Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times

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 On the opposite side lies severest depression, which is silent, withdrawn, and completely lacking in expression, a kind of pure immanence.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

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 completely leaving melancholia behind but precisely by incorporating it into the methodology and subject matter of the work itself. Kristeva herself suggests the impetus that has led me to juxtapose her work with that of Walter Benjamin when she places him within “a specific economy of imaginary discourses as they have been produced within the Western tradition,” discourses that “are constituently very close to depression and at the same time show a necessary shift from depression to possible meaning.”²⁷ She indicates Benjamin’s work on Trauerspiel, and specifically on allegory, as among those that best achieve “melancholy tension.”²⁸

Kristeva argues that allegory is “inscribed in the very logic of the imagination” and thus that the imagination itself might be conceived of as allegorical. The question that arises from both Kristeva and Benjamin’s work is: how might humans, if not overcome by this melancholia, reach the stage where we again become interested in the life of the sign, the symbolic life of culture? I will examine melancholia and allegory (which Benjamin aligns with melancholia and Kristeva with melancholic imagination) together, considering the idea of art as holding promise for addressing melancholic modernity. In particular, I will contrast Kristeva and Benjamin’s allegorical approach to the negativity of depression to Hegel’s idea that the melancholic “prose of the world” is only a determinate negation that, while pervasive and persistent, will ultimately be overcome and left behind, in a logic more akin to mourning. Mourning and melancholia are more than contingent psychic processes for these thinkers. Rather, they determine the direction in which self-conscious being develops.

The distinction between melancholia and mourning was explored by Freud in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” In mourning a loss, Freud writes, “normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged.”²⁹ This drawn-out process of separating oneself from an object to which, though separate and distinct from oneself, one nevertheless feels an intense attachment, is called Trauerarbeit, the work of bereavement, and it normally results in an ego that is free and uninhibited. By contrast, melancholia concerns attachment to and loss of an object that is loved—and hated—not as distinct from oneself but as a part of oneself. This process can result in suicidal depression or asymbolia, the inability to link signs to meaning that Kristeva describes.³⁰

Both mourning and melancholia are reactions to the loss of a loved object, either of a loved person—most originarily, of course, the lost mother—or, as Freud says, to the loss of “some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”³¹ Melancholia is further distinguished from mourning in that whereas in mourning the lost object is consciously lamented and can be clearly identified, in melancholia the sufferer may not be able to identify the source of her grief, which often remains unconscious.

In melancholia, Freud writes , “the ego can kill itself only if … it can treat itself as an object—if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world.”³² The ego “wishes to incorporate” the lost object, toward which it feels an ambivalent mixture of sorrow at losing it—and perhaps even before losing it—and anger at it for deserting the ego; the method by which it would do so, Freud writes, “is by devouring it.”³³

Kristeva describes melancholia as the incorporation of the lost object and the resulting self-identification with it. The repeated self-accusation that is a result of the unconscious identification with the lost object combined with anger at it for leaving and ambivalence about it in the first place is a symptom of melancholia. The explanation for the melancholic’s withdrawal into silence lies in her recognition that language is complicit with the paternal order that sanctioned the loss in the first place.

Freud’s analysis seems to limit melancholia to specific individual cases. In The Ego and the Id, however, he revised his theory of melancholia, which had previously been reserved for the analysis of severely depressed individuals. In the later analysis, Freud suggests that melancholia may be constitutive of subjectivity itself. Freud writes that as a person develops, he or she is continually forced to give up sexual objects, and therefore the id must be compensated for this loss. Freud describes an “alteration of the ego”: the ego sets the lost object up inside of itself and then appeals to the id, trying, Freud writes, “to make good the id’s loss by saying ‘Look, you can love me—I am so like the object.’”³⁴ This identification of the ego with the lost object may be the sole condition under which the id can give up its attachments, and, Freud postulates, this process, especially in the early phases of development, “is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those objectchoices.”³⁵ That is to say, the very constitution of the ego is melancholic, since it is composed of a series of settings-up of lost objects. Kristeva and Benjamin go further than this, suggesting that specific historical configurations of cultures are so constituted and, as a result, can be described as depressed.

The idea of melancholia or depression on a collective or national level, which Kristeva puts forward in different ways in New Maladies of the Soul, in Revolt, She Said, and in Contre la dépression nationale, is a controversial one. Clearly, Freudian theory posits melancholia as a disorder that affects an individual, not a group or collective. However, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, whose original German title evokes the whole of human culture and its unhappiness (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) rather than that of any specific civilization, might be considered in this vein. Kristeva’s analysis has a more exact precursor, however, in the work of the existential psychologist Frantz Fanon, who diagnosed the colonized of the Antilles as suffering from an inferiority complex not on an individual but on a collective level.

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon argues that for Europe and for “every country characterized as civilized or civilizing,” the family is a miniature version of the nation and that, conversely, the characteristics of the family, in particular its paternal structure of authority, are projected onto the social environment.³⁶ This ensures, on Fanon’s view, a seamless transition from familial to civic life for any subject who has been raised in a functional family. For black culture, however, Fanon writes, it is almost exactly the opposite. A black child, having grown up in a normal, functional family, “will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.”³⁷ This abnormality is provoked not by a return on any level to familial psychic traumas that shaped the child in infancy or childhood but rather to injections of popular white culture—which present villains, savages, and evil spirits as black—into black culture during childhood, injections that only have their full effect at a later date, when the black subject enters in a full-fledged way into the white man’s world. When the black child—who has identified, just like any white child, with the white hero and explorer who fights the villain or evil in books and films thus who subjectively interiorizing the white man’s attitude without realizing it—goes to Europe, he will tend to cast his own family structure, which is now identified with what society rejects, back into the “id” and identify his political or subjective state with white culture.³⁸ This causes profound dissonance at the level of egoic identification.

Kristeva analyzes a level of social depression that affects everyone equally, more or less, yet its root is the same “capitalistic and colonist society” that Fanon identified.³⁹ In her Contre la dépression nationale, Kristeva identifies the relationships between French citizens and immigrants and the problems left over from the dysfunctional French colonial enterprise as a source of French “national depression” and advocates a greater openness to immigrant others as one method of combating this kind of depression. Kristeva began to write about depression as a national or Western phenomenon in the late 1980s, when she noted an enormous increase in the number of patients with depression in her psychoanalytic practice.⁴⁰

In the current climate of global warfare, ethnic and religious division, and mutual suspicion, we can perceive an analogous melancholic process on a cultural level throughout the West. The loss of orientation toward the Kantian ideals of perpetual peace and cosmopolitanism, with national identity constituted only negatively against that of racialized others and given over to a commercially and militarily dominated confrontational globalism, has led to a melancholic condition that transcends individuals. As Adorno writes in the introduction to Minima Moralia, “What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance as its own.”⁴¹

Kristeva imagines the constitution of culture itself, like Freud’s ego, as a string of lost objects, traces of which we can see in the historical chain of memorials to great individuals, official records of world-historical events, and the trauma of war and loss. In the normal process of cultural formation, these monuments memorialize the past, building it up from within through abandoned object cathexes, whereas when a culture is pathologically melancholic, as Kristeva contends that European and North American cultures of the twentieth and twentieth-first century are, it is in need, just as is the individual who has lost all desire to communicate, of some sort of force of reeroticization. The creative drive can be seen as a move from the death drive to Eros, and Kristeva envisions this possibility primarily through art, through revolution in a very particular sense, and through psychoanalysis.

Freud addressed the individual’s feeling of being “bewildered in his orientation, and inhibited in his powers and abilities” in a time of war, particularly in a historical period when humanity thinks it has reached a high level of civilization.⁴³ Although Freud considered warfare to be an almost inevitable outcome of extended human interaction, attributable to our basic animal nature, he also expressed hope, in his epistolary exchange on the experience of war with Albert Einstein, that pacifists, among whom he numbered himself, might take hope from the cultural disposition of human beings but also develop “a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take.”⁴⁴ Had he lived to see contemporary forms of warfare, he might well have expressed agreement with Kristeva that the immense destructive capacity of technological warfare in which the world seems to be enmeshed, the fact that this brutality can be unleashed from a safe distance by global superpowers, and individuals’ seeming impotence vis-à-vis international conflicts could result in a depression (or “inhibition of powers and abilities”) that is “utterly intolerable.”⁴⁵

At the same time, the detached nature of citizens’ relationship to current wars within which we are nonetheless implicated can lead to a maniacal attitude vis-à-vis social action on both sides of a conflict, in which individuals can express their aggression or death drive without restraint. Xenophobia and religiously informed racism provide a means for individuals to act out the manic inversion of their depression.⁴⁶

This kind of reaction exhibits the peculiar tendency of melancholia “to change round into mania—a state which is the opposite of it in its symptoms.”⁴⁷ Kristeva judges that this tendency characterizes late modernity. She speculates, in an online essay, that the very global cosmopolitanism of which Western societies are most proud leads them to commit countless acts of almost imperceptible impoliteness, which indirectly aggravate “national depression.” Terrorism, fundamentalism, and right-wing intolerance are all symptoms of this depression shifted in various directions:

In 1932, Benjamin was in Spain and Italy. The political situation in Germany was worsening and, as he writes at the beginning of the passage, “it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.”⁴⁹ He proceeds to call up willfully all the images of his childhood in Berlin in order to initiate a feeling of longing that, while it would cause pain, “would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body.”⁵⁰ Not limiting his reverie to his own childhood, he also seeks insight into the irretrievability of the past per se, “not just the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability,”⁵¹ signaling his project to be a continuation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but on a social and political level.

This image of spiritual inoculation seems to me to be an apt one for describing not only the project of the “Berlin Childhood” essay but also the interest in and importance Benjamin ascribes to the figure of the allegory in his monograph On the Origin of German Tragic Drama. Like the intentional pain that reminiscing about an irretrievable past can invoke, the melancholy and fragmentary nature of allegory not only provides an alternative to idealist accounts of art but also lends itself paradoxically to the overcoming of melancholia understood as a debilitating collapse into asymbolia.⁵² The trope of allegory may be thought of as a complication of the binary opposition found in conventional psychoanalysis between mourning—which aims primarily at leaving the past behind—and melancholia, the disabling inability to separate from a lost object. Like memories of childhood willfully invoked, allegory serves as a kind of spiritual inoculation against a more overwhelming and paralyzing attitude toward the past as well as providing a way of imagining a future that might be otherwise. Just as Proust creates a beautiful work of art in conjuring up traumatic memories of the past, the future of a society, nation, or culture might be imagined otherwise through the lens of writing or art.

In Stranded Objects, Eric Santner reflects on discourses concerning the mourning of the Holocaust. Santner gestures to an alternative sense of mourning, one that would neither imagine that we could work through the past in order to simply put it behind us nor use it for strategic purposes. Although Santner refers to this process as a kind of mourning, I think it shares common ground with the intermediary stage Kristeva discusses between the absence of signification and a fixed meaning. Indeed, Santner argues that melancholia emerges “out of the struggle to engage in the labor of mourning in the absence of a supportive social space.”⁵³ Santner points out that there must be a social dimension to the labor of mourning if it is to be successful and that part of the social dimension of mourning is the development of the capacity to feel grief for others and guilt for the suffering one has directly or indirectly caused. This depends in turn on the “capacity to experience empathy for the other as other” (not an attempt to put oneself in the place of the victim), something that film, theater, novels, paintings, and other artworks can accomplish more intensely and effectively than any other medium.⁵⁴

One of the ways in which this process might be initiated, Santner writes, is through the exploration, in thought, of possibilities not pursued, imagining how it might have been if one had acted differently. This is an imaginative, even a literary, act. Adorno, referring to Proust, describes the temporality of politically promising artworks in similar terms, as the remembrance that “remains bound up with semblance: for even in the past the dream was not reality.”⁵⁵ Because of this creative or imaginative dimension, art—in conjunction with philosophy and psychoanalysis—is one of the privileged places to which we must turn in considering the question of the possible political significance of mourning and melancholia.

Kristeva locates herself in a philosophical lineage that begins with Socrates, Plato, and Augustine and moves through Freud and Proust. What they share is a preoccupation with a “retrospective return” or “retrospective introspection,” by which she refers to a combination of anamnesis and self-interrogation, a recultivation of the inner life that has been destroyed by depression, anxiety, and stress.⁵⁶ While for Plato the aim of such a process might be a reunification with one’s most rational, universal self, and for Augustine, a reconciliation with the divine, for Freud, Benjamin, and Kristeva the inner rift cannot be so easily healed. It can, however, be addressed and tended, in a process of continual self- and other-instigated interrogation. For Freud, this process may have been primarily limited to the analytic situation, but Kristeva writes, “the solution to this permanent condition of conflict? Creativity.”⁵⁷

In Hegel’s view, the melancholic condition is one-sided because psychological (interior) and thus merely subjective. The melancholic refuses the future and remains caught up in the loop of the past and present, choosing to “embrace the present in the gratification of its own despair.”⁵⁹ The negative can be overcome through the introduction of objective content that complements the one-sidedness of subjectivity. The ultimate triumph of affirmation in Hegel’s description of human existence suggests that his theory bears a closer affinity to mourning, which, though painful, ultimately leaves behind suffering and negativity in favor of an ego/ethical life that is free and uninhibited, similar to the way in which Hegel describes the organic body dealing with infection and disease. Hegel seems to assume that in most cases this process is successful.

For Benjamin, in contrast to Hegel, modernity has shown itself to be purely prosaic. Attacking the very romanticism that, for Hegel, provided the representation of the highest possibility of art, Benjamin argues that the philosophy of art has been “subject to the tyranny of a usurper who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of romanticism.”⁶⁰ The usurper is the theory of the “symbol,” which Benjamin uses in a Hegelian sense as “resplendent but ultimately non-committal knowledge of an absolute.” Hegel, too, had criticized the symbol for the inadequacy of its manifest form to its content, and both Benjamin and Hegel use the dismissive locution “beautiful soul” to describe the romantics.⁶¹ Benjamin seems to indict Hegel along with romanticism, however, in his critique of the postromantic or idealist theory of the symbol, which, he writes, “insists on the indivisible unity of form and content.”⁶² Traditional aesthetics sees beauty as a symbolic construct that “merges with the divine in an unbroken whole.”⁶³ What makes the theory typically romantic, according to Benjamin, is “the placing of this perfect individual within a progression of events which is … redemptive, even sacred.”⁶⁴ It is this characterization that allows us to infer that his critique is also of Hegelian philosophy of spirit.

For Benjamin, allegory is the unacknowledged other of classicism, which in turn was the other of romanticism. Allegory was adopted by romanticism, he writes, “to provide the dark background against which the bright world of the symbol might stand.”⁶⁵ According to Goethe’s distinction, allegory seeks the particular from out of the general, whereas the symbol sees the general in the particular. For classicism, the term “allegory” thus expresses a conventional relationship between an image and an abstract meaning,⁶⁶ while the symbol grasps the particular in all its vitality and in so doing simultaneously grasps the general or universal. Whereas the temporality of the symbol is an almost religious moment of redemption or reconciliation, a “mystical instant in which the symbol assumes the meaning into its hidden … interior,”⁶⁷ allegory unfolds in a violent dialectical movement that is “untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful.”⁶⁸ It would therefore not be incorrect to align the symbol, as Benjamin discusses it, with mourning, and allegory with melancholia. He writes: “the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy.”⁶⁹ And indeed, the allegorical presents the perspective of the melancholic, who possesses an intimate awareness of the unity between the world of dreams and that of meaning.⁷⁰

Benjamin distinguishes the allegory of medieval Christianity from that of modernity. The earlier form of allegory was primarily concerned with separating the true religion and the true God from the pagan pantheon. Accordingly, early allegory “established itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely.”⁷¹ Allegory began by being closely aligned with fallen nature, the material, and the guilt of the flesh. Because of its fallenness, nature is mute and suffers.⁷² The omnipresence of death, most salient in the corpse, becomes a central figure of early allegory. Because these fallen things cannot speak, allegorical language is fragmented and suggestive, needing to be put together by the reader of the allegory.

In addition to his study of allegory within seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel, Benjamin also addresses allegory in his reading of Baudelaire as part of a critique of modernity, in particular of the mythic spell of commodity culture. Benjamin had planned to write a book on Baudelaire, with one of its three sections to be on Baudelaire and allegory, but only the set of notes entitled “Central Park” attests to this unfinished project. Allegory’s task within modernity would be to make present what has been excluded from dominant linear and progressive ideas of history.

In modernity, the figure of the dead thing is arguably also central, but rather than representing nature and materiality, the dead thing—which, if possible, is even “deader” than the corpse (since the latter has the possibility of being “resurrected” in the spiritual realm)—is the commodity; “the devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity.”⁷³ Baudelaire’s life history and work, in Benjamin’s reading, form a composite image of “petrified unrest,” of eternal movement that knows no development,⁷⁴ like the temporality of mass production, which eternally generates the same. Baudelaire’s poetry wrenches things from their familiar context, namely from the “normal state for goods on display.”⁷⁵ In so doing, Baudelaire could

Unlike the baroque allegory, the Baudelairean allegory manifests traces of the “rage needed to break into this world, to lay waste its harmonious structures.”⁷⁷ The dialectic of commodity production introduces a new significance to the (dead) thing, that of being eternally identically repeatable; thus “allegorical emblems return as commodities.”⁷⁸ Benjamin calls allegory the “armature of modernity,” seeming to accord it an even more important status in the time of technological development and commodity culture than in the era of the baroque, since “baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from within.”⁷⁹

Thus, while the Baroque allegory in a very real sense emerges from social and political upheaval, from decades of war, from earthly suffering, and from the imagery of fragmentation or the ruins of the ancient world, modern allegory is resuscitated by Baudelaire in a time of apparent abundance and smooth, progressive development, the golden age of industrial capitalism. The connection between these two historical periods, as Max Pensky argues, is that “allegory proceeds from Trauer ,”⁸⁰ a state that is neither subjective nor objective but rather a subjective determination arising from and intimately connected to the objective material conditions of its context. Thus art both reflects material conditions and provokes thought on how to engage with the dominant problems of its time.

Benjamin’s analysis of the German Trauerspiel provides insight into how the allegorical mode of linguistic representation might express both melancholia and a means, if not of overcoming it, of “remaking it better than it was.” For the baroque, and also for modernity, Benjamin argues,

This process initially describes the downward spiral toward asymbolia. Words and forms and meaning occur not as parts of a seamless whole, disappearing in their service to a unified meaning that brings the work together in the oneness of its significance, but as fragments, runes, part of a petrified landscape that can only be put together by an interpreter after the fact. Signification itself takes on a melancholic structure, yet there is still a possibility of recapturing, if not one unified, total meaning, then a string of fragmentary senses.

Rebecca Comay writes of allegory as a resuscitation of meaning, with an emphasis on the bodily, materialist implications of resuscitation, as compared to the spirituality of resurrection that we see in Hegelian dialectic. Contrasting Hegel (idealism) with Benjamin (as a representative of materialism), Comay writes: “Symbolic resurrection—‘vision’—… calls up the dead as objects of consumption: the mourned object devoured or introjected as host or food for thought. Allegorical resuscitation—‘theory’—throws up the dead as indigestible remainder and untimely reminder, the persistent demand of unsublimated matter.”⁸²

These words recall quite strikingly Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia and underline the connection between allegory and melancholia. The distinction between vision and theory is Benjamin’s. “Vision,” on this reading, signifies an effacement of temporality, a movement toward the eternity of mythic time, whereas “theory” exposes the present to the past, summoning back the dead in order to interrogate them.⁸³ The reference to devouring or introjecting the lost object recalls Freud’s discussion of melancholia and again is linked to allegorical expression.

Benjamin asserts that the allegory must resist “absorption”—a word that recalls mourning’s “digestive” effect—into a unified and unchanging meaning, remaining open to a plurality of interpretations.⁸⁴ Unable to sustain the illusion of totality, allegory must unfold in novel ways; “it is part of their nature to shock.”⁸⁵ If melancholy “causes life to flow out of” an object, Benjamin writes, “then it is exposed to the allegorist”;⁸⁶ it gains its significance entirely from the work of allegory, which makes of it something different, yet it remains a “key to hidden knowledge.”⁸⁷ The only pleasure that the melancholic allows herself is allegory.⁸⁸ The proper stance of the theorist vis-à-vis modernity is a recognition of one’s condition of being stranded in a world of mere things with the life sucked out of them. The task of the allegorist would be both to manifest this state of affairs and to find a way to address it without putting forth false promises of redemption.

Kristeva calls the imagination of pathological melancholia “cannibalistic.” The imagination that produces melancholic art is, by contrast, “allegorical.” This second type of imagination/language bears witness to the semiotic process that gives rise to symbolic language and that sometimes reappears in poetic language or art. In calling the imagination allegorical, Kristeva indicates that she is making a reference to Benjamin. Specifically, Kristeva refers to the allegory as a “hypersign,” as the “lavishness of that which no longer is, but which regains for myself a higher meaning because I am able to remake nothingness, better than it was.”⁸⁹

The melancholic, on Kristeva’s view, is a “necessarily heterogeneous subjectivity, torn between the two co-necessary and co-present centers of opacity and ideal.”⁹⁰ She postulates that the movement from depression to possible meaning that is opened up for the melancholic, sometimes with the aid of art, might be akin to the very structure of the imaginary itself, as an intermediary, or “tense link,” between the Thing, or the unsignifiable, and Meaning, between the unnamable and the proliferation of signs. The imaginary, on this reading, contains an “infinite possibility of ambivalent, polyvalent, resurrections”⁹¹ for the melancholic awakening to possible meanings. Kristeva asks the question, “might the Imaginary be allegorical?” referring explicitly to Benjamin’s work on German tragic drama, where allegory best achieves a melancholy tension, as Kristeva reads it, between the absence of meaning and full signification, between the void and plenitude, between absence and presence.

Allegory shifts back and forth from disowned meaning, which Kristeva compares to the ruins of antiquity, to the resurrected, spiritual meaning that a Christian reading would attribute as truth even to fallen things. She calls the activity of the imaginary a “flaring up” of a “surplus of meaning” with which the speaking subject can play.⁹² This surplus leads to the creation of the beautiful as that which, in the imagination, promises to fill in the lack perceived by the melancholic. Bringing together Freud’s essay “On Transience” with “Mourning and Melancholia,” Kristeva suggests that for Freud sublimation might be compensation for the originary loss. In “On Transience” Freud is inspired by a conversation with two melancholy friends, for one of whom the beautiful’s transient nature leads to a decrease in its value. Freud responds in contradiction: “On the contrary, an increase!” Kristeva speculates that beauty, for Freud, might be the one thing that is not affected by the universality of death, in the sense that it makes us recognize and cherish the finitude of our existence.⁹³

Kristeva goes on to ask whether the beautiful might be the ideal object that never disappoints the libido, or whether the beautiful object might appear as that which restores the deserting object,⁹⁴ the value that will never perish. She postulates that this melancholic structure of the beautiful parallels ego constitution but that it is allegorical in form, since it circles around the depressive void, standing in for that which never is, transforming loss in order for the ego to be able to live.⁹⁵ The allegorical is an intermediary form of language stretched between depression or the depreciation of meaning and “signifying exaltation.”⁹⁶ Poetry, Kristeva speculates, might “bear witness to a (for the time being) conquered depression.”⁹⁷

Kristeva mentions Holbein, Dostoevsky, and Marguerite Duras as melancholics who worked against, through, and with their melancholia precisely through a melancholic process of creation. She shows that these artists transformed what otherwise would have been an endless, asymbolic lethargy into a signifying and positive mode through writing and painting, without thereby leaving melancholia completely behind or renouncing it, or by resolving it into mourning or complete closure.

Ewa Ziarek has argued that melancholia itself can be conceptualized as a kind of protest, in the form of the refusal to master alterity in terms of linguistic proficiency. Kristeva writes in Black Sun :

Imagination presents an ideal but at the same time provides the subject with the possibility of playing and replaying it in varied forms, manifesting its illusions and disillusion.¹⁰⁰ Kristeva links this human imaginative capacity to the imaginary of a certain form of Christianity, to the ability to transfer meaning “to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning.”¹⁰¹ Very provisionally, through dreams and words, the melancholic subject preserves idealization as a place to survive.

In her discussion of the sixteenth-century German painter Holbein, Kristeva makes clear that she is not simply interested in pointing out the biographical description of an artist as a melancholic or the empirical fact that he or she chose melancholic subjects for his or her art. Rather, she writes, speaking of Holbein:

The death of Christ, the subject of Holbein’s famous The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, which had such an intense effect both on Dostoevsky and on his character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, provides Kristeva with a trope for exploring the notion of melancholic beauty. The notion of God dying is, she writes, the ultimate depressive moment.¹⁰⁴ Yet Kristeva reminds us that another Christian tradition, one focusing on asceticism and martyrdom, eroticized the physical and mental pain and suffering of the Christian tradition to the greatest extent possible.¹⁰⁵ To overlook this tradition would be to marginalize the moment of Christ’s anguish on the cross, the “Father, why have you forsaken me?” that introduces, however briefly, a “caesura” between father and son, one that “provides an image … for many separations that build up the psychic life of individuals,” namely, “birth, weaning, separation, frustration, castration.”¹⁰⁶ This gives the death of Christ a “tremendous cathartic power,” bringing to light the drama in the inner life of every subject and offering “imaginary support to the nonrepresentable catastrophic anguish distinctive of melancholy persons.”¹⁰⁷

In considering the death of God, Hegel focuses primarily on the resurrection and on the Eucharist, moments in which “sacrifice (and concomitantly death and melancholia) is aufgehoben—destroyed and superseded.”¹⁰⁸ In The Phenomenology of Spirit, however, he discusses the death of Christ as a crucial moment in religious life for the transition toward the final stage of the phenomenology of self-consciousness, absolute knowing, beyond the realm of “picture thinking” or representation that still haunts religion and of which it must be divested. Kristeva writes that “Hegel stresses the consequences of this action for representation.”¹⁰⁹ Indeed, Hegel writes that the death of Christ is also the death of representation:

The death of this picture-thought contains, therefore, at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine Being which is not posited as Self. That death is the painful feeling of the Unhappy Consciousness that God Himself is dead. This hard saying is the expression of innermost simple self-knowledge, the return of consciousness into the depths of the night in which “I” = “I,” a night which no longer distinguishes or knows anything outside of it. … This Knowing is the inbreathing of the Spirit, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and Substance therefore has become actual and simple and universal Self-consciousness.¹¹⁰

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel describes this moment of the death of Christ as concurrent with self-consciousness’s assimilation of the knowledge of the absolute, “the deepest abyss of severance” for representation. Kristeva writes that the heart of this severance is the simultaneity of natural death and divine love, “a wager that one could not make without slipping into one or the other of two tendencies,” either a Gothic or Dominican tendency to re-present natural death in art or an Italian or Franciscan tendency to exalt luminous bodies in an attempt to make the glory of the beyond visible through the movement of the sublime. Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ may be the sole example of a painting that goes in neither direction but is located “at the very place of the severance of representation of which Hegel spoke.”¹¹¹ This “betweenness” is an interval rather than a severance, one that would be achieved artistically through the spiritual inoculation of melancholia:

Is it still possible to paint when the bonds that tie us to body and meaning are severed? Is it still possible to paint when desire, which is a bond, disintegrates? Is it still possible to paint when one identifies not with desire, but with severance, which is the truth of human psychic life, a severance that is represented by death in the imagination and that melancholia conveys as symptom? Holbein’s answer is affirmative. Between classicism and mannerism his minimalism is the metaphor of severance: between life and death, meaning and nonmeaning, it is an intimate, slender response of our melancholia.¹¹²

Thus the vision of the death of Christ is a way to “bring him back to life” in a material, this-worldly way.¹¹³ The act of painting, or of viewing the painting, is “a substitute for prayer.”¹¹⁴ In “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” Kristeva also considers style as a means of contending with loss. Here she argues that it is through luminous color that the mother is evoked; in the Orthodox conception of the virgin Mary, she is also manifested as a place of direct contact through color and configuration of space.¹¹⁵ Unlike Hegel, for Kristeva the death of Christ is not the death of representation. Rather, representation comes to support the nonrepresentable and thereby to ease anguish.

Starting from the diagnosis of modern culture as suffering from depression,¹¹⁶ Kristeva focuses on the inoculatory effect of melancholic artworks as a form of resexualization of drives frozen into a kind of monotonous repetition by the loss of a loved object incorporated rather than mourned. Art that might achieve this re-erotization would point forward rather than backward, acting in analogy to the homesickness for a past that will never reappear, but with the added promise of another this-worldly home yet to come. Rather than thinking of fragmented or anguished art as purely self-destructive, Kristeva outlines how the creative drive, even or especially in its revised (resexualized) melancholic form, might be thought of as effecting a re-entrance into signification, a re-erotization of existence, but precisely existence that retains its origin in the melancholic.¹¹⁷ She calls this process, in fact, an “erotization of suffering.”¹¹⁸ She argues that self-critique and critique of one’s culture can become moments of ego development and creativity and that art can take anguish and transform it into a kind of libidinal energy, marking a move away from the death drive, a defense that utilizes melancholia (a more benign form of “death in life”) to inoculate itself against the more debilitating potential of the death drive, namely, its destructive or fragmenting force.¹¹⁹ “The depressive affect,” Kristeva writes, “can be interpreted as a defense against parceling.”¹²⁰ Sadness can “reconstitute an affective cohesion of the self.”¹²¹

Among the semiotic processes that art evokes, if we imagine the symbolic order as constituted along the lines of the Enlightenment calculus of instrumental rationality, we might also include the figure of nature, which Benjamin demonstrates was the primary subject of Baroque allegory. What Kristeva and Theodor Adorno share is a conception of Nature (Adorno) or the maternal body (Kristeva) as the suffering remnants of Spirit, as that which has been excluded by the relation of mastery that the subject has vis-à-vis the object. The beauty of nature, in Adorno’s account, or the beauty of the severed head in Kristeva’s, becomes a figure for the promise of what could be otherwise.

Adorno and Kristeva share a concern for the historical development of the concept of nature. They are both concerned with how a dominant paradigm of discursive and instrumental reason has overshadowed any other possible access to nature and the body and how the abject other has been aligned with nature. Both speculate as to whether art might be able to give a “voice” to these suffering remnants. Kristeva, Benjamin, and Adorno have a common interest not in overcoming melancholia, since it is an important symptom manifesting the disorder of our time, but in exploring ways in which melancholia might be tempered in such a way as to point to another way of existence.

Art may possibly restore a voice to what is mute, to melancholia as asymbolia. Yet art speaks in a language that is enciphered, and it is philosophy’s task to render the mute eloquent.¹²² Art and philosophy thus must work hand in hand. Philosophy itself must retain the melancholic aspect of the artwork in order to do justice to it, and this involves preserving a fundamental ambiguity or indecision that would problematize the idea of a master interpretation. Adorno explicitly and Kristeva implicitly push this problematization so far as to question the boundaries between art and philosophy.

Like melancholia, which Ziarek calls a “powerful critique of the desire to master alterity through the order of representation,”¹²³ nonrepresentational art alone can do justice to the beauty of nature’s power to escape the matrix of calculative reason. While for Adorno nonrepresentational art is purely abstract, Kristeva privileges art that, while it might be figural, suggests or inscribes rather than representing its subject.¹²⁴ Adorno insists on the fragmentary nature of politically successful modern art. If artworks achieved a unified meaning, a totalized utopian view, they would be reconciled with what they intend to critique. But:

The ideological, affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has its corrective in the fact that there are no perfect works. If they did exist, reconciliation would be possible in the midst of the unreconciled, to which realm art belongs. In perfect works art would transcend its own concept; the turn to the friable and the fragmentary is in truth an effort to save art by dismantling the claim that artworks are what they cannot be and what they nevertheless must want to be; the fragment contains both these elements.¹²⁵

Adorno argues that art speaks; art’s language, however, is not the voice of the subjective intention of the artist but a language of the object as object—to the extent that the object speaks, the work of art is successful. The objective, that trace of materiality or nonconceptuality that refuses to be taken up into the realm of spiritual signification, is an essential feature of a meaningful work of art. “Art’s linguistic quality gives rise to reflection over what speaks in art,” writes Adorno; “this is its veritable subject, not the individual who makes it or the one who receives it.”¹²⁶

Adorno calls radical modern art progressive not merely, he says, because of its techniques but because of its truth content. It is the language of radical modern art that makes “existing artworks more than existence.” This language can only be accessed by “the effort to purge authentic artworks of whatever contingent subjectivity may want to say through them,” a task that “involuntarily confers an ever more definite shape on their own language.”¹²⁷ The task of the philosophical commentator is to allow this expression to come into words without thereby reifying its meaning, a task fraught with risk. As Benjamin writes, the “ambiguity” that is the “basic characteristic of allegory” is a “fragment, a rune” whose “beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it.”¹²⁸

Kristeva’s own admiration of modern art lies in the presence of the re-erotized or redeployed semiotic within some of these works. Her analysis therefore foregrounds the existence of something essentially unpresentable in successful works of art or, more precisely, something that can be expressed only negatively or indirectly through its absence in the work. The unpresentable manifests itself as a kind of libidinal force that is nonetheless a protolanguage expressing itself in visual art through color and tone rather than representational form, releasing an affective energy that indicates the unpresentable while simultaneously acknowledging its inability to be presented.

Art opens up a space that is atemporal but not eternal, impossible to connect to the logical order that it interrupts; it therefore expresses itself in terms of a question. Kristeva challenges the Kantian assumption of a concurring sensus communis undergirding aesthetic judgment. Art is needed precisely to “counterbalance the mass production and uniformity of the information age,” to “demystify the idea that the community of language is a universal, all-inclusive, and equalizing tool.”¹²⁹ As I will elaborate in chapter 3, Kristeva believes that art should perform an alienating, diversifying and anti-identificatory function rather than bring together a culture in complacent assumptions of judgments in common. The art that she privileges might be called an art of the uncanny far sooner than an art of the beautiful, in that it thematizes and intensifies the strangeness at the heart of what seems most familiar to us. Color, timbre, inflection, shadow, affect—those semiotic elements of poetic language—cannot hope to be universally shared.¹³⁰

I will now consider some examples of contemporary art as illustrations of what I mean by a melancholic beauty that might be capable of addressing the melancholia of our age. Kristeva describes successful art as art that avoids succumbing to the pathological melancholia that threatens it, either by introducing erotic (life-engendering) fantasies into the narration or, by means of color and sound, effectively re-erotizing the sublimatory activity. She gives the examples of Sade, Diderot, Proust, Genet, Celine, and Joyce as authors who perform one of these two versions of re-erotization.¹³¹

What I have called spiritual inoculation also performs this re-erotization in willfully conjuring up memories from the past in a way that will not paralyze the present but precisely render it tangible and navigable, in the manner of Proust. I believe that artworks that can effect this inoculation are entirely in line with Kristeva’s consideration of writers and artists who overcame melancholia through creating melancholic art. Such art intentionally dwells on the melancholic constitution of the present, either through incorporating temporality into its structure or by manipulating the expected form of the artwork in order to subvert the more damaging melancholia that threatens to overwhelm both artist and viewer in traumatic times.

In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Kristeva discusses two installations from the 1993 Venice Biennale along these lines, in order to respond to the question whether beauty still plays a role in contemporary art. This question is significant if we recall that in Black Sun she called beauty the one thing that might still be able to speak to the melancholic, in order to bring her back from suffering into language.¹³² The installations, by Hans Haacke and Robert Wilson, can be understood in terms of their construction of a symbolic meaning that transcends intentionality, “of which the artists who made them may not have been aware.”¹³³ Both installations in some way literally represented the collapse of foundations: Haacke’s had visitors walk across a crumbling, shifting terrain; Wilson’s ground sank and caved in under spectators’ feet. The art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is, writes Kristeva, fundamentally different from that of the early twentieth century, even though both respond to unprecedented human trauma. Whereas the modern movement in visual art, despite its reaction against devastating world wars, still maintained a faith in the possibility of a unifying theoretical (albeit critical) basis, the art of today no longer has a solid foundation. Artists don’t know where to go or even whether they are capable of going anywhere anymore: “Part of our pedestal is falling into ruin.”¹³⁴ Yet this experience of the disintegration of artistic and theoretical foundations is ambiguous, even “exquisitely” ambiguous, for it is not entirely negative. “The simple fact that an installation has been created in a place where the foundations are disintegrating gives rise to a question as well as to anxiety.”¹³⁵

Here for the first time Kristeva introduces a new sense to her now-familiar discussion of art as revolt or revolution. Whereas in her previous works revolutionary art always referred to an art that exposed the semiotic foundation of symbolic forms, indicating and re-erotizing the sensuous and bodily elements of language, here revolt is discussed in terms of temporality, invisibility, refusal, and displacement. This “shifting of the collapse is deeply affecting, moving, not a jubilation or moment of ecstasy” but “a sign of life nevertheless, a timid promise, anguished and yet existent.”¹³⁶

This new form of art, often in the form of an installation that surrounds and envelops the experiencer rather than confronting her as a two-dimensional flat surface, calls on the entire body to participate through sound and smell and sometimes touch as well as vision. It asks the audience/spectator not to confront an object or image but to enter a space “at the borders of the sacred.” This art experience is a form of incarnation, but it is one that occurs less through a direct re-erotization of the senses and more through a revitalization of (affective) feeling. The installations include a sense of temporality and narrative; they unfold over time and reference historical events. Their temporality has an added dimension, however, in that they also displace reflection onto our own selves, our narratives as well as our regressions, our progress as well as our disruptions.

The first form of art I will consider, in order to add to this consideration (while also taking into account, if not foregrounding, the explicitly political content) is the countermonument. In Germany, where this art form began, countermonuments are usually constructed for the purpose of engendering discussion about the dangers of racism and fascism, but they do so in a way that also confronts the dangers of conventional monuments. Like embodiments of cultural mourning, the monument is a visible manifestation of a culture’s desire to put a trauma behind it and to commemorate itself, usually in the terms of heroism. However, as Robert Musil points out, “There is nothing in this world so invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention.”¹³⁷ A traditional monument to war both monolithically commemorates the fighters and marks the end of conflict, giving permission to the onlookers to move on with their lives while the memorial does the remembering for them.

By contrast, in Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev Gerz’s very different Monument Against Fascism and War for Peace, installed in 1986 in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg, the artists constructed a twelve-meter-high column plated with lead accompanied by a steel stylus, so that anyone could inscribe in the soft lead. A plaque that accompanied the monument reads, in several languages:

Over the course of the next seven years, the monument was lowered, in five-foot increments, into the earth. The only thing to remain visible is a plaque marking the spot of what once was there, just as a gravestone marks the end of a human life. The monument literally changed with each visitor. At the same time, it disappeared into a very mundane context, a pedestrian shopping mall where it can easily be overlooked. This countermonument incorporates a sense of time and, by extension, of decay and ruin. It nonetheless retains a material or objective remainder or reminder, though in the form of a fragment. And it includes a conceptual component that suggests the work’s meaning but does not claim to render it fully transparent, that cedes the primary voice to the objective remainder and allows it, rather than the artists, to speak to its interlocutors, who must seek it out. Here we see Santner’s “it might have been” at work; as Nietzsche writes, “it is an attempt, as it were, a posteriori to give oneself a past from which one would like to be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended.”¹³⁸

In For They Know Not What They Do, Slavoj Žižek considers the relationship of a culture to its traumatic past in a way that can be applied to the question of countermonuments. He writes, implying a critique of traditional memorials:

In this quotation we can discern the contrasting logics of mourning and melancholia. The kind of monument that would seek to be perfectly faithful to the past would end up betraying it by integrating it in a false symbolization into which it would disappear. This is the negative counterpoint of Adorno’s argument that to seek to represent the emancipation that the beauty of nature signals pictorially will only collapse that promise into the commodity culture that it attempts to resist, a landscape to be purchased and displayed.

That the kind of memory Žižek refers to is allegorical in Kristeva’s terms can be seen in the language he uses to describe it. Like Kristeva discussing the beautiful’s role in circling around the depressive void, standing in for that which never is, transforming loss in order for the ego to be able to live, Žižek characterizes the task of the Left as that of the drive in Lacanian psychoanalysis: “the compulsion to encircle, again and again, the site of the lost Thing, to mark it in its very impossibility—as exemplified by the embodiment of the drive in its zero degree, in its most elementary, the tombstone which just marks the site of the dead.”¹⁴⁰

Referring to the resistance to a neo-Hegelian conservatism, Žižek writes:

This … is the point where the Left must not “give way”: it must preserve the traces of all historical traumas, dreams, and catastrophes which the ruling ideology of the “End of History” would prefer to obliterate—it must become itself their living monument, so that as long as the Left is here, these traumas will remain marked. Such an attitude, far from confining the Left within a nostalgic infatuation with the past, is the only possibility for attaining a distance on the present, a distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New.¹⁴¹

Recently, another countermonument of some interest has been erected. Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna was constructed in 2001 after a lengthy design competition and resistance from the public against the design and the implications of the project. Whiteread’s monument is the negative form of a library. The concrete structure contains the imprint of rows of books, spines facing in, lining the outer walls. Inscribed around the base are the names of Nazi concentration camps. The work’s facade bears a dedication in German, Hebrew, and English to the sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Whiteread has been casting the “negative space” in the interior of closets, under chairs, within bathtubs, and even the insides of entire houses for years. Her sculptures bring to presence the spaces that objects occupy or the traces of space they leave behind. Her countermemorial is arguably the least radical of her works, although it is the most visible. I argue that all of Whiteread’s works, not just the explicitly political ones, address the themes of cultural and personal melancholia that we have been considering here. Her work has been described as the engraving of invisibility, the bringing to presence of absence as absence,¹⁴³ evoking the abjection of the body turned inside out.

Rosalind Krauss describes Whiteread’s work by way of Roland Barthes’s description of the photograph as a traumatic death mask, both structured and asymbolic. Barthes writes that in the face of photography, “I have no other resource than this irony: to speak of the ‘nothing to say.’”¹⁴⁴ Krauss finds the same presence of structure and asymbolia in Whiteread’s sculptures, which both signify, in that they cast an actual site, yet work against the universalizing of the cast, whose usual function is a serial run of objects.¹⁴⁵ The cast of the interior of the object gives birth to a singularity that lies somewhere between silence and the universality of the concept. In this sense her work is melancholic, maintaining a tension between opacity and possible meaning, between the articulation and dearticulation of significance. The solidification and objectification of the interior space creates an uncanny experience of what is usually considered off limits, the private, an experience that Whiteread herself describes as akin to “exploring the inside of a body, removing its vital organs.”¹⁴⁶ It is also an exploration of the remnants of the symbolic order, of the maternal body, of nature. The work references a loss of language that might lead to a transformation of language, logos, the symbolic. The object speaks—but it speaks the impossible language of the private, the domestic, the feminine. The works House and One Hundred Spaces evoke the temporality of both memory and imagination; both the constricted past and a future struggling for freedom. Whiteread turns the space of domesticity into a map of art, that does not simply expose the hidden condition for the possibility of representation (negative space) but transposes it into something crafted, created. Whiteread’s work is a perfect example of what Kristeva calls the “second degree thetic,” expressing the language of the semiotic from out of the position of the symbolic. The works do not simply commemorate what has always already been there but in a real sense create it, by bringing it into tangible being. The negative space made solid in Whiteread’s work brings the hidden semiotic underbelly of symbolic language to the fore in such a way that it becomes not only visible but visibly obtrusive, impossible to ignore and seductively captivating. We recognize and are drawn to this semiotic space without being able to name it, precisely because it silently and invisibly accompanies every aspect of our symbolic life.

In this chapter I have suggested that Kristeva, Benjamin, and Adorno’s writings on melancholia, allegory, and nature can be fruitfully juxtaposed in order to think an alternative to a paralyzing, leveling malady, whether it be the melancholia of a depressive, the frustration of a political theorist vis-à-vis the hegemony of consumer capitalism, the impasse of a philosopher face to face with the death of god, or a culture pushed to its breaking point. What all of these approaches share is an interest in the work of art as a gesture of resistance to silent acquiescence or asymbolia, a promise that some day, things might be different. The allegorical work of art makes tangible the silent choric interstices of language, the material backbone of the visible.

In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Kristeva emphasizes the dependence of melancholia on the isolation of the death drive. Freud discovered the link between sublimation, which “disentangles the mixed drive,” and the extrication of the death drive, which “exposes the ego to melancholia.”¹⁴⁷ While this melancholic condition often is linked, as we have seen, with an artistic stance, one must nevertheless caution that such a condition is neither to be intentionally sought nor necessarily desired, for “how does one avoid succumbing to it?”¹⁴⁸

The provisional answer that Kristeva gives is the sexualization or erotization of the sublimatory activity, the emphasis on the color, texture, and rhythm of language and the use of plastic representation. This sexualized sublimatory activity exposes the speaking subject to the death drive while tempering its aggressive force in a form of spiritual inoculation. This seems to be achieved, Kristeva suggests, by allowing language a broader latitude than it has in propositional communication, including a consideration of the unrepresentable or ineffable within language.¹⁴⁹ This is a facet of language that is also present in unconscious transference and countertransference in the psychoanalytic situation. Kristeva reminds us that this nonrepresentable “other” of language, with which the speaking subject needs to be reconciled, was called the logos for the pre-Socratics and Being for later philosophers.¹⁵⁰ If being can be sexualized in language, it is because, as Freud showed, the fate of meaning is linked to the “destiny of negativity.”¹⁵¹ It remains to be seen what the contours of this negativity will be, and it is to negativity that we will turn in the next chapter.