Melancholy and Darkness. Dilemmas of Subjectivity in the Dark series

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Imagen de portada realizada por Julio Pantoja. Buenos Aires. 2017. Restos de un afiche sobre una pared de la ex Esma. En el poster desgarradp se alcanza a ver una foto de Pablo Lasansky tomada el 30 de marzo de 1982 de la represión a la marcha obrera de la CGT.
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Published: Dec 13, 2023
Keywords:
melancholy;, TV series;, subjectivity;, affections;, Julia Kristeva.

Main Article Content

Ariel Gómez Ponce
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Abstract

Dark is a German TV series that, despite its obsession with time travel and the end of time, portrays melancholy as its predominant emotional experience. To account for this, the article recovers some arguments from Julia Kristeva’s semiology: a theoretical conception that historicizes the meaning of affects as a modality of significance that constitutes subjectivity. In Kristeva’s terms, melancholy deploys an affective semiotics that is linked to fragility of love, finding its resonances in corporality, but also in a decentred temporality that would respond to the depressive economy of postmodern culture. Netflix fiction inventively presents this melancholic pathos, not only capturing epochal breaks related to subjectivity and its way of inhabiting time, but also proposing such affect as an dark tonality that flows throughout its visuality, more specifically through those procedures of representation linked to chromaticism, temperatures and aesthetic composition. From this reading, the article seeks to demonstrate how Dark manages to make melancholy a matter of content, but also of form.


 

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How to Cite
Gómez Ponce, A. (2023). Melancholy and Darkness. Dilemmas of Subjectivity in the Dark series. Heterotopías, 6(12), 1-23. https://revistas.psi.unc.edu.ar/index.php/heterotopias/article/view/43630
Issue
Vol. 6 No. 12 (2023): Discourses, representations, and appropriations of the contemporary city. A look at urban habitation
Section
Articles
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Author Biography

Ariel Gómez Ponce, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

 

Ariel Gómez Ponce is Assistant Researcher at the Center for Research and Studies on Culture and Society (CONICET and National University of Córdoba, Argentina). He holds a PhD in Semiotics, is a Professor of Spanish as a Mother Tongue and Foreign Language at the UNC, and has a Post-Doctorate in Social Sciences. Currently, he is the Director of the research program "Studies on Pop Culture. Local forms, global designs and semiotics of the popular" (CEA, FCS, UNC) and as Academic Coordinator of the PhD in International Studies (CEA, FCS, UNC). In addition to numerous specialized articles, he has published the book Depredadores. Fronteras de lo humano y series de TV (Babel, 2017), has edited with Pampa Arán the book Fredric Jameson: una poética de las formas sociales. Claves conceptuales (Edicea, 2020) and, together with Silvia Barei, Lotman revisitado. Perspectivas latinoamericanas (Edicea, 2022). From the perspective of a materialist semiotics of culture (Bakhtin, Lotman, Kristeva, Jameson), he is dedicated to the study of current popular and mass culture, problematizing how television series question subjectivities in late capitalism.

How to Cite

Gómez Ponce, A. (2023). Melancholy and Darkness. Dilemmas of Subjectivity in the Dark series. Heterotopías, 6(12), 1-23. https://revistas.psi.unc.edu.ar/index.php/heterotopias/article/view/43630

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