
well as subjective and social wellbeing than by invalidating psychological theories that are
highly relevant to personal therapy.
The crux of the theoretical problem in “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” is its
failure to aptly point to the quantifying aspect of identifi cation in melancholia that led to its
qualifi cation as a pathology. Since one of the author’s, Shinhee Han, is a psychological
clinician, it is surprising to read how the article equates loss of desire with the impossibility
to attain the American Dream, “a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness,
heterosexuality, middle-class family values—often foreclosed to [racial subjects]” (344).
Eng and Han believe that the American Dream is a narcissistic object choice and that the
racial subject’s identifi cation with the Dream later gives way to symptomatic depressions
when a white patriarchal society witholds the dream-object from him or her on a racial
basis. In this context, thinking of a dream as an object is far less unsettling than hearing
a clinician promote a view of a normal desiring subject in terms of its completeness,
of “being whole”: “We are dissatisfi ed with the assumption that minority subjectivities
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