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Melancholia is a retreat from and a total rejection of society, due not only to the repressive function of social norms but also to the total effect of society, which the melancholic experiences as suffocating. The melancholic’s rebellion is therefore a passive one. Under the conviction, whether justified or not, that all avenues toward effective action have been closed off, the melancholic rebel recedes into a resigned interiority, brooding over the very conditions of the impossibility of action themselves
…Melancholy isolates; conversely, the enforced isolation from social institutions and practices produces both melancholic sadness and the alienation necessary to gain a critical insight into the structure of society itself.
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