Collective melancholia arises from failing to realize democratic ideals while denying the failure.

Evidence

In mourning, Freud remarks, one understands the world to have suffered a loss; with melancholia, one experiences it as a loss of part of oneself, fixating on the sense of emptiness. Collective melancholia, I want to suggest by extension, is the exacerbated socio-psychic condition, the social stress, following from multiplier fixations and awkward hesitations: on the failure to realize these social ideals – of democracy, of morality, of justice; on the guilt attendant both to these failings and to the consequent denials “necessary” to sustain the fiction of the idealizations; on extending the historicist fabrication of ethnoracial distinction – whether articulated as natural inferiority or cultural difference – to shore up the façade of commitment to these ideals in the face of their imminent implosion; on the hesitancies between embracing the fictions and their attendant rewards, at least totally, or letting go of them, giving them up, if not quite completely. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 696

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes mourning from melancholia (world-loss vs self-loss) and extends to collective political melancholia.
• XREF: Connects to Cheng’s racial melancholia and to the earlier chapter themes in this book about racial denial.