Nietzsche and Freud: God's death between mourning and melancholy

Abstract

In A Gaia science Nietzsche attributes two senses to the death of God: first as murder, then as the emergence of a new dawn, the harbinger of new hope. In the case of murder and not simply death, one can ask whether the act denounced by him could be thought of in the perspective of the murder of the primeval Father, the founding myth elaborated by Freud; as dawn and openness to new hopes, seems to imply a work of mourning to be consummated with the transvaluation of morals. This article undertakes a reflection on these two perspectives in order to put philosophy and psychoanalysis in dialogue. Under the hypothesis that the death of God is the repetition of the murder of the Primordial Father, the problematic of mourning and melancholy as possible destinations of Nietzsche’s project.