Publisher's Synopsis
Throughout the many essays that form this book, Roger Bartra reflects on some of the characters of modern history that have been embroiled by this illness: Lincoln, Kierkegaard, Munch, Baudelaire, Goethe. Being a symptom of change, crisis and the absurd, melancholy has been a discomfort, an illness present in the human soul that flows in a persistent way since antiquity. Melancholy has devastated and desolated the life of the people it has lived in, but at the same time it has created magnificent artistic expressions that affirm life-and the tension that comes with it-. According to the author, nowadays the presence of this discomfort has aggravated for the various reasons: the fragmentation of society, the experience of late capitalism, the appearance of the society of exhaustion. With these reflections, Roger Bartra invites us to think, what does it mean to live at the beginning of the XXI century?
