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

The depressive phase thus effects a displacement of sexual auto-erotism onto an auto-erotism of thought: mourning conditions sublimation. Have we really taken account of the degree to which our languages, called maternal, are of a double sort, both mourning and melancholia? That we speak out of depression as others dance on a volcano? A body leaves me: its tactile warmth, its music that charms my ear, the view given to me by its head and its face are lost. For the “capital” disappearance I substitute a capital incarnation? The one that keeps me alive, on condition that I represent, ceaselessly, never enough, indefinitely, but what? A body that has left me? A lost head?

TOWARD THE END OF STRANGERS TO OURSELVES, KRISTEVA extends Hegel’s historical dialectic to include the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis, even tracing Freud’s discovery of the unconscious to the preparatory historical stage described in Hegel’s account of the restless and productive tarrying of Spirit with its negative Other.¹ Drawing a line from Kant to Herder to Hegel to Freud, Kristeva then traces her own thought of negativity as the driving dynamic of human psychic development through its inception in German idealist philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis.²

This extension of the historical dialectic past Hegel and past the unity of substance and subject in Absolute Spirit is paralleled, I argue, in Kristeva’s articulation of a spiritually essential art beyond religion and philosophy, subverting the Hegelian claim that art in its highest vocation is for us a thing of the past. The dissolution or inadequacy of art for our spiritual needs, in Hegel’s account, has its beginning in romanticism, when the commensuration of form and content characteristic of classical art was ruptured through Spirit’s self-actualization. Kristeva argues that what distinguishes the art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century from the art that preceded it, even from surrealism, is its foregrounding of the semiotic unconscious. Kristeva’s philosophy of art is at least in part a phenomenology of the unconscious or the bodily repressed insofar as it momentarily manifests itself in certain forms of art. Modern and postmodern art and literature can become transformational signifying practices that work against philosophical systems of absolute knowledge and counter to the artistic metaphysics of representation, precisely because they lie at the borderline between soma and psyche.

I will argue in this chapter that Kristeva’s concept of negativity, articulated most extensively in Revolution in Poetic Language, can be productively read alongside Theodor Adorno’s articulation of nonidentical mimesis, a form of mimesis that he claims can remain faithful to the ban on graven images.³ A connection between negativity/negation and iconoclasm is suggested in Adorno’s claim that the ban on positive representations of utopia leads to the possibility of exposing the injustices of modern life, just as negative expression in psychoanalysis can lead to a revelation of repressed content.⁴ Kristeva’s account of iconoclasm also engages with the Freudian theory of negation, which, she argues, fundamentally transforms Hegelian negativity; in this way, the ban on graven images emerges as a way of blocking the spectacle. In saying “no” to images, that is, Kristevan iconoclasm affirms the image/icon in a more revolutionary sense.

Adorno and Kristeva agree that iconoclasm must be understood as a ban on representation. Whereas Adorno’s iconoclasm led him to embrace art movements that eschew figuration altogether, in particular abstract expressionism, championing an unintelligibility that shatters traditional hierarchies of understanding, Kristeva articulates an iconoclasm that inscribes the figurative rather than representing it. To understand this distinction concretely and illustrate it, I will consider Walter Benjamin’s and Kristeva’s writings on photography and film along with some examples of contemporary art. A mimesis that respects the ban on graven images moves art history beyond the systematic movement of the Hegelian dialectic that culminates in the Absolute, extending it in the direction of dynamic differentiation without resolution, as well as into the unknown of the unconscious, decentering the trajectory of self-consciousness.

For Hegel, the philosophy of art coincides with the investigation of the concept of beauty, both its meaning and its progressive instantiation in history. Hegel’s conception of beauty, in turn, rests on the image insofar as it coincides with the Idea; that is, beauty represents the ideal, bringing it to presence in sensuous form. Art gathers together and harmonizes the two sides of concept and sensuous material, giving itself the task of presenting ideal content to immediate perception in a sensuous shape, such that the two “appear fused into one.”⁵ For this reason, Hegel claims that art must be concrete, that is, equally subjective and objective, simultaneously spiritual (and thus universal) and at the same time fully actualized and particular.⁶ Giving an analogy to conceptions of the divine, Hegel claims that a purely abstract concept of God is not fully actualized because it is one-sided. Jews and Turks, he writes in his Lectures on Aesthetics, “cannot represent their God in the positive way that Christians have” because of the ban on graven images in Judaism and Islam. The Christian God, by contrast, is “set forth in his truth,” because the incarnated Christ, like art, represents “essentiality and universality and particularization together with their reconciled unity.”⁷ Art proper must manifest such embodied ideality.

It is thus ancient Greek art that marks the apotheosis of visual art according to Hegel’s reading. Art’s aim is, above all, to “make the Divine the center of its representations,” and Greek religion presents a complete commensurability between the sensuous and the ideal, portrayed most strikingly in sculpture. The incarnation of God in Christ does this too, initially, and this embodiment has been represented in early Christian art, but the truth of Christianity in its fully actualized form cannot be contained in a representation; it bursts the bounds of sensuous encapsulation. Poetic lyric alone could “strike the note of praise of [the divine’s] power and his glory,”⁸ and religious philosophical texts might do this even better once the constraints of sensuous form, having been fully exhausted, are shed. For this reason, art, “considered in its highest vocation,” is, for us, a thing of the past.⁹ It has lost its genuine truth and life and has conceded its place to ideas, which require no sensuous presentation.

Art succeeds insofar as it establishes a complete reciprocal interpenetration of meaning and expression, in Hegel’s view. Preclassical (that is, pre-Greek) art, which Hegel calls symbolic art and which he associates with “the East,” presents corporeal and predominantly natural forms in order to convey meanings that are indeterminately spiritual. Here Hegel discerns a manifest incompatibility of content and form in the opposite direction, where ideal content remains either implicit (in primitive totems, for example) or unintelligible (as in the case of the sublime).¹⁰ Classical art is the consummation of the realm of beauty because it idealizes the natural and transforms it into an “adequate embodiment of spirit’s own substantial individuality.”¹¹ True art must be representational, on Hegel’s view, because in order for the ideal to correspond with external reality, the human being must appear to be completely at home in the world, free in relation to nature, and living harmoniously in all relationships. For this to be possible, “the representation must be drawn up in complete fidelity to nature,”¹² with a “fullness of detail,”¹³ while presenting “an essential harmony into which … a great deal of contingency enters … yet without the loss of the fundamental identity” of subject and environment.¹⁴

Hegel considered romantic art to be so spiritually elevated that beauty, as the perfect correspondence between external form (expression) and internal content (meaning), could no longer be “the ultimate thing.”¹⁵ Romantic art comes at a time when Spirit “knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality” and thus withdraws from the external “into its own intimacy with itself,” judging nature to be an inadequate existence to itself.¹⁶

The art historian Donald Kuspit has described, over a series of essays, the progression from modern to postmodern art in a way that, when pieced together, provides a contemporary version of Hegel’s analysis of the history of art. Kuspit argues that the initial stage of modern art was marked by the movement to abstraction, resulting in a formalism in which, as in Hegel’s account of symbolic art, the ideal content of avant-garde art was not yet adequate to its form. This resulted in a kind of mysticism in which the meaning of abstract avant-garde art clearly pointed beyond its form to a transcendent meaning, yet without any determination. Such art, according to Kuspit, displays a “will to unintelligibility” or to enigma. Though early avant-garde art clearly aspired to a critique of society, its signification was ambiguous and unclear. Kuspit clearly implies that this interpretation might also characterize Adorno’s privileging of abstract art.¹⁷

In the 1980s, by contrast, according to Kuspit’s analysis, art and society were reconciled and subsequently embraced each other. In this period, avantgarde art cynically gave up pretensions to idealism and promoted itself as a commodity.¹⁸ Finally, in the last part of the twentieth century and perhaps leading into the twenty-first century (though the essay was published before the beginning of the new century), the content of avant-garde art began to transcend its form, giving way to a conceptualism that disdained material form, where the message, which Kuspit associates mainly with feminism and multiculturalism, overshadowed sensuousness as well as emotion or affect. In this way later avant-garde art moved toward the concept purified of the corporeal, a purity Kuspit refers to as contemporary art’s iconoclasm.¹⁹

Both Adorno and Kristeva express versions of iconoclasm in their consideration of contemporary art. While arguing for art’s political significance, they also both resist the Hegelian idea that it is art’s role to be morally didactic. Art that seeks to be activist, either in expressing an explicit political view or cloaking itself in a moral cause, seems to apologize or take on a defensive stance for existing as a “merely” aesthetic phenomenon. Worse, it risks becoming embroiled in or taking on the characteristics of the very order that it seeks to criticize. Art’s role is to provide an alternative to instrumental reason, commodity culture, and the spectacle in order to provide meaningful social resistance or intellectual challenge; it is not to serve already existing goals, however worthy. Art opens up and aesthetically embodies paths of desire that are not inscribed in advance of its creation. If art has a political significance, that significance does not consist in being able to present in a different manner ideas that could be more clearly expressed in directly conceptual terms. Rather, art is a means of making conscious those myriad conscious and unconscious imaginary ways in which we negotiate the systems of meaning of our world—law, religion, family, morality, education, culture—and in the process open up the realization that they are not unconditionally or exhaustively constitutive of the human subject.²⁰ This is to emphasize that these systems may be criticized and, perhaps indirectly, changed. It is art’s role to estrange us from familiar ways of seeing and organizing the world. This tarrying with estrangement can be related to what Keats called the “negative capability” of the poet, who cultivates the attitude of allowing herself to remain in uncertainty without immediately reaching for a readymade solution.²¹

Adorno called this possibility art’s “negativity” and argued that this negativity was social in character and tied to the possibility of providing a resistance to the social misery that it makes present to us. As Diana Coole writes, the critical function of art that Adorno invokes by calling it “negativity” performs a political act: “it destabilizes illusions of perfection, presence and permanence by associating the positive with petrified and illegitimate structures of power.”²² Kristeva’s conception of negativity can be tied to Adorno’s and to Hegel’s in this evocation of negativity, a term she especially uses in her earliest work on poetic language. Yet she also wants to engage with the Freudian sense of negation, in particular its role in the shift from the expression of the drives to signification, both in order to foreground the role of the body and the unconscious within aesthetics and to complicate the Freudian understanding of art as the purely individual product of sublimation or avoidance of suffering. Her version of iconoclasm, which privileges an art that inscribes rather than represents and that portrays an economy of interrelated similitudes rather than reproducing or miming a figure, complicates and attempts to avoid the potential pitfalls of both Hegelian idealism and Adorno’s arguably mystical materialism.

Adorno’s elitism has been much deplored. Certainly, in his critique of the culture industry Adorno can be harsh and dismissive. However, arguably Adorno’s message is more positive than negative. Rather than simply dismissing the contemporary obsession with jazz music and the cinema, Adorno is pointing to a loss in culture itself, that is, a refusal to hear the voice of intellectualism within aesthetics. Adorno points out that it is not solely the left that has turned a deaf ear on the high theory of certain philosophers and artists but that in doing so it repeats the disdain of bourgeois society that preceded it.

Materialism’s error, according to Adorno, lies in its disregard for consciousness and epistemology. Matter without consciousness would have no dialectical movement to it. Epistemology’s revenge, he writes, “has been the image doctrine.” Images purport to mirror matter. Thought, by contrast, “is not an image of the thing” but aims at the thing itself.²⁶ Image theory “denies the spontaneity of the subject”: “If the subject is bound to mulishly mirror the object—necessarily missing the object, which only opens itself to the subjective surplus in the thought—the result is the unpeaceful spiritual silence of integral administration.”²⁷

Only a resolutely reified consciousness would believe, Adorno writes, “that it possesses photographs of objectivity.” The doctrine of the image fantasizes the possibility of immediately reproducing what it captures on film or on the canvas, moving toward the “disfigurement” of art characteristic of the Eastern bloc.²⁸ Theory, by contrast, conveys not immediacy, not a replica of the object, but rather the conception inherent in it. Representational thinking is thinking without reflection, nondialectical thinking.²⁹

In Aesthetic Theory Adorno nonetheless advocates a form of mimesis, one that he calls a “nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other.”³⁰ Art reflects the social order out of which it emerges, but it does so by opening up areas that exceed what the order itself is prepared to disclose, and therefore it does not “mulishly mirror” its object but allows the object to speak by virtue of the very “subjective surplus” in its approach. Art accomplishes this through a method of negation that allows for the return of repressed content, speaking in a kind of sensuous code to which there is no definitive conceptual translating key.

Art that resolutely tries to mirror social problems sabotages its own project. Most strikingly, the Marxist tradition has negated its critique by embracing a crude imagistic realism. For this reason, Adorno champions nonrepresentational art:

The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the absolute spirit.³¹

Unlike vulgar materialism (sometimes exemplified in Adorno’s texts by the work of Brecht or Sartre), the materialist ban on images for which Adorno calls registers thought without the “image character of consciousness”; such a process can be called demythologization.³² Unlike idealism, which aims for the sublation of the sensuous in absolute spirit, a materialism that embraces theory and not the image invokes the resurrection of the flesh.³³

In her early writings, Kristeva articulates the pivotal distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and the negativity of their relationship specifically around a reading of Hegel. In particular, Kristeva is interested in Hegel’s conception of negation and its possible relation to Freud’s theory of what she calls “rejection,” based on Freud’s notions of Verwerfung and Ausstossung outlined in his essay “Negation” (“Verneinung,” 1923). I will map the parallels Kristeva draws between the two thinkers in an attempt to illuminate further the dialectical lineage between Hegel and Freud mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva is as concerned with complicating Husserl and Frege’s philosophical views on language as she is with questioning the post-Freudian psychoanalytic view of the repression of prelinguistic bodily experiences upon the subject’s entrance into language. Freud’s essay “Negation” elucidates a clear connection between such prelinguistic bodily experiences and the inception of logical judgment, or what he calls “the origin of an intellectual function from the interplay of the primary instinctual impulses.”³⁴ Freud begins the essay by noting that during analysis, a patient’s free association may make it possible for the content of a repressed image or idea to enter consciousness by means of negation. For example, the psychoanalyst may ask the patient what he or she would consider to be the most un likely imaginable outcome or interpretation of a given situation, and, if the patient, unaware, falls into the trap the analyst has laid and says what he or she thinks is most unimaginable, Freud asserts that he or she almost always makes the correct identification of the true outcome or interpretation. Likewise, in recounting a dream a patient may assert the person with whom he or she had a sexual encounter was not his or her mother, and Freud indicates that this claim is almost certainly the only way in which the repressed dream image of the mother can make its way into conscious thought.³⁵ In this moment of expression, however, only one part of the repression is freed; the image or idea enters consciousness. Until the patient recognizes the truth of the idea or image and accepts it intellectually as his or her own, the memory will not be fully “negated.” Jean Hyppolite interprets this two-part process of undoing repression as a “double negation,” linking it to Hegel’s use of Aufhebung.³⁶

What is significant about this process of double negation is a remark that Freud makes almost at the end of the essay, where he posits that negation not only provides a means of reversing repression and allowing a content to make its way into conscious thought but that the process of negation may be at the inception of the break between affect and intellect, at the origin of logical judgment or the very intellectual function itself.³⁷ Negation would, then, signify, from its inception, the psyche’s process of translating affective content into thought. As Hyppolite puts it, negation would itself be the generator of thought.

The earliest form of “judgment,” according to Freud, is a continuation of the original process by which the ego, in terms of the oldest, oral instinctual impulses, either takes things into itself (“I should like to eat this”) or expels them (“I should like to spit this out”).³⁸ This is what Freud calls the “judgment of attribution,” and it depends on pleasurable or unpleasurable perception: “this is good” or “this is bad.”³⁹ The second level of judgment, the intellectual level, involves an absence rather than a presence of a sensation. Intellectual judgment marks an absence, indicates “a representation that no longer has an object that corresponds to it.” In fact, “what is at stake here,” Hyppolite writes, “is the genesis of the outside and of the inside.”⁴⁰ Freud names what emerges from this inside/outside distinction a “judgment of existence,” one that distinguishes between the representation within the subject and the existence or nonexistence of an object outside of it. Intellectual thought is dependent on the mind’s capacity to reproduce a perceived thing in the absence of the external object, independently of whether it is perceived to be good or bad.

In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva identifies the origin of her concept of negativity as Hegelian. However, in connecting it with Freud’s concept of negation—the bodily origin of which she names, in its function as conduit between somatic and linguistic judgment, according to the usual French translation of Ausstossung, or “rejection”—Kristeva is quick to qualify that the word “negativity,” as opposed to Hegelian “negation,” does not signify a negation of negation, or Aufhebung, that would result in the restoration of unity. Rather, she characterizes the negativity that she is exploring in this book, namely, the negativity of aesthetic productions, as a “reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position.”⁴¹ The distinction between the “reversed reactivation” of a contradiction, on the one hand, and the “double negation” of an original thesis, on the other, is key to understanding the way in which Kristeva’s dialectic of the history of art differs from Hegel’s. This distinction in turn clarifies how the extension of the historical dialectic to Freud retroactively changes the very nature of the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness and, in particular, the Hegelian account of the end of art.

Kristeva calls negativity “the fourth term of the dialectic.”⁴² She approves of Hegelian logic in its linkage of the real with the conceptual, the objective with the subjective, and in that it is both concrete and dynamic. However, it is with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious that Hegel’s logic can become materialist, when “one dares think negativity as the very movement of heterogeneous matter, inseparable from its differentiation’s symbolic function.”⁴³ By materialism Kristeva refers to the body and the drives (the materiality of the subject) rather than exclusively to Marx’s dialectical materialism. She criticizes Marx and post-Hegelian materialist theory in general for essentially eliminating Hegel’s concept of negativity (one that inheres both in Subject and Substance) and conceiving of process primarily within external material conditions. Her interest in the “object” lies in the materiality of language, its shape, rhythm, and sound.

Kristeva identifies “Hegelian negativity,” as opposed to negation, as “the indissoluble relation between an ‘ineffable’ mobility and its ‘particular determination.’”⁴⁴ She chooses negativity to signify the process of becoming of the “subject-in-process/on trial”—using the double meaning of Kafka’s Prozess to indicate parallels between the development of the subject and of the text—because it constitutes the logical impetus behind both negation and the negation of negation (double negation) without being reducible to either one of these. Rather, “negativity is the liquefying and dissolving agent that does not destroy but rather reactivates new organizations.”⁴⁵ Negativity, for Kristeva—following Freud, but going beyond what he explicitly says—lies somewhere between the prelinguistic bodily organization of drives and the symbolic constitution of language proper and the subject. It is at the crossroads, as Kristeva writes, of the biological and the social order.⁴⁶

Kristeva’s primary interest lies not in the association of ingestion with affirmation and expectoration with negation but rather in what she calls the “‘second’ return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic.”⁴⁷ Whereas Freud’s analysis of negation stops with the postulation that rejection is at the inception of intellectual judgment, Kristeva asserts that in poetic language negativity continues to operate within symbolic language after the “thetic position” of the subject within the symbolic order has been firmly established. Rather than a negation of a negation, the operation of negativity, which she also calls an “explosion of the semiotic within the symbolic,”⁴⁸ would be, instead, a “transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position.”⁴⁹ The contradiction that would be reactivated in the aesthetic judgment, in particular that of specifically modern and postmodern art and literature, would be the bodily origin of judgment itself, this time expressed through rhythm, musical intonation, and other parts of every linguistic act that are meaningful yet do not represent or signify anything. These aspects of language make up the semiotic chora in its very opposition to yet coexistence within the representational or signifying power of language. Although these elements of language—which could be visual as well as aural, in the case of painting or other visual art—are reactivated and even foregrounded in poetic or artistic expression, nonetheless the thetic, or subject position within language, remains firm. Another way of thinking of this relationship between language and the body is as the return of the repressed under the symbol of negation.

In such a process as Kristeva visualizes it within the artwork, “rejection re-constitutes real objects, ‘creates’ new ones, reinvents the real, and re-symbolizes it,”⁵⁰ prefiguring a parallel she later draws between revolutionary artworks and psychoanalytic dialogue. The key difference between the work of rejection within the movement of analysis and within aesthetic production is that while analysis ideally effects the passage of the repressed into the symbolic function, rejection in artworks “marks signifying material with the repressed,” arranging the repressed element in a different way and taking up a position that is “positivized and erotized in a language that … is organized into prosody or rhythmic timbres.”⁵¹

This relationship within poetic language between the intentional, expressed meaning of the words used and their accompanying affective tones, rhythms, and musicality can be connected to the Hegelian identification of the signifying consciousness with a conceptual order that exceeds it. Negativity designates a process in language that binds the human being “to the laws of objective struggles in nature and society,”⁵² to that dimension of existence that exceeds the subject both as a conscious and as a material presence. Unlike the Hegelian dialectic, however, whose “ideational closure … seems to consist in its inability to posit negativity as anything but a repetition of ideational unity in itself,”⁵³ the dialectic in poetic language between the symbolic and the semiotic turns the One back upon itself, shattering its unity. The reintroduction of the symbol of negation into poetic language does not lead to an intellectual acceptance of the repressed, which would amount to an Aufhebung or cancellation of the material, but instead constitutes a “post-symbolic … hallmarking of the material that remained intact during first symbolization.”⁵⁴ In this process the “materiality” of the sign, which was initially expelled, is brought out of the unconscious into language and consciousness not as a form of intellection but as a form of eroticization, an investment of drives organized into rhythm and timbre. Kristeva argues that such a negativity, because of its nonsubjective origin, cannot be located in a singular ego.⁵⁵

Negativity recalls the moment of the generation of meaning without being reducible to a specific signification. Its genesis does not pave the way for the reemergence and eventual acceptance of a repressed memory but rather recuperates “lost time” in such a way that any reader, or spectator, can recognize himself or herself in it. This recuperation might be compared to a kind of transference of a painful memory into an intermediary space such that an immediate interiority can be mediately directed toward other people, stabilizing the identity of the artist and of the artwork.

The recuperation of lost time might be connected to the idea of a ban on graven images understood in a specific, nonreligious sense, in several ways. In particular, it is crucial that negativity points to some element of language or expression that is in principle unrepresentable, or not articulable in symbolic terms,⁵⁶ yet that itself provides the condition of possibility for separation that allows for language and representation to come into being. I will trace Kristeva’s reading of this historical ban in its connection to purification rites as well as in terms of her specific interpretation of the meaning of mimesis. Finally, I will consider the ban on graven images in terms of a repetition oriented toward the future, one that allows for an event to be repeated therapeutically, that is, not in an identical, pathological way that would disable and paralyze the experiencer but in such a way that she is dynamically freed, that psychic rigidities may be relaxed and reoriented. Kristeva calls this literary or artistic process a “sublimating gesture of reshaping and reconstructing” oneself,⁵⁷ a process that also takes place as working through in psychoanalysis, through the mimetic identification (through transference and countertransference) of the analyst and the analysand.

Kristeva first mentions the ban on graven images in Powers of Horror, as part of a historical overview of purification rites in several religious and literary discourses. Considering the connection of the sacred with sacrifice in both psychoanalysis and structural anthropology, Kristeva notes the relative absence of discussion of the second of the two taboos of totemism: murder and incest. Kristeva posits that the sacred is a two-sided formation founded, on the one hand, by murder and the social bond constituted on the basis of atonement for murder,⁵⁸ and, on the other hand, by incest, by “another aspect, like a lining, more secret still and invisible, non-representable, oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable identity, toward the fragility—both threatening and fusional—of the archaic dyad, toward the non-separation of subject/object, on which language has no hold but one woven of fright and repulsion?”⁵⁹

The archaic dyad to which Kristeva refers is the mother-child bond prior to the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, the acquisition of language, and the separation of subject and object, the same archaic bond that is at the origin of the semiotic chora in language.⁶⁰ Kristeva’s interest in Powers of Horror is in the ways that societies “code” themselves symbolically in order to temper the subject’s confrontation with the feminine and reinforce the necessary separation from the mother.⁶¹ Here we are again confronted with the genesis of the distinction between inside and outside that gives rise to judgment, in its original signification in German as Ur-teil, scission, or separation. Naming this border gives rise to language,⁶² Kristeva argues, just as Freud had argued that the inception between inside and outside is at the origin of intellectual judgment.

In Judaism, Kristeva writes, defilement gets progressively shifted from the material to the symbolic register, as prohibitions dealing with food and the body give way to prohibitions on pronouncing the name of the divine and making images of the divine: “Defilement will now be that which impinges on symbolic oneness, that is, sham, substitutions, doubles, idols.”⁶³ In the name of the “I” of the Lord, who speaks through the intermediary of Moses, moral prohibitions that operate “according to the same logic of separation” between the material and the symbolic, namely, those concerning justice, honesty, and truth, also follow.⁶⁴ The dietary abomination of earlier texts gets transformed into what Kristeva calls “an inseparable lining, an inherence in the contract or the symbolic condition”; this in turn forms the material condition for symbolic prohibition. Kristeva argues that divine speech in the Old Testament contains “coiled within it” a “demoniacal reproduction of the speaking being” that the compact with God both brings into being and banishes.⁶⁵ This demoniacal reproduction would be a fantasized return to the mother as both temptation and threat, the nether side of the ban on graven images.

In another part of Powers of Horror, Kristeva calls this preverbal, presymbolic lining “a ‘beginning’ preceding the word.”⁶⁶ Returning to the concept of negation, she writes that the naming of this beginning, in which there is as yet no clear distinction between inside and outside, would amount to the introduction of language.⁶⁷ Part of the impetus for poetic language is that it seeks a “reconciliation with what murder as well as names were separated from. It would be an attempt to symbolize the ‘beginning’”⁶⁸ without thereby banishing it.

Jean-Joseph Goux traces a similar iconoclasm within the Greek and Roman tradition with reference to the goddess Hestia, who, unlike other pagan gods, was not considered to be representable. Possessing the sole temple without images, Hestia existed alongside a whole pantheon of gods, the proliferation of whose images otherwise suggests a completely iconophilic culture.⁶⁹ Goux writes that Hestia is accorded a primacy in time, place, and in the order of ritual and notes that “what seems to be at stake is society’s time,” unified around a center. He goes on to demonstrate the connection between the ban on representation and Hestia’s virginity and ultimately speculates that there is a link “between the prohibition of any ‘incestuous’ tendency, including the adoration of a mother goddess of fertility, and the radical proscription of representation.” All images, Goux suggests, and all imagination lead back to a desire for the mother, “not so much as a real figure as an unconscious field of meanings.”⁷⁰ As the inviolable at the root of the sacred, Hestia marks the inception of the distinction between nature and culture. The ban on images of the divine and the institution of language and culture involves the abandonment of the fantasy of fusion with the mother and the inception of subjectivity and symbolic life.

One might worry, given Kristeva’s early and enduring emphasis on the neglected semiotic (and maternal) aspect of language, that she would envision therapeutic art as a kind of return to a primal, material, nonsignifying poetry of tones and rhythms. However, as she insists in Revolution in Poetic Language, there can be no return, either to a preindividuated fusion with the mother or to a pre-thetic stage of language. To insist on the possibility of a pure experience of the semiotic would be to fetishize an “unsayable” without limit.⁷¹ In respecting the ban on graven images, Kristeva upholds the symbolic pact that would keep the maternal abject at bay. The ban on graven images contrasts with or staves off not only the impure but also any religious tradition that would allow for the symbolic representation of the divine. Although she discusses Christian art, as we will shortly see, she embraces the tradition of iconography in its proximity to some contemporary nonrepresentational art, clearly resisting the iconophilic tradition. What she calls repetition and eventually links to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is a return to the semiotic from within the symbolic that both recuperates and pushes its symbolic signification to its very limits, straining it almost to its breaking point. As such, there is a possibility, indeed a need, for the semiotic to return to interrogate symbolic formations, albeit only in the indeterminate guise of its formation through the negative.⁷²

What would it mean, then, to seek reconciliation with the origin, to attempt to do justice to the beginning without occluding it, to “represent” Hestia? In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva mentions in passing that the Biblical prohibition on representation applies primarily to the imagistic representation of god’s love, which is felt but cannot be sensuously presented. She associates the ban on representation with the “zero-degree of symbol formation,” the necessary precondition for the Oedipal complex that gives rise to language and subjectivity.⁷³

The search for a nonrepresentational origin of symbolic life leads to the psychoanalytic identification of the “imaginary father of individual prehistory” mentioned by Freud in The Ego and the Id. According to Kristeva’s analysis in Tales of Love of this preoedipal father of individual prehistory, the imaginary father is the guarantor of identity, the bridge by which the child succeeds in leaving behind its fusion with the mother and moving toward an identification with the formal paternal function associated with language and law. What allows for this move is the child’s recognition of the desire of the mother as extending beyond the mother-child fusion.

Unlike either the mother, whose love and care threaten to engulf the child, and the prohibitive father of law, the loving “father of individual prehistory” (identification with whom Freud refers to as “primary”) points toward a space of meaning for the individual separate from the mother yet preserving the affective and imaginary qualities repudiated by the symbolic order in its most formal sense. Kristeva refers to this loving identification as “the very space of metaphorical shifting,” condensing semantic features and nonrepresentational semiotic drive heterogeneity.⁷⁴ This semantic space shares elements of both the maternal and the paternal realms without being reducible to either one. Freud calls this form of identification “immediate” and “previous to any concentration on any object whatsoever”⁷⁵ yet nonetheless “always already within the symbolic orbit, under the sway of language.”⁷⁶ Kristeva identifies the loving father with the desire of the mother, which points the child to a realm beyond her sway while simultaneously bringing him to the realization that he cannot be everything for her (and vice versa).

In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva calls the imaginary father a “ghostly yet secure presence of the father before [subjects] become aware of any oedipal hold on the father’s love or on love for him.”⁷⁷ Though this father may only exist in a hallucinatory or imaginary fashion, he nonetheless is “the keystone of the capacity to sublimate, especially through art.”⁷⁸ The imaginary father of individual prehistory thus functions precisely in the way that Hestia does. Neither Hestia nor the imaginary father can be represented, though they guarantee the possibility of representation. Both are uncertainly or at least dually gendered, possessing the qualities of mother and father.⁷⁹ Both indicate the semiotic, but only from within the framework of the symbolic. Hestia and the imaginary father subtend the capacity to sublimate and occasionally punctuate, and thus have the potential to modify, the symbolic order.

In Crisis of the (European) Subject and The Severed Head, Kristeva explores iconoclasm through a contrast of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions of Christianity in Europe. Here Kristeva compares the tradition of making images of the divine family and of biblical stories, as it flourished in Catholicism, with the Orthodox icon of Byzantium. One of the causes of the split between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church was the perception by the former that the latter worshipped idols. Kristeva contrasts the image or representation of the divine (Christ and Mary), as it flourished in Catholic art, with the Orthodox icon of Byzantium. She focuses on the peculiar brand of iconoclasm practiced by the Orthodox church, which functioned as the equivalent of negation in that it allowed for an imaginary element to appear that would otherwise remain hidden.

Following Marie-José Mondzain,⁸⁰ Kristeva argues that the peculiar iconoclastic theory of the Orthodox patriarch Nicephorus at the end of the ninth century negotiated an economy of divine presence that inscribed the appearance of (divine) Being as a sensible trace⁸¹ rather than directly representing it.⁸² The polysemic term “economy,” on this reading, refers, on different orders of similitude, to both the incarnation, or consubstantiation of God the father (through the body of Mary) in his son who is his image, and the figurative tradition of representing the divine in icons. Kristeva points out that the word “icon,” eikon in Greek, is a homophone of economy, or oiekonomia, and that the economy of Nicephorus encompasses both divine mystery and its figurative potentiality. Orthodox iconography, on this argument, respects the ban on direct images of the divine while nonetheless preserving the traditionally representational relationships between concept, material body, and spirit. This “double articulation,” according to Kristeva, allowed for a simultaneous preservation of the enigma of the divine in its incarnation and the possibility of portraying this mystery through iconography. The orthodox icon emphasizes difference and identity rather than autonomy and equality, emphasizing the fullness of each person in the polyphony of her identifications. Orthodox art explores both suffering and mercy, disappearance and reappearance.⁸³

In the catalogue for The Severed Head Kristeva argues that the virgin Mary, too, is implicated in the authorization of the Orthodox Byzantine icon, specifically in the experience of viewing the iconic image, which refers to nothing external but instead to the passage between the orders of the invisible and the visible. Kristeva maintains that this passage between invisibility and visibility parallels the conception (in both senses) of Christ as God’s incarnation through Mary’s divine impregnation. The economy of the icon embodies the entire chain by which God is incarnated through the body of Mary, a process that allows the divine to be “dispensed into history” by entering into the flesh and into the visible. Iconographic representation is not mimesis in the traditional sense, on this argument, because it takes account both of birth through the maternal body and the void (the kenosis, or “self-emptying,” of the incarnation). The void is thus inscribed along with the divine image, giving it birth in the visible. The void itself, she argues, “is nothing other than the sign of the sacrificial cut,” the invisible divine sacrificing itself to give birth to the visible.⁸⁴ Kristeva adds to Mondzain’s analysis by reading the cut as the severance from the mother that allows for the emergence of representation in image and in symbol. She further links this cut to representations of the severed head in the history of art.

The iconic tradition is related to accounts of the so-called mandylion of Abgar, a piece of cloth upon which the face of Jesus was said to be imprinted. Unlike the shroud of Turin, the mandylion’s imprint is of a face, not an entire body. Tradition has it that the mandylion was sent by Jesus in a letter to King Abgar of Edessa in response to a request for healing. The important facet of the mandylion that Kristeva emphasizes, following Nicephorus’s argument, is that it is an imprint or indication rather than a representation of Christ’s face. Nicephorus defined mimesis as an inscription of the divine image rather than an imitation or circumscription of it. The inscription limits the image to a sensible trace.

By contrast, the representational tradition of figura, the prophetic announcement of the coming of Jesus, as described by Erich Auerbach, supports the growth of the economy of representation: the sacrifice of Isaac prefigures that of Christ, Adam’s fall prefigures Christ’s sacrifice of himself for all sinners, and so on. Such a conception of figuration sees a continuity in the Judaic and Christian traditions as well as a continuity between the unpresentable nature of God and his figuration in the material presence of Christ.⁸⁵ Representation can be associated with mimesis in the traditional sense of copying or circumscribing and lends itself to a continuing tradition of iconophilia. This version of mimesis lends itself to the growth of a representational continuum where the invisible economy of the icon is replaced by a network of signs of prefiguration. Every event of the tradition is rendered visible in its role as the herald of the next, such that no absence or void remains. Kristeva discusses this separation between economy and figure as the determination of two distinct destinies for representation in the West.⁸⁶ Figure, as opposed to the icon, delineates an interpretive system in which “the Risen One accomplishes, increases, and exceeds the work of his Precursor” according to the logic of the Hegelian Aufhebung.⁸⁷

The word figure, which in French signifies “the face” in addition to its usual sense of “plastic form,” comes from the root figura, a word that has connotations of plasticity and malleability of not just form but also substance. Accordingly, “figure” can also substitute for “metaphor” or “allegory” but conveys specifically the “corporal action of the real being.”⁸⁸ Despite the active connotations of the term, however, “figurative logic does not in the least become a historical process in the modern sense of the term” (Kristeva seems to have Hegel in mind here) but rather “confers an element of veiled eternity to each even, which remains isolated, fragmentary.”⁸⁹ Figurism “charges all forms with history and with actual bodies, and, inversely, it incarnates the experience of history and bodies into forms,”⁹⁰ allowing for the momentary revival of ancient stories and images in the manner Kristeva herself enacts in this exhibition and its catalogue.

Kristeva considers the gradual introduction of the term visage to mean “face” in French, a usage that did not entirely usurp but nonetheless rendered superfluous the older word “figure.” Visage, from vis- or “vision,” indicates the corporeal specificity of the head (and its “gateways to the soul,” the eyes) as opposed to figure, which can also designate the (appearance of the) entire body. Kristeva speculates that it was Diderot who inscribed the “prophetic latency” of the word figure into the word visage—perhaps somewhat in the way he inscribes the foreigner or the mad nephew into the rational man of the Enlightenment ⁹¹—through his defense of a style of painting that neither copies nor mimics but rather exaggerates, weakens, or corrects its model.⁹²

Diderot admired the painting of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who portrayed modern, everyday heroes in classical settings, giving rise, in their interaction, to a new uncanny pleasure. Kristeva argues that “a new conception of the sublime was underway in these ‘figure’ heads that is neither ecstasy nor purity but the immersion of the terrible into the great, of passion into reason that figures forth a face.”⁹³ Figure, then, lashes past to present⁹⁴ and in so doing manifests a dynamism in the human face that Diderot describes as a “canvas that shifts, moves, stretches, relaxes, turns pale, blanches according to the infinite multitude of alternatives of that light, mobile breath we call the soul.”⁹⁵ Such a transformation “humanizes transcendence.”⁹⁶

The Orthodox tradition of inscription that Kristeva describes in her later works can be associated with her discussion, in Revolution in Poetic Language, of a mimesis that is very different from the one Auerbach describes. In the earlier work she defined mimesis in literary signification as “the construction of an object, not according to truth but to verisimilitude.”⁹⁷ By verisimilitude she means that the object is posited but not denoted; rather, it is connoted or allowed to proliferate in multiple significations.⁹⁸ In turn, the object is dependent on a subject of enunciation, but this subject is “unlike the transcendental ego in that [s]he does not suppress the semiotic chora but instead raises the chora to the status of a signifier, which may or may not obey the norms of grammatical locution.”⁹⁹ This kind of mimesis partakes of the symbolic order, but only partially, by reproducing some of its constitutive rules. In so doing, the positing of the symbolic is subverted, and even the positing of the enunciating subject is disrupted.¹⁰⁰

What is important about this form of mimesis and what distinguishes it from mere glossolalia, or infantile babbling, is that it operates within the linguistic order and thereby communicates and is social or intersubjective. Moreover, although poetic mimesis does not actually call into question the subject position that it requires to be signifying language, it prevents it from becoming “theological.”¹⁰¹ Poetic mimesis shows the possibility for a different configuration of the social and thus has the power to critique culture. Kristeva writes that “both mimesis and poetic language with its connotations assume the right to enter into the social debate, which is an ideological debate.”¹⁰² They have the power to question “theology” or accepted ideology, “both its necessity and its pretensions”:

In other words, poetic language and mimesis may appear as an argument complicitous with dogma—we are familiar with religion’s use of them—but they may also set in motion what dogma represses. In so doing, they no longer act as instinctual floodgates within the enclosure of the sacred and become instead protests against its posturing. And thus, its complexity unfolded by its practices, the signifying process joins social revolution.¹⁰³

Certain forms of contemporary art—Kristeva mentions, as an example, the works of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, which inscribe a gesture, literally cutting through paper rather than directly representing anything—implicitly rediscover the iconic Byzantine economy. Fontana’s artworks often consist of incisions into paper or other media. She writes: “he is inviting us to a participation in the visible that is not limited to the gaze alone but engages our entire affectivity. The icon’s oscillation between visible and invisible is thus unconsciously sought.”¹⁰⁴ Here the “invisible” would refer not to the divine but rather to the unconscious, the entire unrepresented realm of affects and drives, as well as to the semiotic underbelly of symbolic life. The cut indicates the necessity of great artworks’ relation to a founding emptiness, the link it provides between the spectator and “their invisible center.” All great art, writes Mondzain, is “kenotic.”¹⁰⁵

Fontana’s inscription is literal, but I will argue that a counterpart to it can be found in a certain kind of photography, one that is discussed by Walter Benjamin in his essays on that art. The “resurrection of the flesh,” in Kristeva’s words, presents without representing, for “representational thinking would be without reflection,” and “without reflection there is no theory,” as Adorno put it.¹⁰⁶ It is counterintuitive to think of the photograph as an art form that can exemplify iconoclasm, but we can understand this claim in reference to Mondzain and Kristeva’s discussions of the orthodox icon.

Walter Benjamin’s meditations on the relatively new art of photography are both brief and occasionally enigmatic.¹⁰⁷ What seems clear is that Benjamin associated the moment of capturing and freezing a photographic image both with a temporality that is distinctive of modernity and with a new, redemptive possibility that would move beyond the critique of modernity and suggest possibilities for future change. This possibility has something to do both with the photograph’s capacity to capture the optical unconscious, beyond the explicit intentions of the photographer, and for its capacity to preserve a moment of lost time, but in such a way that it does not merely retrieve it or repeat it identically.

Benjamin’s essays on photography and film are most often associated with their analysis of the historical effect of technological reproducibility on art and in particular with the identification of the loss of the aura with the invention of photography. Although he is not extremely precise in his definition of the term, sometimes even claiming that all objects, including natural ones, have an aura, Benjamin usually predicates it of artworks as unique and singular objects possessing a specific history. As Benjamin uses the term in discussing photography and nature, however, aura is also a “strange weave of space and time; the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.”¹⁰⁸ One could speak of the aura of a city, such as Paris, or the aura of a person that pervades her clothing and surroundings without being reducible to any of their particularities. Benjamin describes the photographers’ client as “a member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat.”¹⁰⁹ Benjamin traces the strange genealogy of the photograph from its origin as an art form with a new form of aura, to the decline of aura through new lighting techniques, to the photographic industry’s eventual attempt to simulate an aura, and finally to the photographs of Eugene Atget that “suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.”¹¹⁰

Photography is defined continually against more traditional forms of art, particularly with reference to the question of whether it is art’s role to imitate nature. Early photographs were associated with fairgrounds rather than with business; it was only with the invention of the visiting-card picture that photography became an industrial phenomenon.¹¹¹ Though these early photographs had a kind of aura given the darkness that surrounds their subjects, who emerge from them full and serene, framed by a “breathy halo” that is the product of technology, their aura is nonetheless very different from that of the painterly portraits that preceded them.

When advances in optics allowed for the faithful recording of appearances as in a mirror, photography fell into the traditional role of art as imitation of nature. And theoreticians of photography begin to “attempt to legitimate the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning.”¹¹²

The reproducibility of the industrialized photograph eventually negated its simulated aura, for, as Benjamin writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” aura traditionally signifies the singularity of the original, its history and its authority. Film and commercial photography substitute for the original a plurality of copies, allowing a multiplicity of viewers to encounter the image, each in his or her own particular situation: “it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.”¹¹³ As Benjamin notes in the photography essay, the earliest photographic plates were one of a kind, frequently kept for safekeeping in a jewelry box.¹¹⁴

Nevertheless, the essay on photography does not nostalgically long for the photographs of the past. Rather, Benjamin is concerned with distilling the real artistic essence of photography, with what makes it distinct as an art form. When photography seeks to imitate nature or traditional forms of representational art, it is not true to its nature. The two aspects of photography that Benjamin finds most distinctive and significant are its incorporation of the unconscious and its temporality. Both of these aspects seemingly are in some way erased or at least minimized in industrialized photography, the period that Benjamin describes as the “decline” of photography. However, both come to the fore strikingly in some forms of postindustrial photography.

Benjamin first indicates the presence within photography of a “space informed by the unconscious,” as well as the flashlike complexity of the photograph’s temporality, in his discussion of the earliest photographic plates. Unlike painting or other traditional art forms, photography evokes an irresistible urge on the part of the beholder to discern within it a “tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now” that the photograph has “seared” into the subject.¹¹⁵ This spark is described by Benjamin as “an inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”¹¹⁶ This is precisely the temporality of Proust’s madeleine¹¹⁷ and of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit.¹¹⁸

Benjamin goes on to claim that no matter how carefully the photographer has attempted to capture nature faithfully, as in a mirror, “it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.”¹¹⁹ This “optical unconscious” is revealed by the techniques photography has access to, of freezing and then enlarging a particular view, and, in the case of film, of slowing motion down so that we may become aware of its component parts, that fraction of a second when a person takes a step or shifts a limb.¹²⁰ “It is through photography,” Benjamin writes, “that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”¹²¹ Photography can reveal things that are not available to the ordinary eye. It is precisely in being frozen and cut off from their context (and recall that the context is an integral part of the aura) that the optical unconscious can be accessed. Photography thus functions in a manner analogous to negation.

As an example, Benjamin points to an early photograph of the photographer Karl Dauthendey, who posed himself beside his fiancée, a woman who would commit suicide shortly after the birth of her sixth child. Though Dauthendey seems to be holding on to his fiancée, “her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance.”¹²² Here again we see a moment in time frozen that, from the perspective of knowledge in the present, seems to have nested within it an indication of something unconscious that suggests future events. Roland Barthes identifies death as the punctum of every photograph—not the studium, or subject of the photograph, but the point in the photograph that “pierces” us and draws us out of it, a point that is active rather than passive. A photograph that was only studium and not punctum would be a representation. Because a photograph records an actual moment of life, in the case of a portrait, what is captured is a moment in the flow of self-consciousness, immobilized and presented for observation, rather than the imagination of the artist, as in the case of a painted portrait, for example.¹²³

Photography thus must be understood as the severance and isolation of a moment of time as opposed to an instant in a seamless narrative or one partial image that contributes to a whole. It has a “flashlike” or “explosive” temporality that is akin to the “flash” of mimesis itself and language as its bearer.¹²⁴ The point is not to redeem the image by inserting it into a narrative that would explain and complete it but to recognize the “now time” of interpretation in its relationship to the past, for a photograph, in the words of Barthes, sets up “not a perception of the being-there of an object … but a perception of its having-been-there. It is a question of a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.”¹²⁵ What photography does is not to duplicate a moment but to “mime” it, where what results is ambiguous, suggesting a “magical correspondence” between past and present akin to the correspondences familiar to ancient people, for example, a similarity between a constellation of stars and a human’s character and future. Language is required to “fill out” this correspondence, as Benjamin writes in “Doctrine of the Similar”:

Rebecca Comay writes that “the temporal structure of the image itself converts seeing into reading, and image into text,”¹²⁸ and she quotes Benjamin to the effect that this is the true sense of the Jewish ban on divine images.¹²⁹ In the conversion of the ban on images (Bilderverbot) into a “flight from images” (Bilderflucht), Comay argues, Benjamin executes a “salvage operation” of “that kernel in the imaginary which defies idealization and which thus negotiates an opening to the unforeseen,” which is precisely what a good photograph may also do.¹³⁰

Comay also delineates at length the disagreement between Adorno and Benjamin on the question of the significance of the image.¹³¹ Nonetheless, I want to suggest at least a possible proximity between Adorno’s language of the demythologization of materialism and Benjamin’s notion of the conversion of image into text. If we recall that Adorno castigated the vulgar materialist notion that thought must “mulishly mirror the object,” calling this “image theory,” we can see a parallel to Benjamin’s critique of industrialized photography, in which the photograph is conceptualized as an exact reproduction or “mulish mirror” of an object, one that can be reproduced infinitely. Benjamin’s articulation of the true nature of photography in contrast to this reproduction can be likened to Kristeva’s distinction of the icon from the image. Recall that whereas the image was associated with figuration or representation, assuming a continuity or commensurability between the Judaic and Christian traditions of iconoclasm and iconophilia, respectively, the icon inscribes the divine as a sensible trace rather than directly manifesting it.¹³² This surplus that cannot be contained within the image would refer to the unconscious or to the void along with what is indefinitely inscribed of the divine.

The question remains as to how this conjunction of nonsensuous similarity (mimesis), flashlike temporality, and opening up of a space of the unconscious translates into contemporary photography. In Benjamin’s discussion of the photographer Atget, we get a sense of the possibilities he views in photography in its postrepresentational phase. He calls Atget’s Paris photos “the forerunners of Surrealist photography” in their disruption of the stifling atmosphere of conventional portrait photography.¹³³ These photos, which show only details, fragments, bits of trees or lampposts or balustrades cast adrift from their context, initiate “the emancipation of object from aura.”¹³⁴ This emancipation is necessary in the industrial age, where “even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its reproduction.”¹³⁵ Benjamin calls this artistic achievement a “salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings,” giving “free play to the politically educated eye.”¹³⁶ Atget’s photographs are likened to crime scenes. But, Benjamin asks: “Isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn’t it the task of the photographer—descendant of the augurs and haruspices—to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his photographs?”¹³⁷ This characterization presents art as discomfort, as alienation, as a practice designed to dislodge unsalutory habits and suggest that people or society could be different. In freezing the moment, photography has the capacity to provide both evidence of wrongdoing and the hope for justice or restitution.

A photograph can make a lost moment present. Thus Benjamin ties the flashlike temporality of the photograph to the instant of messianic time, which may erupt through the linear time of history at any moment. The content of this moment is not articulable in conceptual terms, least of all as prescription or formula. Rather, as Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama :

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”—this is not only a warning against idolatry. With comparable emphasis the prohibition of the representation of the human body obviates any suggestion that the sphere in which the moral essence of man is perceptible can be reproduced. … And from the point of view of any kind of artistic practice, this life, which concerns us morally, that is in our unique individuality, appears as something negative, or at least should appear so. … The truth content of this totality, which is never encountered in the abstracted lesson, least of all the moral lesson, but only in the critical elaboration of the work itself, includes moral warnings only in the most indirect form.¹³⁸

At the end of “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin, just as he is discussing the crime scene–like nature of Atget’s photographs, cryptically writes that because the camera is getting smaller and smaller, and thus ever more capable of capturing “fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms,” inscription will now become the most important part of the photograph.¹³⁹ Photography is a material inscription of memory; like the optical unconscious that it sometimes presents, something inaccessible to ordinary perception is made manifest through this inscription. As in Kristeva’s discussion of the icon, however, the meaning presented is a sensible trace rather than a clear conceptual repetition or representation of particular content. Though it disrupts narrative signification, the image may also, in being taken out of its place in the sequential flow of time, configure new meanings. The paralysis of the associative mechanisms occurs by virtue of this removal of the image from its context in a specific place and time. Inscription, then, marks both the moment of that excision and the proliferation of new meanings that it might open up, pointing both backward and forward.

Kristeva’s theoretical writing on photography is limited to a brief passage in Language: The Unknown and to her interview in the catalogue for the photographic exhibition “Inferno/Paradiso.” In the former, she limits her discussion of photography (and cinema) to the context of language, calling both media forms of “visual language.” She notes only one peculiarity of photography, namely, that it provides us with a unique temporality, a simultaneity of “spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority,” a conjunction of “here-now” and “there-then.”¹⁴⁰ Cinema, by contrast, does not present or try to recreate a moment from the past but, even when it takes place in the past, invites the audience in to live the moment as if it were the present.

In the catalogue for “Inferno/Paradiso,” an exhibit curated by Alfredo Jaar and inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Kristeva answers more general questions about her work, questions posed by an interviewer who tries to relate it to the exhibit, which asked photojournalists to be “witnesses to the great cosmic and historical drama of contemporary life, through their extraordinarily intense encounters with present day inhabitants of Inferno and Paradiso.” Jaar explains that “like Dante, the photographers are powerless to change the tragedies that they document, but are left with only language to document these experiences in all their complexity.”¹⁴¹

Kristeva is interviewed for the “Paradiso” half of the catalogue. The interviewer, Rubén Gallo, presses her to compare her work to that of Hannah Arendt, specifically on the idea of natality, and, relatedly, to connect her work to the question of the child as a symbol of hope and freedom. Kristeva is careful to distance her infrequent discussion of the psychoanalysis of children from “cheapened” and “sugary” depictions of childhood (some of which might arguably be present in the exhibit) and focuses rather on the Arendtian concept of initium as a second beginning, a repetition of the initial act (principium) by which god created the earth. She seems to link the sugary, cheap image of children to the society of the spectacle that she criticizes at length elsewhere. The transformative image, by contrast, opens up a new space of freedom that “annihilates the constraint of the model-object and replaces it with the flight of thinking and the vagabondage of the imagination,” much in the way Kant discusses the productive capacity of the imagination to generate aesthetic ideas.¹⁴²

In New Maladies of the Soul Kristeva also refers to the “psychic apparatus” of the human being as a “darkroom” where representations and their meaningful value for the subject are registered.¹⁴³ Clearly playing with Freud’s image of the unconscious as a photographic negative, she distinguishes between representations of the society of the spectacle, which shapes modern individuals and which offers neurochemical drug treatments for the distresses of modernity, on the one hand, and representations that are meaningful and valuable for psychic life, on the other. The “darkroom of the soul” would be a place whose images would not necessarily be immediately available for retrieval and dissemination and whose temporality would always be one of deferral. Such images might be retrievable through the psychoanalytic dialogical process or through the “involuntary memory” of art, where the debilitating symptoms they cause might be addressed and transformed.

I want to develop this metaphor of the photograph without necessarily limiting myself to artworks that use the photographic medium. Following Benjamin’s articulation of the flashlike temporality of the photograph and Goux’s discussion of Hestia’s role in the articulation of iconography, in conjunction with Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic traces that punctuate symbolic expression, I speculate that what some artworks achieve is a momentary incision into the patterns of everyday imaginary life, opening up a vision of something other. Like flashes from the unconscious, which periodically and unpredictably punctuate conscious life, these moments are neither intentional nor controllable, though they inform and possibly transform the intentional structure from which they emerge. Kristeva’s notion of art as revolution posits an analogy between the process that takes place in the analytical situation, in which, through discourse, sedimented psychic patterns may be exposed and perhaps reoriented in a healthier way, and artworks that repeat in such a way that they open up new possibilities.

The clearest examples of contemporary art that follow the logic of Kristeva’s notion of iconoclasm and revolt, of nonidentical mimesis, or of the return of the repressed under the sign of negation are those artworks that take as their subject a traumatic personal or political event in the past and our current relation to it. What Kristeva’s articulation of an avant-garde art of inscription, Benjamin’s notion of a flashlike temporality that severs an image from its context in a linear narrative, and Barthes’s conceptualization of the punctum, or punctual node of a photograph, have in common is the idea of art as a cutting away or through, and I want to think of the artworks I examine here in those terms, even though they do not, as in the Lucio Fontana example, literally use cutting as an artistic form. The word in French for “to cut” is couper, at the root of both tout d’un coup, the phrase in Proust that always signals the narration of the emergence of involuntary memory, and après coup, the French translation of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit. It is this notion of revolt or return through severing that characterizes the kind of art that for Kristeva signals a political repetition through difference.

A beautiful example of this kind of artistic work can be found in the series and exhibition entitled Corte de Florero, or “The Flower Vase Cut,” by the Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría. In this series, where again the title makes a veiled political reference, Echavarría references the flower vase cut, one of the mutilations practiced during the Columbian violence of the 1940s. The series depicts elaborate and beautiful botanical specimens constructed entirely out of human bones. The photographs recall botanical drawings recorded by European explorers who wanted both to document new species of plants and to entice European viewers in an attempt to encourage colonization and inhabitation of the “new world.” Scientific curiosity and violent conquest are thus juxtaposed, just as the fragile beauty of the plant is presented simultaneously with the horror of human remains. Describing his work in this series, Echavarría writes: “My purpose was to create something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it. The spectator would come near it, look at it, and then when he or she realizes that it is not a flower as it seemed, but actually a flower made of human bones—something must click in the head, or in the heart, I hope.”¹⁴⁵

It is this click that I think draws together Kristeva’s art of inscription (from the Greek skariphasthai, “to scratch an outline”), the iconoclasm of Hestia, and Benjamin’s theory of photography. What can come to presence is not a narrative or a message but perhaps only an image cut off from its context. When the camera clicks, it severs a moment from the flow of linear time and isolates it in space. This moment can be accessed immediately, or after a long-deferred stretch of time, or even never revisited. Hestia’s role is perhaps more enigmatic; however, as the goddess of the hearth, she negotiates the boundary between the body and the mind, the semiotic and the symbolic, the natural and the cultural. Hestia emerges through the moments of punctuation; she is the semiotic as it is taken up and read through the symbolic, the rhythm of their interaction, those flashes that might have the potential to reorder symbolic formations.¹⁴⁶

In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Jacques Lacan discusses his controversial introduction of the notion of a psychoanalytic session of unfixed duration as a means of disrupting the analysand’s expected psychic patterns in the session. Lacan refers to the tempo, duration, and ultimately signification of a session, just as of a sentence, as its “punctuation”:

By changing the duration of a session, in particular through the implementation of “short sessions,” Lacan hoped to disrupt the expectations of his patients and give birth to new revelations from the repressed unconscious of his patients. Indeed, he gives as evidence of the success of this method the following statement: “I was able to bring to light in a certain male subject fantasies of anal pregnancy, as well as a dream of its resolution by Cesarean section, in a time frame in which I would normally still have been listening to his speculations on Dostoyevsky’s artistry.”¹⁴⁸

Art has an analogous capacity to disrupt meaning and suggest new configurations through its innovation in punctuation, and it is this capacity that Kristeva refers to as its possibility of inscription rather than representation. It can also be thought of, in art and in therapy, as a kind of modification in rhythm. In her discussion of the medium of film, Kristeva speaks of the “logic” of what she calls the “thought specular” as a kind of “skeleton.”¹⁴⁹ We can understand this skeleton and its modifications in analogy to the rhythm of a song, the beats that give it structure. In the Pedro Almodóvar film Volver, for instance, the title song, which is a traditional tango, is sung instead to a flamenco rhythm. The rhythm of a tango is binary, divided into two, four, or eight beats per measure and characterized by a steady, pulsing strum.¹⁵⁰ Tango is thought to originate from Cuba, from the music and dance of African slaves held by the Spanish. Flamenco developed out of tango, but it has a different, more complex rhythmic structure reflecting, perhaps, the turbulent times out of which it evolved. Many of the songs of flamenco are said to arise out of the persecution of the Moors and the Jews in Spain during the Inquisition and “the spirit of desperation, struggle, hope, and pride of the people during this time.”¹⁵¹

The decision to have Volver sung in a flamenco rather than a tango rhythm is a subtle one, one that perhaps has no conscious effect on the viewer, especially the one (who probably represents the majority of viewers) who has no in-depth knowledge of either tango or flamenco. Yet unconsciously, or on a bodily, semiotic level, the change in rhythm delicately affects the viewer, giving rise to the simultaneous and paradoxical feelings of deep anxiety and hope. The song is sung in a formerly failed restaurant next door to her apartment building that Raimunda has impulsively reopened (she has been given the keys by the owner so she can show it to prospective renters) in order to feed a film crew who has inquired into it. In the back room of the restaurant the dead body of her husband lies in a deep freezer; he was stabbed by her teenage daughter when he tried to molest her. Raimunda’s efforts to hide the crime and resuscitate her life (burdened by the recollection of her own father’s sexual abuse) are tempered by the gravity of the knowledge of that hidden corpse, which weighs her down like a traumatic memory, yet the sensuous profusion of the food she creates and the cheerful bustle of the film crew suggest the possibility of rebirth from sadness. Most importantly and tellingly, of course, her relationship with her missing mother, who reappears first as a foreigner, then as a ghost, but eventually manifests herself as a real, living presence, will have to be faced and reintegrated into her new existence. Correlative to the flamenco rhythm of the song are other elements of circular rhythm found throughout the film, from images of lofty modern windmills dotting a field; to the smell and cyclical movement of an exercise bicycle used by Raimunda’s mother, who throughout the film haunts it like a ghost; to the cycle of regular care of the graves of the dead and the women turning around the “principal mourners” at the funeral; to the return of the mother/daughter relationship. Like the claps that perform a staccato punctuation of the flamenco song, knives and stabbing also punctuate the film, from the opening scenes, where Paula stabs her stepfather, to the restaurant scenes of cutting vegetables, to, finally, Raimunda’s act of carving an inscription into a tree beside the river where she has buried Paco. This punctuating, circular rhythm and the carving recall Kristeva’s characterization of successful art as inscription, as cutting away or through, as well as Barthes’s identification of death as the punctum of every photograph, the point that “pierces” us and draws us out of it. Just as a photograph that was only studium and not punctum would be a representation, a film that is only specularity without “thought” or a lektonic logic would be an ordinary Hollywood narrative, which Almodóvar’s films are clearly not. These moments of punctuation present the semiotic as it is taken up and read through the symbolic, resulting in a rhythm of interaction, in flashes that might have the potential to reorder symbolic formations. Interestingly, Almodóvar has said of his own entire aesthetic oeuvre, entirely in keeping with this rhythm of Nachträglichkeit, that “we don’t have confidence in the future, but we are constructing a past for ourselves, because we don’t like the one we have.”¹⁵²

This logic, which is also the logic of the “thought specular” in Kristeva’s parlance, constitutes a version of the specular that distances itself from itself by both embodying fantasy and disparaging it.¹⁵³ The cinema of the thought specular puts semiotic elements of signification into play in a more direct and unavoidable way than any other medium: vision, sound, movement, and tone are not merely present in profusion, but they practically abut on the viewer’s face. The interplay of these lektonic traces reflect and retrace the energies of the pulsating and desiring body,¹⁵⁴ in particular the semiotic element of rhythm, which accompanies us in the profusion of temporal experiences that make up human existence.

In her privileging of rhythm, Kristeva seems to follow Sergei Eisenstein, one of her favorite film directors, who links rhythm in particular to the unconscious. In a text on cinematic method, Eisenstein writes that

everything in us that occurs apart from consciousness and will—occurs rhythmically: the beating of the heart and breathing, peristalsis of the intestines, merger and separation of cells, etc. Switching off consciousness, we sink into the inviolable rhythm of breathing during sleep, the rhythm of sleepwalking, etc. And conversely—the monotony of a repeated rhythm brings us closer to those states “next to consciousness,” where only the traits of sensuous thought are capable of functioning fully.¹⁵⁵

Note the proximity of “sensuous thought” to “thought specular.” Humans are rhythmic organisms striated by the cadences of their pumping and circulating organs. Human rhythms alternate and conform to the different activities in which we engage, fluctuating naturally in multiple ways. The society of the spectacle affects not only what we see but also how we interact rhythmically with the world, imposing an identical rhythm on activities as diverse as work and play, thought and relaxation, love, anticipation, dread, and horror. One way in which aesthetic activity can intervene therapeutically is by obliging the body to engage in alternate rhythms. Film in particular can capture the entirety of bodily rhythm in a new and transformative way, seizing the viewer and turning her into a participant and collaborator with the aesthetic event, as she is literally moved by the work.

In Almodóvar’s film Talk to Her, the spectator enters the film in the role of Marco, a masculine yet sensitive figure whom we first encounter at the ballet, silently weeping as he watches a performance choreographed by the late Pina Bausch.¹⁵⁶ Recounting a similar experience, the director Wim Wenders says of watching a piece by Bausch, “I was caught by an emotion that I’d never experienced in front of any stage; any dance, theater, opera, whatever. … My body understood it, but my brain was lagging far behind.”¹⁵⁷ Bausch herself is quoted as saying of her dancers (and perhaps those who watch them): “I am less interested in how people move than in what moves them.”¹⁵⁸ This emotional and corporeal experience of being captured or moved expresses what I mean by being caught up by an alternate rhythm of bodily existence.

Bausch’s dance “Café Müller,” as it is presented in the film, has three dancers, two women and one man. As the two women stagger gracefully yet blindly, their faces masks of pure suffering reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy, through a café littered with chairs, a man struggles to remain one step in front of one woman’s path, removing and shifting chairs to allow her to pass. She continues on her path without even seemingly noticing him, only to crash into a wall repeatedly, falling wildly yet with controlled balletic posture. The dance seems to portray a disoriented and melancholic life-orbit, where one obstacle is avoided only to make way for another collision. The accompanying music is the elegiac “O Let Me Weep, For Ever Weep” from Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen (1698 and 1702), with lyrics that lament the loss of love. Despite the profound sadness and chaos of the piece, it is intensely beautiful. Pina Bausch once said in an interview that “Mit dem ‘Nur Reden’ kann man ja nichts anfangen ,” or “nothing can be begun ‘by speaking alone.’”¹⁵⁹ Her point is that the body itself has a language more primordial than and ultimately forming a condition for the possibility of symbolic language, through its movements, affects, and rhythms, a point Kristeva has also made repeatedly.

The story of Talk to Her, like Volver, is a story of punctuation and healing. It follows the journey of transformation in the character of Marco, starting from the point when Marco’s girlfriend, a famous bullfighter, falls into a coma after being gored by a bull, and Marco meets Benigno (“benign”), a young man who is the nurse and almost exclusive caregiver of another young woman in a coma in the same hospital. The wound of the bull’s horn is an allegorical expression of a psychic trauma, although the enactment of the therapy addressing the trauma takes place primarily in the caregivers (and the spectators).

In the alternation between punctuation and healing, rhythm and figure, we see a clear enactment of what Kristeva means by the art of inscription. John Lechte describes the semiotic sphere that Kristeva has so eloquently articulated as a realm of musicalized, timeful space,¹⁶⁰ articulated by Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language as the dynamic and creative Platonic chora. Here art becomes a place of therapeutic address.

Kristeva imagines an ideal, impossible film, one directed by Eisenstein and Hitchcock (another master of conflict, who allowed the fear evoked by the death drive to come to the fore explicitly), with a score by Schönberg.¹⁶¹ Schönberg’s opera Aaron and Moses enacts the very dynamic between image and iconoclasm that Kristeva finds compelling. The story follows the two brothers, Moses and Aaron, one who strictly follows the injunction against any graven images of the divine, the other who interprets the image less rigorously as a possible intermediary to the divine, in response to the people’s demand for a god they can see. Schönberg investigates this dynamic with reference to the struggle going on in his own time between religious and secular Jews, the former who thought it most important to remain purely focused on theological doctrine and the latter who insisted on the necessity of statehood and citizenship for the Jewish people, allowing them to integrate more fully into public life. While Schönberg shows little sympathy for Aaron’s desire to use the image as a way to approach the divine (as well as for the correlative secular Jewish desire for a state), Kristeva calls the debate between Aaron and Moses a misleading one. She writes that this is a false dichotomy, between “the jubilation of idol worshippers seduced by the golden calf (followers of the image?) and the divine threat exploding in thunder, imageless,” and that this is the very dichotomy that the thought specular seeks to negotiate.¹⁶²

Mimesis, in the sense that Adorno, Kristeva, and Benjamin use it, is not an identical repetition but rather a re-creation of what cannot be exactly reproduced or retrieved. In a very real sense it is the creation of memory. This is to say that it would not be art’s role to recapture a lost sensation in the freshness of its original plentitude or in the rawness of the originary trauma. Rather, art creates memory by bringing into being words and thoughts that transport what is outside of time and language into language and time and thus into memory—and perhaps out of symptom. Art, literature, and possibly psychoanalysis, because of its emphasis on the unconscious, can thus act as the Hestias, or conditions of possibility, for imagining the order of human existence in a new way.

Kristeva conceptualizes this negative path toward thought, language, art, memory, and transformation in terms of a new interpretation of the theological ban on images. Kristeva’s iconoclasm follows that of Hans Holbein, whose art she analyzes in Black Sun, and of Lucio Fontana, whose works repeat the Orthodox icon (as she interprets it) in that they inscribe rather than represent, “giv[ing] form and color to the nonrepresentable”¹⁶³ or “locating representation on the ultimate threshold of representability.”¹⁶⁴ Benjamin’s discussion of the invention of the photograph and its subsequent development as an art provides a concrete means of thinking about how art can present a truth about a particular time that both freezes it so that it can be examined by later theorists just as it was in its own time, and that perhaps brings forth elements of the past that were overlooked at the time, such that their redemptive possibilities might be discerned and gleaned. Kristeva takes this discussion to the medium of film, to explore its therapeutic rhythms. The task of the thought specular is “to remain in idolatry (fantasy) while at the same time exhibiting symbolic truth.” This task translates the sensibility of Kristeva’s iconoclasm for the cinema.