De l'économie de la mélancolie du scholar : figures du pharmakon chez Robert Burton
An unrivaled summation of erudition, intelligence and humor in which all knowledge is stored and linked, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1651) is still today an object of research of great value for the history of medicine as well as for social and cultural history and the history of ideas. Composed in this particular period of in-between ages, The Anatomy constitutes a unique point of articulation between the still current authority of the hippocrato-galenic medical discourse, tributary of an indissociable union between a natural and a moral philosophy, and the advent of the remarkably modern spirit of labour/work and economics which the "Protestant ethic" opens up and which rather takes part in a gradual separation of the fields of science and morals. If Robert Burton, through the publication of his book, certainly intends to perpetuate the Greek tradition of melancholia as it was instituted, among others, by the Letters of the pseudo-Hippocrates, an aspiration which he reveals from the outset by the choice of his pseudonym: "Democritus Junior", we shall see that he is, however, not its most faithful disciple. The present paper will indeed examine how Burton lays the foundation of an ethic that no longer relies on the serenity of the wise man (as incarnated by Democritus of Abdera), who succeeded to eradicate, by the sole means of his reason and his will, his melancholy, but rather on the resignation of the gentleman devoted to the professional, civic and domestic task, capable of enduring indefinitely, and even profiting from, his ambivalent melancholy. A vocational posture characteristic of a distinctly modern ethic and which is ideally exemplified, in Burton’s book, by the more "positively" melancholic figure of the scholar. Particular attention will be paid, in the first part of this paper, to Burton's relationship with his book and his reader in order to identify the therapeutic/pathological potential of The Anatomy itself as a book. Then, we will look at the more implicit or peripheral healing strategies that are deployed in the text and which are attached to the more properly vocational dimension of the scholar's intellectual work and life.
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