Community and melancholy: Loss and identification

This thesis explores the relationship between singularity, community, loss, melancholy, and identification, offering a reimagined framework for understanding community. Drawing on the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Sigmund Freud, it examines how communities can form not through fixed identities or immanence but through shared vulnerability, finitude, death and the acknowledgment of loss. Freud’s and Butler’s theories of mourning, melancholy, and identification provide key insights into how loss shapes both individual and identities. Melancholy, as an ongoing engagement with absence, reveals how communities can emerge around shared experiences of incompleteness and singularity rather than unity or totality. The thesis argues that rethinking community through these concepts provides an alternative to totalitarian and individualist paradigms. By embracing insufficiency, difference, and the unrepresentable, it becomes possible to imagine a community that transcends normative conformity while fostering ecstatic relation to the other.