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The podcast episode “Deep Dive Into Mourning” discusses Işık Barış Fidaner’s exploration of melancholy, mourning, and desire, drawing connections between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the loss of traditional narratives like God and nature. Fidaner argues that desire is inherently melancholic, rooted in unattainable ideals, and connects this to larger societal mourning, particularly through Nietzsche and Freud. The episode explores how mourning shapes modern existence and the dialectical process of moving between desire and loss, urging listeners to confront the emptiness of ideals to enable personal and cultural growth.

Generated by Google’s NotepadLM website given these links:

1) Modern Mourning of God and Nature

2) Žižek’s Attitude towards God and Nature

3) Every desire is a melancholic desire

4) Authentic Fidelity is the Drive to Mourn

5) Symbolic Mourning and Real Mourning, Paranoia and Cynicism

This is part of Numerical Discourses

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All right, so get ready for a deep dive into the work of Ishik Barish Fidaner. Yeah, this one’s going to be juicy. Our listener sent in Fidaner’s writings on melancholy, mourning, desire, and get this—how those connect to philosophy, psychoanalysis, even our ideas about God and nature. Big stuff!

It’s pretty amazing how Fidaner brings it all together.

No kidding! But let’s, uh, maybe unpack that a little. Where do we even start?

Well, Fidaner makes this really intriguing argument about desire. We usually think of desire as this, you know, positive force, right?

Yeah, totally, like striving for something better or something more, right?

But Fidaner argues that desire is actually inherently melancholic.

Whoa, hold on. Most people think of melancholy as, like, that lingering sadness, you know, like after a bad breakup. What’s desire got to do with that?

That’s exactly what makes Fidaner’s analysis so interesting. They kind of flip the traditional view of melancholy on its head. See, it’s not just about getting stuck on something you’ve lost, like we usually think. Fidaner, drawing on Agamben, says it’s about the very nature of desire itself.

Okay, I’m intrigued but a little lost. What do they mean by “the nature of desire”?

It’s about longing for what’s impossible, that inherent lack within desire we’re always dealing with. Think about a time you really, really wanted something, but you knew deep down you couldn’t have it.

Oof, yeah, like yearning for something just out of reach.

Exactly. That mix of intense longing and impossibility—that’s the essence of melancholy according to Fidaner.

So it’s like we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment from the get-go?

In a way, yeah. And that’s where the “staged loss” comes in.

Staged loss? That sounds… I don’t know, kind of manipulative.

Think of it more like a coping mechanism, a way to handle the intensity of desire. Fidaner uses this great metaphor. Picture that scene in Psycho—

Oh, okay, with Norman Bates?

Yeah, right after the, um, you know, the murder, and he’s meticulously cleaning the bathroom, trying to erase what happened.

Okay, yeah, intense imagery.

My point exactly. Melancholy, in a way, is our attempt to control desire, which is ultimately uncontrollable, right? We create this fantasy—this “perfect origin,” as Hegel called it—the source of our desire.

Exactly, but then we have to mourn its loss. It’s how we cope with the fact that true fulfillment, in its purest sense, is always just beyond our grasp.

Okay, so we create this perfect origin only to mourn its loss. Sounds kind of bleak. Are we just stuck in this cycle forever then?

Well, it’s a process, right? A back-and-forth. Fidaner calls it a dialectical process.

Dialectical—for those of us who haven’t brushed up on our Hegel—what does that mean?

Basically, it’s this movement between different phases. We start with this jumble of desires, this inconsistent mess, as Fidaner puts it. Then we project an origin—this idealized source for all those desires. But eventually, we realize that origin never really existed—it was a fantasy all along.

Yeah, that’s rough.

And that’s where mourning comes in.

Wait, but we’re not talking about, like, actual grieving here, right?

Not in the traditional sense. In this context, mourning is about recognizing the illusion and shifting our desire to something new. One fantasy dies, another takes its place.

So it’s less about holding on to the past and more about moving on to new objects of desire?

Exactly. Fidaner calls it the “metonymy of desire.”

Metonymy of desire, catchy. Basically, it’s that constant shifting of desires, never quite reaching complete satisfaction.

Man, it really does make you think. This whole dance between melancholy and mourning—it’s like Fidaner is tapping into something fundamental about the human experience.

But then it gets even bigger, right? They apply this to, like, entire cultural shifts.

You’re right, they do. This is where things get really interesting. Fidaner argues that modernity itself is a kind of “double mourning”—the mourning of God and the mourning of nature.

Okay, whoa. So we’re not just talking about individual longing anymore. This is about society as a whole losing its grip on these grand narratives.

Right, and we can see this double mourning play out in figures like Nietzsche and Freud.

Nietzsche—the guy who said “God is dead”?

The one and only, and that’s a perfect example of what Fidaner is talking about.

Okay, so Nietzsche declares the death of God—the ultimate origin story bites the dust. How does that tie back into melancholy?

Well, in rejecting God, Nietzsche kind of became fixated on this idea of the individual’s “will to power.” He basically swapped one origin for another.

So even in his rejection, he was still clinging to an ideal.

Exactly. And Fidaner actually calls Nietzsche an “exemplary melancholic” because he mourned God, but not nature. His process was incomplete—he replaced one idealized figure with another.

Okay, so we’ve got Nietzsche rejecting God and kind of clinging to this idea of the will to power. Where does Freud fit into this whole double mourning thing?

Freud takes us inward. He goes deep into the psyche—all those unconscious drives and desires that shape our actions, right?

The id, the ego, all that good stuff.

Exactly. So while Nietzsche mourned the loss of an external authority, Freud dove into what happens when we confront the illusory nature of nature itself.

You mean, like, the idea of a benevolent, orderly natural world?

Precisely. He peels back the layers and shows how that too is a kind of projection—a way of making sense of a world that might be inherently meaningless.

So we’ve got these two giants—Nietzsche and Freud—both grappling with the loss of these big, comforting narratives. It makes you wonder how much this double mourning is still playing out in our lives today. Do we feel the effects of it even if we don’t realize it?

It really makes you think, doesn’t it? The sense that the old ways of explaining things—they just don’t quite cut it anymore.

And speaking of grappling with these big questions, Fidaner’s analysis of Slavoj Žižek adds a whole other layer to this.

Ah, yes, Žižek. Always a wild card.

Right? To put it mildly. I mean, this is the guy who called Mother Nature a “crazy bitch” and said God is “stupid, indifferent.”

Yeah, he doesn’t mince words, that’s for sure.

Subtlety is not his strong suit. But how does all that in-your-face negativity connect back to what Fidaner’s saying about mourning?

That’s the fascinating part. Fidaner suggests that all that negativity—that almost aggressive rejection of God and nature—might actually point to a kind of, hm, unprocessed melancholy.

So even in rejecting these figures, he’s still kind of hung up on them?

Exactly. It’s like he’s so busy railing against them that he stays tethered to them, in a way. Fidaner makes this distinction between symbolic mourning and real mourning.

Okay, I think I’m following. So symbolic mourning would be…?

Think about statues, poems, those really angry rants about how terrible something is. It’s a way of holding on to the memory of what’s lost, even if it’s just a shadow of its former self.

Like going through the motions of letting go but not really confronting the loss itself.

Exactly. Real mourning, though—that’s about confronting the void. It’s about accepting that the perfect God, the benevolent nature—those idealized origins—they never actually existed.

And this is where Žižek gets stuck, according to Fidaner—stuck in that symbolic mourning. All that negativity, as insightful as it can be, keeps him connected to the very things he’s criticizing. He hasn’t truly mourned their loss.

So what’s the alternative? How do we escape that trap? How do we actually go through this real mourning?

That’s the million-dollar question, right? And Fidaner, being Fidaner, they don’t exactly give us a step-by-step guide. But they do something just as valuable—they give us a way to understand what’s at stake in this whole struggle. Because here’s the thing: facing that void, that lack of ultimate meaning—it can be terrifying. It’s much easier to cling to anger, cynicism, nostalgia—anything but that emptiness.

So clinging to those ghosts of belief, even if they’re more like scary ghosts, is more comforting than facing the unknown.

But what happens if we don’t do that real mourning? What if we stay stuck?

Well, Fidaner suggests it can manifest in some pretty unhealthy ways. They talk about paranoia, for example—like that lingering suspicion that someone’s always watching, controlling everything.

Exactly—that can be a way of avoiding the true weight of mourning God. And then there’s cynicism, which would be like that belief that everyone’s selfish deep down, that the world’s just a cruel, meaningless place.

You got it. And that, in a way, can be a way of avoiding the mourning of nature.

So even in their absence, these figures—these gods and natures—they still have power over us, like shadows.

Right, they linger, even after the light’s gone. And Fidaner uses these really interesting terms to describe this new landscape we’re in, this space after mourning. They talk about the

barred subject and the barred other.

Okay, those definitely sound like philosophy terms. Break those down for me.

So, the barred subject—that’s us. We’ve come to terms with our own limitations, the fact that we don’t have all the answers. And the barred other—that’s the realization that there’s no ultimate authority out there, no God or nature to provide easy answers.

So it’s liberating, but also kind of terrifying. We’re responsible for creating our own meaning in a world that might not have any inherent meaning.

Exactly. And that’s a heavy realization.

It is. So where do we even begin?

Well, that’s where Fidaner leaves us—with some serious food for thought. They don’t offer easy answers, but they do encourage us to think about how this double mourning plays out in our own lives.

Especially for our listener, right? After all, they’re the one who sent us down this rabbit hole in the first place.

So, as we head into the final part of this deep dive, let’s turn our attention to those lingering questions. What does it mean to truly mourn these gods and natures? What does that look like?

It’s like, how much of our thinking is still shaped by these figures, even when we think we’ve moved on?

Right, and Fidaner really pushes us to think about that. What are those gods and natures we’re still holding on to, maybe without even realizing it?

Are we talking about, like, those deep-seated ideas about how things should be—about success, relationships, you name it?

Yeah, exactly. Those stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, even when—well, even when they might not hold up anymore.

And maybe those stories of those gods and natures—they’re not all bad, right? I mean, some of them probably helped us get to where we are.

Totally. But there comes a point when we have to ask ourselves: are these beliefs still serving me, or am I holding on to them out of fear?

Fear of the unknown, fear of that void we talked about.

Exactly. It’s way easier to stick with what’s familiar, even if it’s not really working anymore, than to face that emptiness.

It’s like choosing the familiar, even if it’s a little dysfunctional, over venturing out into the wilderness with no map, no compass.

Perfect analogy. But, you know, that’s where the real growth happens, right? When we’re willing to let go of what we think we know and embrace the unknown.

It’s that real mourning that Fidaner talks about—letting go of those old beliefs, those gods and natures, so something new can emerge.

And it’s not a one-time thing, right? It’s an ongoing process. We shed those old beliefs, and then guess what? We find new ones to question, new layers to peel back.

So it’s less about finding all the answers and more about being okay with the not knowing, the constant questioning.

Exactly. And honestly, I think that’s a pretty great place to leave things.

I agree. So to our listener, who we have to thank for sending us down this rabbit hole—huge shoutout. What are the gods and natures you might be clinging to? What would it mean to really mourn them? And what new possibilities might open up if you did?

Keep asking those tough questions, folks, and keep diving deep with us. Until next time!