In recent years, the end of love has been announced many times. Love, the claim goes, is foundering because of endless freedom of choice, the overabundance of options, and the compulsion for perfection. In a world of unlimited possibilities, love itself represents an impossibility. Passion, too, is said to have grown cold. Eva Illouz has traced this state of affairs back to the rationalization of love and expanding technologies of choice. However, this sociological theory fails to recognize that another influence is now underway, which is corroding love far more than endless freedom or unlimited possibilities. The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self. In fact, the vanishing of the Other is a dramatic process—even though, fatefully enough, it largely escapes notice.
Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other. It is not by chance that Socrates the lover is called atopos. The Other, whom I desire and who fascinates me, is placeless. He or she is removed from the language of sameness: “Being atopic, the Other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the Other, about the Other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward.”1 Our contemporary culture of constant com-parison (Ver-Gleichen) leaves no room for the negativity of what is atopos. We are constantly comparing one thing to another, thereby flattening them into the Same, precisely because we no longer experience the atopia of the Other. The negativity of the atopic Other refuses consumption. Therefore, the society of the consumer endeavors to eliminate atopic otherness in favor of consumable—heterotopic—differences. In contrast to otherness, difference is positive. Yet today, negativity is disappearing everywhere. Everything is being flattened out into an object of consumption.
Today, we live in an increasingly narcissistic society. Libido is primarily invested in one’s own subjectivity. Narcissism is not the same as self-love. The subject of self-love draws a negative boundary between him- or herself and the Other. The narcissistic subject, on the other hand, never manages to set any clear boundaries. In consequence, the border between the narcissist and the Other becomes blurry. The world appears only as adumbrations of the narcissist’s self, which is incapable of recognizing the Other in his or her otherness—much less acknowledging this otherness for what it is. Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns—in itself.
Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other. Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself. Today’s narcissistic “achievement-subject” seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One—a mirror affirming the latter’s image. This logic of recognition ensnares the narcissistic achievement-subject more deeply in the ego. The corollary is success-induced depression: the depressive achievement-subject sinks into, and suffocates in, itself. Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love—which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.
In the inferno of the same, the arrival of the atopic Other can assume apocalyptic form. In other words: today, only an apocalypse can liberate—indeed, redeem—us from the inferno of the same, and lead us toward the Other. Thus, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia begins with the announcement of an apocalyptic, disastrous event. “Disaster” literally means “unlucky star” (desastrum, in Latin). On her sister’s estate, Justine stares into the night sky and sees a reddish glow, which later proves to be a starless planet headed for earth. This heavenly body, “Melancholia,” is a desastrum, which sets fatality in motion. At the same time, however, it is a negative, emanating a healing, cleansing effect. The name “Melancholia” is paradoxical insofar as this planet heals the depression that has taken the shape of a particular form of melancholy. It manifests itself as the atopic Other, which tears Justine out of the swamp of narcissism. She experiences a veritable blossoming under the influence of the death-bringing planet.
Eros conquers depression. The tense relationship between love and depression commands the cinematic discourse of Melancholia from the film’s inception. The prelude from Tristan und Isolde, which frames the film musically, invokes the power of love. Depression represents the impossibility of love. Alternatively, it is the impossibility of love that has led to depression. Only the planet Melancholia, the atopic Other breaking into the inferno of the same, arouses erotic desire in Justine. The nude scene, at the rocks on the river’s edge, presents the body of a lover, aglow with sensuality. Eagerly, Justine writhes in the blue light of the heavenly body that is bringing death. The scene intimates that Justine in fact desires deadly collision with the atopic, wandering planet. She awaits approaching catastrophe as joyous union with her beloved. Inevitably, Isolde’s Liebestod comes to mind. As death draws near, Isolde also yields lustfully to “the World-breath’s wafting universe” (des Welt-Atems wehendem All).2 It is no coincidence that precisely this scene—the only erotic sequence in the entire film—features the prelude from Tristan und Isolde again. Magically, it invokes the proximity of eros and death, apocalypse and deliverance.
Paradoxically, the approach of death animates Justine. It opens her to the Other. Liberated from narcissistic captivity, Justine also devotes caring attention to her sister and her sister’s son. The film’s real magic lies in Justine’s miraculous transformation from a depressive into a lover. Thus the atopia of the Other turns out to be the utopia of eros. Cannily, the director uses well-known classical paintings to steer the film discursively and reinforce a particular symbolism. Thus, in the surrealistic opening sequence, he fades in Pieter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow to induce deep, wintry melancholy in the viewer. In the background, the landscape borders the water—like Claire’s estate, which blends into Bruegel’s painting. Both scenes display a similar topology, as the wintry melancholy of Hunters in the Snow extends to the world of the characters. The hunters trudge homeward, downcast and in dark attire. The blackbirds in the trees make the winter landscape even gloomier. The sign of the inn, displaying the image of a saint, hangs at an angle and is almost falling down. Then, black flakes fall slowly from the sky, consuming the picture like a fire. This melancholy winter landscape is followed by a scene that resembles a painting; here, Justine is presented in the style of John Everett Millais: with a wreath of flowers in hand, she floats on the water like the lovely Ophelia.
After an argument with Claire, Justine succumbs to despair once more; her helpless gaze wanders over abstract paintings by Malevich in books lying open on a shelf. In a fit of rage, she tears the books down, then replaces them with other pictures portraying unfathomable human passions. Just at this moment, the prelude from Tristan und Isolde sounds forth again. Once more, it is a matter of love, desire, and death. The first image Justine reaches for is Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. Then she grabs a volume of Millais with the painting of Ophelia—followed by Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, Bruegel’s The Land of Cockaigne, and, finally, a drawing by Carl Fredrik Hill depicting a forlorn, baying stag.
The lovely Ophelia drifting in the water with her mouth half open—her gaze lost in the beyond, like a saint or a lover—points to the proximity of eros and death yet again. Hamlet’s beloved dies surrounded by fallen flowers, singing like a siren, Shakespeare writes. Ophelia dies a beautiful death, a Liebestod. Millais’s painting shows a flower that Shakespeare does not mention: a red poppy, which signifies eros, dreams, and intoxication. Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath is also an image of death and desire. In contrast, Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne depicts an overstuffed society of positivity—an inferno of the same. Here, the swollen figures lie about apathetically, exhausted by satiety: even the cactus has no thorns; it is made of bread. Everything is positive inasmuch as it is edible and consumable. This gorged company resembles the morbid wedding party earlier in the film. Tellingly, Justine places Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne next to an illustration by William Blake, which depicts a slave suspended by the ribs, but still alive. Here, the invisible violence of positivity stands opposed to the brutal power of negativity, which exploits and robs. Justine leaves the library immediately after opening a book to Hill’s picture of the stag and placing it on the shelf; the image stands for the erotic desire, or yearning for love, that she feels. Clearly, Lars von Trier knew that Carl Fredrik Hill suffered from psychosis and depression. This sequence of images illustrates the discourse of the film as a whole. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.
In Melancholia, the apocalyptic sky resembles the empty firmament that Maurice Blanchot makes the primal scene of his childhood. It reveals the atopia of the wholly Other by suddenly interrupting the Same:
Suppose this: the child—is he seven years old, or eight perhaps?—standing by the window, drawing the curtain and, through the pane, looking. …
What happens then: the sky, the same sky suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing … such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost …—… the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected … is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, and endless flood of tears. … He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.3
The child Blanchot describes is enraptured by the infinity of the barren sky, torn out of himself and emptied (entinnerlicht) into an atopic Outside, dissolved and drained. The disastrous event (Ereignis)—this invasion of the Exterior and wholly Other—unfolds as dispossession (Ent-Eignis), an annulment and voiding of the Own; that is, it unfolds as death: “the sky’s emptiness: the disaster as withdrawal outside the sidereal abode.”4 And yet, disaster fills the child with “ravaging joy”—indeed, with the happiness of absence. Herein lies the dialectic of the disaster, which also structures Melancholia. Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.