Through education, the various forms of media, the family, and so on, the beliefs and values of the bourgeois class are interpolated into the working-class subject and through habit become second nature. The working-class subject is surrounded from the moment of their birth until their final breath by capitalist society, a society created by the bourgeois class. In this essay, I hope to explore further the concept of melancholia and the working class and to examine how this state indicates a potential for emancipation. I had hoped, through the writing of the book, to perform a kind of speech act, one through which the working class might recognize themselves, the result of which would be a kind of mass class consciousness. We are all one class, the current belief system insists, and if one of us is unable to survive, this failure is the symptom of our own laziness. In the United States, for example, because the concept of social class has been removed from social discourse, there is an overall societal consensus that social class no longer exists and, as a result, there is no working class. In the book, I examined the lives of working-class writers, musicians, and filmmakers whose work is imbued with this affect. In the working-class subject, I recognized these symptoms and located this loss as the loss of their working-class subjecthood. As a result, they are unable to grieve the loss of the lost object. Melancholia, according to Freud, occurs when the melancholic experiences the loss of an object that remains unknown to the sufferer.

At the same time, I recognized melancholia as a symptom of the working-class subject. How was it possible, I wondered, for contemporary capitalist society to insist that there is no working class while this seemingly nonexistent subject, the working class, is vilified by the very society insisting they do not exist. The impetus for the project was a seeming paradox. In 2019 I began work on a text that would become The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class. – Monte from Claire Denis’s film High Life We were scum, trash, refuse that didn’t fit into the system. Cruz argues that melancholy must be recognized as a specific form of mourning for the working class, and that organization as a class can point ways out of bourgeois society. This observation of the proletarian subject’s loss of class consciousness inspired the writer Cynthia Cruz to investigate the intersection of psychoanalysis and a critique of capitalism. They thus actively quash the self-awareness of a social class for which the convictions and values of the bourgeoisie have largely become second nature anyway. In the hegemonic public discourse, the proletarian subject – and the working class as a whole – largely exists only to be disparaged and abused: defamatory terms like “white trash,” “welfare queen,” or “poverty porn” address the working class in a purely negative manner.

Notes on a case of melancholia