Head Cases

Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times

Elaine P. Miller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231537117
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression.

Reviewing Kristeva's corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual's "aesthetic idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits Kristeva's reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination's allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel's dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a "stuck" existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of "spiritual inoculation" against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection.

1

KRISTEVA AND BENJAMIN

MELANCHOLY AND THE ALLEGORICAL IMAGINATION

Let’s imagine you suffer from anxiety; this is a pathological state. Or you are no longer anxious and you become a consumer, a totally stabilized individual that can be manipulated like a robot. Midway between these two solutions, lie intellectual works and art. These are the actual sites of this anxiety and revolt. The artist’s goal is to find the representation of this state of anxiety.

—Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?

—Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

KRISTEVA ARGUES, PERHAPS UNCONTROVERSIALLY, THAT melancholia is a malady that affects individuals in modernity to a greater extent and in a different and more debilitating way than at any other point in history. Whereas in the past melancholia was associated with the solitary philosophical temperament and with artistic creativity, that is, with the exception rather than the norm, today melancholia or depression is a widespread mental and physical affliction that manifests itself in its most acute form as an inability to act or speak or even to feel. In the opening paragraph of Black Sun, Kristeva refers to melancholia as an ever-widening “abyss of sorrow” that, often on a long-term basis, makes us “lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself.” Even short of this complete loss of interest there may occur a “modification of signifying bonds” in which language functions as a source of anxiety and in reaction thinking slows down.¹

It is her preoccupation with the loss of language in depression and the need she prescribes, before there can be any kind of “talking cure,” to first reestablish the bond with symbolic life, that Kristeva thinks distinguishes her theoretical consideration of melancholia most notably from Freud’s. She writes, “In certain cases, the discourse of the melancholic is so impoverished that one wonders on what could one base an analysis.”²

Kristeva postulates that creative endeavors can provide a tenuous bridge between the depressive refusal of language and the ability to talk about one’s depression to an analyst or to show any interest in returning to normal symbolic life. The recovering or reawakening depressive, through writing, painting, composing, or responding to art, can potentially be captured by an indeterminate region that slowly emerges between two extreme poles. On the one side lies transcendence or the life of signs, which is a realm of assumed shared meaning in which, as a result of depression, she has for a time refused to participate. On the opposite side lies severest depression, which is silent, withdrawn, and completely lacking in expression, a kind of pure immanence. Kristeva discusses the process of the melancholic’s being drawn out of the inertia of apathy and asymbolia and toward a tentative interest in the “life of signs.” The intermediary region that seems to have emerged for artists like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Hans Holbein, who suffered from depression, could be described as a movement toward signification that nonetheless still refuses to commit fully to the determinate order of law and language that shapes human action and human life. It is necessary for the melancholic to emerge from the absence of language in order to regain a foothold on life, yet she naturally hesitates to participate fully in the structure that gave rise to her depression in the first place. Beauty, Kristeva writes, appears as something that may “grab hold” of the melancholic to bring her slowly back from suffering toward language.³

In this chapter I will examine this intermediary realm of melancholic art and literary writing. I argue that melancholic work in the form of creative endeavors can be thought of as a form of spiritual inoculation, a term that allies Kristeva’s work on this subject with the thought of Walter Benjamin. By the term “spiritual inoculation” I refer to the intentional exposure to a small dose of an otherwise lethal malady (in this case, melancholia or depression), in order to stave off a more disabling form of the same woe—also the principle behind homeopathy.⁴ Although the figure of inoculation suggests the prevention of the onset of a disease, I will instead be considering it with reference to an already existing sadness, not a trauma whose origin can be pinpointed at any specific moment in historical time but one that follows a nonlinear temporality involving the unconscious as well as the memory and the imagination. I will examine the ways in which Kristeva and Benjamin speculate on the use of philosophy and art as a means of staving off, promising an alternative to, and contending with the maladies of modernity.

For Kristeva, like Benjamin, modernity has proved detrimental to the human psyche. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva writes that “today’s men and women—who are stress-ridden and eager to achieve, to spend money, have fun and die—dispense with the representation of their experience that we call psychic life.”⁵ By “representation” Kristeva refers to a capacity to register impressions and their meaningful values for the subject.⁶ Drugs for various conditions from insomnia and anxiety to depression, television and other forms of mass media, and products or commodities of manifold kinds stand in temporarily for this kind of representation, but more and more people seek the help of therapists and psychoanalysts because of a general feeling of malaise, an experience of language as artificial, empty, or mechanical, and a difficulty in expressing themselves.⁷ Such a deficiency in psychic life can affect all facets of life: intellectual, sexual, sensory, interpersonal. The analyst is then asked to restore a full psychic life to the individual. Kristeva suggests that these new patients manifest symptoms of the ailments affecting contemporary life, and although each patient has a unique form of the disease, we might call this phenomenon a malady of the soul affecting our time in particular.⁸

In works such as Revolution in Poetic Language, Black Sun, and The Severed Head Kristeva is particularly interested in aesthetic ways of addressing the human need for a full psychic life, or meaningful representation of experience, the lack of which engenders depression and anxiety. Melancholia and depression are not identical, she writes, but are sufficiently related to be able to discuss them together, since both concern the “impossible mourning for the maternal object.”⁹ Melancholia is the “somber lining of amatory passion,”¹⁰ in that the child must undergo the “depressive position” in order to accede to language,¹¹ but once this has been effected, the loss causes her desperately to seek the mother again, “first in the imagination, then in words.”¹² All love is an impossible attempt to return to the mother through the acquired paternal mode of language. Kristeva notes that “if there is no writing other than the amorous, there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy.”¹³

In the Kleinian psychoanalytic paradigm, as we have seen, the child learns language as a means to try to rediscover the lost mother from whom she has been separated through weaning and maturation,¹⁴ and therefore “there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy.”¹⁵ Nonetheless, this depressive position must eventually be overcome in order for individuals to become fully actualized subjects. When this does not happen, or when the compensation for separation from the mother does not correspond to the lack created by the scission, depression in the pathological sense results. Today there are multiple familiar paths to combating depression on an individual level: diet, exercise, psychotherapy, medication. But Kristeva’s interest in Black Sun lies in a treatment of depression that can be discerned in and through writing and art, that is, in a kind of return to the archaic conception of melancholia.

Historically, melancholia has been associated with intellectual thought, in particular with philosophy and artistic creativity. Philosophy emerges in the doubtful moments of the speaking being; melancholia “is the very nature” of the philosopher.¹⁶ Mood itself can be considered a language, Kristeva argues: “moods are inscriptions, energy disruptions, and not simply raw energies. They lead us toward a modality of significance that … insures the preconditions for … the imaginary and the symbolic.”¹⁷ And literary creation transforms this affect into “rhythms, signs, forms” that both are melancholic and speak.

Kristeva calls art a new kind of language, or a “language beyond language,” one that “secure[s] for the artist and connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost thing.”¹⁸ The lost thing, or lost mother, lost when the child enters into symbolic life, is the beyond of signification; it cannot even be imagined, yet it is always sought after. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva had described language as originating in the body of the not yet constituted subject, the subject still fused with the mother:

Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed upon this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures. In this way, the drives, which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.¹⁹

With the entrance into language, the semiotic underbelly of language is covered over, but it does not disappear. In poetic language, and in particular in the nonsignifying linguistic modes of rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and timbre, these energy charges reappear in the form of a “second-degree thetic,” that is, always only indirectly, through the very medium of symbolic language that obscured it in the first place.²⁰

Art “inserts into the sign the rhythm and alliterations of semiotic processes,” those precognitive modalities of significance in which the sign is not yet constituted as the absence of an object or as the product of the distinction between the real and the symbolic. In so doing, it presents a polyvalence of sign and symbol, which builds up a plurality of connotations around the sign. Thus the language of art is other than the language of propositional discourse in that it presents the latter as re-erotized. This symbolic register is re-erotized both in the sense of reactivating the semiotic register within the symbolic as well as in proliferating connotations of words, phrases, and images.

The idea of re-erotizing the symbolic order emerges out of Kristeva’s analysis of traditional philosophies of language as the “thoughts of necrophiliacs.”²¹ The idea of language as death is an extension of Freud’s theory that consciousness itself is a product of the death drive, a protective layer that builds up in order to preserve the psyche from overstimulation. Kristeva argues that language acts in the service of the death drive, diverting it and confining it in order to preserve the self.²² In turn, social structures are built upon the acts of primal murder and sacrifice, with art operating as a kind of ritual atonement for the original crime that founded civilization. Language itself, in which the sign stands in for the absent thing, substitutes death for life.

Art, she writes, crosses the inner boundary of the signifying process, making itself into a kind of scapegoat, the bearer of death. However, in doing so, it exports semiotic motility across the border on which the symbolic is established, allowing for a re-erotization of dead structures. Poetic language of the kind Kristeva analyzes in her early work revisits and reactivates the living origins of language in energy discharges and drive articulation, effectively re-erotizing dead language, just as art and the psychoanalytic talking cure might thaw frozen psychic structures. In returning through the event of death the artist “sketches out a kind of second birth,” a “flow of jouissance into language.”²³

There are three levels of linguistic function in Kristeva’s discussion of melancholia: (1) symbolic language, or ordinary discourse, identified with judgment and the grammatical sentence; (2) semiotic or poetic language, characterized by a connection back to the origins of linguistic acquisition, paying attention or even foregrounding the nonsignifying elements of language, which are related to the primary processes of condensation and displacement; and (3) the absence of language, asymbolia, a symptom of severe depression.²⁴ Poetic language, or the language of creative art, thus represents an intermediary link between silence and the language of either ordinary life or intellectual discourse.

Part of the meaning of the depressive position, which lies at the origin of symbolic life, is that “there is meaning only in despair.”²⁵ Artists and literary writers often seem to be most aware of this precondition for meaning, but there have also been philosophers who recognize it. For example, Blaise Pascal claimed that “man’s greatness resides in his knowing himself to be wretched,” and the novelist Céline wrote that we seek “the greatest possible sorrow” throughout life, in order “to become fully ourselves before dying.”²⁶ What distinguishes Kristeva’s argument in Black Sun from the ancient conception of melancholia is her recognition of the pervasive and often paralyzing effect of depression. What distinguishes her approach from that of many contemporary therapeutic treatments of melancholia is her attention to the way in which depression might be reconsidered by incorporating some aspects of the ancient insight into the condition, notably the awareness that many sufferers of the ailment are also highly creative or intellectually insightful. For some sufferers of melancholia, artistic or intellectual creation can provide a way out of the paralysis of this “incommunicable grief” toward a new life in language. Kristeva analyzes this self-generated treatment that historically some individuals, usually artists or writers, undertook without the intervention of a therapist or medication.

Importantly, this process succeeded not by co...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Losing our Heads
• 1. Kristeva and Benjamin: Melancholy and the Allegorical Imagination
• 2. Kenotic Art: Negativity, Iconoclasm, Inscription
• 3. To Be and Remain Foreign: Tarrying with L’Inquiétante Étrangeté Alongside Arendt and Kafka
• 4. Sublimating Maman: Experience, Time, and the Re-erotization of Existence in Kristeva’s Reading of Marcel Proust
• 5. The “Orestes Complex”: Thinking Hatred, Forgiveness, Greek Tragedy, and the Cinema of the “Thought Specular” with Hegel, Freud, and Klein
• Conclusion: Forging a Head
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List