Melancolía y flema (Concepciones humoralistas en torno a la noción de melancolía en "El origen del trauerspiel alemán" de Walter Benjamin)

Abstract

If something is usually considered to be remarkable about “The origin of German tragic drama”, a book written by Walter Benjamin in order to be a postulant as a teacher at the University, is its conceptual richness and innovation. This essay tries to accomplish two objectives: On the one hand, to understand the sense of one of these notions, that of melancholy, which is so important for Benjamin both in this work and all along his philosophical production. On the other hand, an attempt is made to investigate both implicit and explicit sources used by the philosopher to refer to the term under consideration. This will lead us to deal with classic medicine authors such as Hippocrates and Galen, from the renacentist astrological ideological repertoire such as Ficino and some Freudian proposals about mourning and melancholy.