The melancholia of extinction: psychoanalysis and speculative realism at the end

This article considers the end through cinema, psychoanalysis and speculative realism. Among contemporary end-of-the-world films Lars von Trier’s Melancholia stands out for its emphasis on the simultaneity of psychic and cosmic annihilation. On the one hand, this of course evokes Sigmund Freud’s famous essay on grief and depression, “Mourning and Melancholia”, as well as Julia Kristeva’s own stellar intervention on the topic, Soleil noir, while also highlighting a strange blindspot in the work of Jacques Lacan. On the other, it points to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, where he examines (via Lyotard) the possibility of thought in the certain knowledge of the end of all things through “solar catastrophe”. This article seeks a dialogue between such positions – beyond Brassier’s incomplete appeal to the death drive – to explore the possibilities that von Trier’s film, and cosmological end-of-the-world cinema more generally, might allow for a rethinking of realism in the context of intellectual and affective extinction. Where Mark Fisher suggests that our everyday “capitalist realism” gives rise to a deadening melancholia, and Frank Ruda argues that “real freedom conceptually presupposes the assumption that the worst has always already happened”, this article asks how to practice critique after the end of the world.

© 2026 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston

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