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  • The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance by Drew Daniel
  • Douglas Trevor (bio)
The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance. By Drew Daniel. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 310. Illus. $85.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

Drew Daniel’s Melancholy Assemblage deserves to be included among other recent, significant studies of perhaps the paradigmatic, if also the problematic, mood of the early modern era: melancholy. I am thinking of Angus Gowland’s Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (2006) and Mary Ann Lund’s Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (2010). While Gowland’s and Lund’s projects center on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Daniel’s book is more a theoretical reconsideration of what constitutes melancholy. Beginning with Jaques’s all-too-familiar description in As You Like It of what his melancholy is not, Daniel proposes that we think of melancholy as an assemblage, by which he means “a multiplicity, an expressive array of materials and postures and cases distributed across the social surround” (7). Assemblage is a crucial term in Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (1980), and Daniel turns to Deleuze and Guattari to define the word as one that might “articulate a framework for thinking about the way that ideology acts upon material bodies and the way that material bodies, in turn, discipline themselves into forms susceptible to such recognition or pull against and distort such alignment” (9). Assemblages thus manifest “specific, local coherence” (10) while at the same time inviting their own eventual collapses under the weight and pressures applied by other modes of thinking and being.

My response to Deleuze and Guattari is a little like Saul Bellow’s take on the idea novel: “Not so hot, in my opinion,” he writes in a letter to Philip Roth in 1957.1 I accept as useful a theorization of the self that emphasizes its assembled, discursive form(s), but Deleuze and Guattari go further than that. Theirs is a worldview in which the delineating factors of gender and social class seem not to matter. The self is always already sutured to its surround, always already shaped by a hegemonic, highly theoretical sociological blanket that can wrap around any perceived rupture. Daniel seems to sense the totalizing effect of a Deleuzian-Guattarian approach, and he works hard throughout The Melancholy Assemblage to temper his debts to A Thousand Plateaus by ushering in other theoretical paradigms. Benjamin, Barthes, Freud, and other thinkers are read and put to use with precision and clarity.

The Melancholy Assemblage recommends itself for its nuanced close readings, its theoretical nimbleness, and most importantly for its central insight regarding melancholy. Daniel suggests that melancholy is an inherently unstable, tense term because it is founded on two opposed discourses: the “Aristotelian/Theophrastan account of genial melancholy and the Galenic account of pathological imbalance” (17). According to Daniel, scholars who have worked on early modern melancholy have nearly always followed Lawrence Babb in assuming that the underlining tension [End Page 485] between the Aristotelian and the Galenic accounts of this affect did not disturb early modern people. Daniel disagrees: “English people were troubled by this very opposition, and the often startling literary and artistic and social assemblages that they fashioned in response constituted a means of working out the consequences of this foundational disparity” (24).

Chapter by chapter, The Melancholy Assemblage seeks out melancholy’s foundational disparities, arguing that this fundamental tension at its heart “disorganizes the concept [of melancholy] but also paradoxically introduces a secondary kind of consistent incoherence, or generative indeterminacy” (17). Chapter 1 focuses on the strikingly consistent manner in which pictorial depictions of melancholy emphasize the same bodily posture, beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) and running right through Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1970). Why do melancholics over time assume the same “propping posture,” with their heads supported by their hands and their bodies limp and languid (41)? Daniel argues it is the inherent instability of melancholy that paradoxically stabilizes its visual representation. One cannot trust that the...

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