Fall 2025, CairoWorkshop
Melancholia in the City
Course details
- Cycle
- Fall 2025, Cairo
- Starts
- Tuesday, Oct 28
- Meets
- Tuesday, 18:00–20:30
- Length
- 6 weeks
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
Melancholia in the City explores the diffuse sense of malaise pervading contemporary urban life, approaching depression through the lens of psychoanalysis as a social and structural experience shaped by how late capitalism hijacks unconscious desire. In dialogue with its participants, the workshop will ground these questions in the context of Cairo, and consider how melancholia might be understood not only as a symptom of exhaustion and loss, but also as a mode of critique, resistance, and the site of potential transformation.
Who teaches it
Course flow
October 2025
We begin with Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, asking how loss becomes inscribed in subjectivity.
November 2025
Lacan reframes depression as a structural and even ethical impasse, tied to capitalism’s injunction to enjoy.
Kristeva illuminates melancholia as a collapse of symbolic mediation, where language falters in the face of loss.
Neoliberalism turns exhaustion and despair into systemic conditions, shaping depression as the defining affect of our age.
Writers like Berardi ask whether melancholia can function as refusal, critique, or disruption of productivity.
December 2025
We close by considering whether sublimation, creativity, and responsibility can transform depression into new ways of relating.
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