Melancholy is an inward withdrawal from worldly relations that paradoxically exposes the self to the horizon of dreaded mortality through temporal distortions and the paralyzing horrors of existence, while simultaneously and paradoxically yearning for solace in the unconscious oblivion of death. It warps temporal coherence and reduces speech to the muteness of asymbolia. In antiquity, melancholy was affiliated with the excess of black bile. In psychoanalysis, it is primarily ascribed to a fixation on a lost or unnameable object. In psychiatry, causes can vary from trauma and stress to chemical imbalances that echo the archaic disequilibrium of black bile.[1]
The concept of melancholy is historically bound to the human psyche. But melancholy can also be understood as a condition that exceeds the human, inhabiting material and machinic processes whose temporalities and trajectories unfold without reference to human narrative. These processes refuse overcoding and find anonymity in their diminished relations, scrambled codes and temporal ambiguity, occupying the realm of inhuman, pre-personal affect.
There is some precedent to locating melancholy in the nonhuman. Before psychoanalysis, melancholy had already been framed as extending beyond the human in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton. He describes it as the “character of Mortality”, encompassing not only humans but plants, animals and sociopolitical bodies.[2] Similarly, László Földényi (citing Agrippa von Nettesheim), lists a range of melancholic animals, as well as architectural ruins and organic decay.[3] Such precedents situate melancholy as both a human and nonhuman affect, through shared transience and susceptibility to deterioration.
But the dominant histories of melancholy have primarily tracked it as a psychophysical or psychoanalytic condition, from humoral excess to the open wound of Freud’s lost object.[4] It is played out as inward psychic reflection that seeks recognition and restitution. In these human-centric frames, withdrawal is pathological and stasis is a setback that requires curative measures. But if melancholy is recast or modified as a way of attending to what exceeds the human – material and machinic operations that do not aim at resolution – then its symptoms are less like errors and more like procedures that decelerate or unmake structural formations. In this sense, melancholy can be conceived as an energetic condition of other-than-human life, or a drift into indefinite decay that culminates in neither destruction nor renewal. It is a double movement toward and away from finitude – a suspension where decay contracts an entity’s relations while at the same time releasing fragments and residues into the outside – a geocosmic openness of ongoing but decelerated transformation.
This reorientation of melancholic being requires abandoning the human as a measure and slackening the compulsion to frame every breakdown as an opportunity for innovation or regeneration. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of body without organs (BwO) – what resists the organizational capture of strata, offering a field of intensity that refuses to coalesce into a fixed representation of stability – resonates with François Bonnet’s notion of the infra-world. It is a term for the mute, viscous realm beneath experience and beneath sensations. The infra-world “oozes, it crouches in the shadows. … It is the mute and blind portion of the real, its accursed share. … It is what fails to make a world.”[5] If melancholy is channelled through this imperceptible field of anonymous disintegration – a subterranean ocean of black bile – its operations repel recuperation and refuse to solidify into an organism or yield to productive reintegration.
Nonhuman melancholy refers to withdrawn, disintegrative processes that resist fixture or closure. It disturbs the positive expectation that damage must be repaired, obsolescence must be renewed, and that ruination must be instantly reabsorbed into productive circuits. Those reparative demands are anchored in human-centred notions of brokenness, and in technological-capitalist teleologies that treat repair or replacement as generative imperatives. Nonhuman melancholy permits slowness, irresolution, corrosion and softening, as well as temporalities that expand intervals of disengagement and diminish relational capacity without fully abolishing it.
Consider the derelict existence of microplastics. Microplastics are dispersed fragments of obsolete, scattered use-objects. They are molecular entities that are not fully reintegrated into productive systems. Their relations are diminished but not entirely withdrawn, as they do leach chemicals and disturb ecologies and bodies. But their interactions are diffuse, diminished, without purpose, and temporally ambiguous. They persist in an open-ended degradation that drifts through flows of air, water, and sedimentation.
To understand that nonhuman entities can be melancholic is to acknowledge that entanglements and affects are not always inclined to be generative. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic machine ontology allows for this reorientation to take place, as it loosens subject-centred modes of being and relocates symptoms as machinic, operative processes. The BwO is the nonproductive surface that resists forms of organization – a “model of death … Zero intensity”, where function is discarded, deserted.[6] In this machinic interpretation, melancholy is something that arises from antiproduction. Instigated by the antiproductive flows of the BwO, it unravels assemblages from within, interrupting absorption and dissipating the flows that regularly keep material-energetic regeneration in motion.
Reoriented to the nonhuman, melancholy ceases to be a mood and becomes a register of operations: partial withdrawal from relations, deceleration, temporal indeterminacy. For example, in magnetic tape degradation, the information signals withdraw as relations diminish. The oxide slackens its bond with the substrate and playback heads can no longer track the signal reliably, until it all becomes illegible noise to the listener. Degradation slows the medium into stutter, suspending its temporal and sequential coherence.
Digital systems can also behave melancholically. Glitch is only a minor, common inflection, but more often, melancholy appears in imperceptible softenings, such as losses through successive compressions or the gradual obsolescence of inaccessible archives. These are diminutions of relational capacity. Nonhuman melancholy thus extends even to binary architectures, which are neither fully immaterial nor immune to disintegration. They can corrode, compress, and diminish, subject to the same melancholic disintegrative potential as other entities.
Nonhuman melancholy diagrams procedures of diminishment and temporal suspension. It is not the absence of affect but its persistence in systems as attenuated drift. It pertains to the organic and digital alike in the slow persistence of subtraction, reminding us that no system is exempt from the eventuality of decay and residual sedimentation.
The term withdrawal requires clarification. In this context, it does not refer to an inaccessible core as it does in object-oriented ontology. Here, withdrawal is shorthand for diminishment of relations: a machine’s decreasing capacity to sustain operative links with other machines and within assemblages. This can be imposed through erosion, corrosion, or infestation, or it can be strategic through disengagement or refusal. Historical accounts of melancholy already recognize withdrawal as a distinctive tendency. It is a movement inward that recoils from sociocultural integration, becomes recalcitrant in its non-participation, and produces “a self that deliberately shuts itself up.”[7] Translated machinically, withdrawal is the machine’s tendency to reduce translations, lessen intensity, and soften bonds.
Antiproduction instigates melancholic diminishment. The BwO “repels the organs and lays them aside”, as the “immobile motor” that collapses intensities to zero.[8] This is one way of describing how disarticulation functions as a mechanism – how machines operate with reduced capacity, or stall without an end point. Yet melancholy is not the same as zero intensity. It stands for diminishment, not eradication. It is a persistent slackening or softening powered by antiproduction’s injection of zero into processes of decay. What unfolds is not a zero-collapse but rather a drifting remainder in proximity to stasis, without the full stop.
Soft rot in cellulose illustrates this dynamic. Fungi such as Ascomycete soft-rot species infiltrate wood and initiate a gradual softening of the relational mesh that holds the fibres in coherence. Hyphae work through the wood’s secondary cell wall and loosen the molecular weave that holds the fibres together. Structural strength slackens and surfaces lose rigidity. The cohesion of the structure is thinned without reaching complete breakdown. The material persists in a weakened and partially articulated state where bonds weaken but do not entirely give way to total obliteration. What remains is a machinic condition of slow disintegration that does not reach the zero point.
Reza Negarestani’s concept of germinal death supports this machinic interpretation by extending diminishment into a theoretical formulation. Germinal death is the loosening of rigid arrangements through decay. Death is “disterminalized”, cracked open into an “ultimate openness”.[9] Antiproduction becomes germinal itself, amplifying the softening of rigid structures. It is a multiplication of disarticulations by which entities resist renewal. The BwO tends toward zero, while Negarestani insists on a disterminalization. As death is split open, it cannot be finalized, and its zero is multiplied into proliferating fissures. Germinal death recalls melancholy’s refusal of closure. It suspends structures, keeping them porous for further disintegration, while ensuring that collapse is never fully terminal.
Nonhuman melancholy resists the humanist (and capitalist) compulsion to translate interruptions into reparation, reintegration, or renewed participation. Instead, it aligns with a mode of remaining adjacent to processes that refuse closure. It is a sustained interval that allows persistence with a deficit of relations, remaining incomplete. These states are not faults to be corrected, but merely conditions of a system’s or an entity’s existence. Melancholy pushes against the fetish for resilience and generative growth, refusing to be captured by teleologies of repair. The melancholic machine recoils from self-maintenance and relinquishes its systemic commitments.
Nonhuman melancholy, as a concept, can be a tool for revealing the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds. Melancholic withdrawal, deceleration, and temporal ambiguity do not belong solely to the psyche. These behaviours also operate through organic matter, artificial systems, and digital substrates. Folding back into human experience, these processes can shape how we encounter and manage events of obsolescence, loss, or suspension. In this sense, nonhuman melancholy enacts a refusal, resisting the imperative to renew or reintegrate, instead lingering in irresolution, disorder, incoherence.
To situate melancholy posthumanly is to perceive it as a machinic ambience, a decentring drift of decay that traverses both human and the nonhuman registers. It is not only a property of subjects but a machinic process refusing operative closure. It is a molecular softening where relations unravel and fragments of bodies, codes, and materials persist in suspended uncertainty. Black bile seeps through these machinic circuits as a primordial viscosity, an infra-substance of antiproduction that stalls organization, function, or structural coherence. Melancholy is a diagram of this disarticulation, a sombre saturnine interval whose affect courses transversally through machinic bodies, systems, processes. It is a softening current that enfolds perception and the flows of matter-movement alike.
Works Cited
Bonnet, François, The Infra-World (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017)
Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Angus Gowland (London: Penguin Classics, 2021), pp. 217–18
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Penguin Books, 2009)
Földényi, László F., Melancholy, trans. by Tim Wilkinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)
Freud, Sigmund, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005). ePub
Negarestani, Reza, “
Death as a Perversion: Openness and Germinal Death”, in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. by Joshua Johnson (Brooklyn, NY: [NAME] Publications, 2013), pp. 55–79.
Opeiko, Sasha, Nonhuman Melancholy: Objects of Decay, Darkness, and the Computational Gaze, PhD diss., Western University, 2024.
[1] Sasha Opeiko, Nonhuman Melancholy: Objects of Decay, Darkness, and the Computational Gaze (unpublished PhD diss., Western University, 2024).
[2] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Angus Gowland (London: Penguin Classics, 2021). ePub
[3] László F. Földényi, Melancholy, trans. Tim Wilkinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 96.
[4] Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005). ePub
[5] François Bonnet, The Infra-World (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), p. 90.
[6] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 329.
[7] Földényi, Melancholy, pp. 57–58.
[8] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 329.
[9] Reza Negarestani, ‘Death as a Perversion: Openness and Germinal Death’, in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. Joshua Johnson (Brooklyn, NY: NAME Publications, 2013), p. 72.