4

SUBLIMATING MAMAN

EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE RE-EROTIZATION OF EXISTENCE IN KRISTEVA’S READING OF MARCEL PROUST

Ideas are successors to sorrows; the moment sorrows change into ideas they lose a part of their power to hurt our hearts and, for a brief moment, the transformation even releases some joy. Successors only in the order of time, though, because it seems that the primary element is actually the idea, and the sorrow merely the mode in which certain ideas first enter our minds.

—Marcel Proust, Time Regained

IN THIS CHAPTER I WILL CONSIDER AT GREATER LENGTH Kristeva’s reading of Marcel Proust, relating it to the idea of sublimation as re-erotization. Commentary on Proust’s texts pervades Kristeva’s writing, and she has devoted an entire book, Time and Sense, to a reading of Proust specifically and to the phenomenology of the experience of literature generally. It might initially seem counterintuitive that Kristeva considers Proust exemplary of the kind of literary writing she most admires. In her earliest writings Kristeva was primarily engaged with avant-garde literature. Even when she considers more traditional writers such as Dostoevsky, it is generally for the purpose of emphasizing certain psychoanalytic themes such as melancholia. It is significant, however, that Kristeva writes about Proust in a work otherwise devoted to the topic of the experience of literature, a subject she links with the recuperation of the image within the symbolic. Kristeva considers Proust to be exemplary of the process of reading and writing literature as a translation of sensory impressions and the drives that both inform and are derived from them into language, as well as for demonstrating how modifications of narrative logic reveal specific psychic states. In particular, Kristeva’s reading of Proust gives us insight into the process of sublimation understood not just as a desexualization but as a re-eroticization of existence, through the translation or transformation of the relationship between Eros and the exposed (by sublimation) death drive into a proliferation of (provisional) aesthetic ideas.

Although I will consider Kristeva’s reading of Proust at length, I will not spend very much time on her discussion of the details of In Search of Lost Time. Rather, I will focus on the themes of experience, sensation, language, temporality, and memory that form important parts of her analysis and that inform her larger corpus of work. It is not until the second half of Time and Sense that Kristeva explores in depth the ideas in Proust’s work that seem to have motivated her interest in it in the first place. Proust “inaugurated a new conception of temporality and thus created the modern aesthetic.”¹

Kristeva writes that after Proust many thinkers and writers tried to emulate his fragmentation of temporality and deconstruction of the traditional, unified novelistic style, in a manner that might be considered more transgressive and avant-garde than their predecessor. Yet “Proust is the only figure who maintains both the violence of marginality that drives his characters as it drove him and the grace to construct a world, to receive communion in the time of the world.”²

PROUST AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Kristeva is not the first author to write about Proust psychoanalytically, but she sheds new light on the topic by considering Proust’s writing style in analogy to the analytic situation, particularly to the transference-countertransference relationship. In a psychoanalytic conference address on the topic of narration, Kristeva begins a consideration of Proust’s writing with a story about one of her patients, who dreads a holiday break because she will not be seeing her analyst for a certain amount of time. The patient makes the comment that when she misses a session, she finds herself telling anyone who will listen, friends or colleagues, long stories about her experiences or endless accounts of patient cases (she is herself a psychiatrist undergoing psychoanalytic training).³ The patient is coming to realize the importance of self-narration in her treatment. Kristeva goes on to explore the relation of narration and other enunciative modalities of literary writing to mental life, in particular to the multiple aspects of hysteria, which, she writes, taking a cue from Freud’s remarks on Dora, has a peculiar relation to temporality. In particular, the hysteric is unable to maintain a continuous linear narration but gets bogged down in the attempt to do so, leaving gaps and false starts, with secondary memories coming in to fill the lacunae.⁴

The discourse of psychoanalysis in Kristeva’s reading is primarily one of fantasy.⁵ As such, it shares much in common with literary narration, with its predominant model of linear recounting following the “logic of an ordeal.”⁶ The ordeal proceeds along an ascending and descending line, with accompanying actions or agents that either further or hinder the action and that can be thought of as manifesting a “logic of interrogation,” during which the hero or the analysand asks herself questions like “who am I?” or “where do I come from?” and “where am I going?”⁷ Kristeva recalls Freud’s analysis of the dependence of judgments of attribution and existence upon the symbol of negation on the one hand, and the bodily act of rejection or ejection on the other.⁸ She wants to extend this analysis to include a consideration of interrogation as the primary mode of both narration and of psychoanalysis. Both modes of discourse presuppose an interlocutor, a second person to whom the questions are addressed.⁹ She compares this act of narration to transference, in which the implicit statement “I assume there is a part of me in you, and I await from it the answer to the question formulated by the other part, or an adherence to the story that I create in answer to my question—unless it is a refusal”¹⁰ forms the basis of an intense identification that can lead to self-revelation.

In the case of Proust and even more strikingly in the case of Joyce or Kafka, the narration comes to have a modified logic, one in which the linearity of the narrative becomes more and more elliptical and interrupted, interspersed with impressions and feelings, multiple metaphors and subordinate clauses. In particular in the case of Proust, the result is the alteration, as Kristeva argues, of “the pace of memory” and an “attempt to re-establish contact with regressive states, hallucinations, or dreams.”¹¹ Proust’s novel can be understood in analogy to the methodology of transference, in which the analysand attempts, to the help of the analyst, her interlocutor, to reestablish contact with her past via (both ideal and sensuous) memories, reawakened impressions, dreams, and fantasies.

Kristeva makes use of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to articulate her understanding of narration, emphasizing the phallic stage, which she considers to be the foundation of the human questioning that is characteristic of philosophy. In particular, Kristeva examines the phallic trial that introduces the Oedipal stage. Recall that in the myth, Oedipus is faced with the riddle of the Sphinx, which in turn, according to her reading, leads to the discursive position of self-interrogation: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?¹² The phallic stage consolidates thought and symbolism and culminates in the capacity to interrogate the parents as to where children come from.¹³

But Kristeva is particularly interested in the residue of nonsymbolic indicators that remain even after one’s passage through the Oedipal crisis and into the symbolic order. Narration “on the couch” is composed both of words and phrases and of affects and emotions.¹⁴ She argues that within every narration there are “non-narrative shreds” that are closer to thing presentations than to word presentations and that their presence indicates a very specific psychical experience, namely the attempt to regain with words what for the patient are still only drives or affects. It is this process, which may be mediated through images, that she sees as particularly salient in Proust’s writing.

Proust’s novel provides a perfect example of the process of sublimation in its most fundamental sense. The novel begins with a memory of waiting for the mother’s kiss. His mother, maman, is going away, and Marcel is waiting for the kiss that will make her absence bearable. The entire novel, as it unfolds from this expectation, desire, and sorrow, narrates the human condition, born fragile and dependent, nurtured by an all-powerful fulfiller of every need, and then gradually forced to separate from this plenitude and eternally seek substitutes for it, as the condition for becoming an individuated self. Marcel is probably the most self-aware of all literary sublimators as he writes that “Ideas are successors to sorrows; the moment sorrows change into ideas they lose a part of their power to hurt our hearts and, for a brief moment, the transformation even releases some joy.” He loses the mother only to find her, self-consciously, in words and ideas. He loses his “head” and forges a head.

PROUST’S CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE

The concept of experience is not a common one in Freud or Lacan’s writings. Although it arguably informs an important part of psychoanalytic discourse, namely, the fantasy, Kristeva claims that Freud, and even more pointedly Lacan, neglected experience, which she aligns with the imaginary realm, in favor of an exclusively symbolic consideration of discourse. Kristeva turns to Melanie Klein’s work on prelinguistic infants to explore the possibility of a kind of “protophantasy” or “quasi-narration” to be found in the baby’s articulation of drives and desires toward an object—the breast, the mother—to assure its egoic survival.¹⁵ Drawing on post-Kleinian cognitive psychology, Kristeva notes that “representations of events” have been observed in children of less than a year old, “equivalent to a primitive plot,” that is, encompassing affects and logical properties of drives such as motivation, repetition, temporality, dramatic tension, and memory associations.¹⁶ Referring to this “primitive plot” as a “pre-narrative envelope,” Kristeva argues that there is an intermediary realm within the prelinguistic infant that lies between impressions (“pure experience”) and the abstraction that would be needed for linguistic representation. Klein named this realm “thought phantasy,” a prerequisite of thought and language, a “primary anxiety” related to the depressive position. Klein emphasized the necessity both of a preverbal and affective “narrative envelope” out of which language could emerge and of the presence of another—typically the mother, but, in the case of the reawakening of these moments in analysis, the analyst—through whose verbal solicitations a narrative of these fantasies, which would be equivalent to the emergence of fantasy itself, can eventually emerge.¹⁷ This would involve three levels: the prenarrative affective structure in which primary desires are expressed, an acting out of fantasy, followed by actual narration in words (symbolic level). Kristeva claims that Proustian experience can be understood on all these levels.

Kristeva approaches Proust’s concept of experience, mentioned only briefly in In Search of Lost Time, yet clearly significant to philosophers,¹⁸ through the Heideggerian distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, significantly modified for her own purposes. In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes between these two terms, both of which may be translated as “experience,” in the following way: “An Erlebnis is not just any ‘experience’ [Erfahrung], but one which we feel deeply and live through.”¹⁹ The French translation of Being and Time renders Erlebnis as expérience or épreuve and Erfahrung as impression. Kristeva reads “experience” (Erlebnis) as “an opening-up to the other that serves to exalt or destabilize me that has “its anthropological roots in my bonds with the primary object, that is, the mother, who is an archaic focal point for needs, desire, love, and repulsion.”²⁰ She thus clearly connects experience to the unconscious. She uses terms like “flash,” “springing forth,” and “sudden appearance” to describe this experience. Secularly, the search for the lost maternal space, to which there is no direct access, may take place through writing or through an artistic mastery of sound or color. When Erlebnis or “experience” is used in religious and philosophical discourse, it indicates a “simultaneity with the plenitude of Being,” or a fusion with God.²¹ Erfahrung, by contrast, can be conceptualized as a secondary imposition upon the initial flash or appearing of Erlebnis that transforms it into knowledge. Reaching its culmination in Heidegger as well as in Hegel, “philosophy has mapped out these stages of experience, of which the second (knowledge) absorbs the first (the springing-forth), such that if we were to isolate this springing-forth, it would appear to be pure nothingness.”²²

In Proust’s account of experience, Kristeva argues, Erlebnis always has a dual structure. The narrator “searches” for lost time, for that flashing up, which is by nature irretrievable. The plot of the novel is linear and continuous, but it unravels in order to catch those moments that cannot be predicted or known. Experience in this sense:

Interrupts the subject’s social and verbal displays and reshapes his psychic map. For this reason, it is inseparable from desire and love. Inside them and through them, experience is felt to be a conversion. Partaking of psychology and of representation, experience marks the fragile painful or joyous bridge between the body and the idea, which makes such distinctions obsolete.²³

This borderline situation between the body and the idea and between the representative (the sensuous) and the psychological is what Kristeva refers to as the experience of the sense of time.²⁴ It refers not to symbolic time, which is sequential and uniform, but to time per se, neither the time of an individual psyche nor the time of events but the time of the narrative, which exists in an intermediary space between them.

Walter Benjamin interprets Erlebnis in a related manner but in almost opposite terms with respect to Proust. Benjamin is interested in the connection between experience (Erlebnis) and memory (Gedächtnis) or recollection (Erinnerung). He contrasts Erlebnis, as an isolated experience, with Erfahrung, as experience over time.²⁵ Benjamin writes that Erlebnis is the achievement of the intellect, which, by pinpointing specific events at precise moments in time and consciousness, creates a shock experience.²⁶ Erfahrung, which Benjamin associates with poetic experience, integrates past and future into a collective memory (Gedächtnis) in which elements of an individual past combine with material from the collective past.²⁷ On Benjamin’s reading, experience in the sense of Erlebnis is hermetic and purely subjective, and thus unsuitable for literary composition, which is distinguished by its capacity for transforming Erlebnisse into Erfahrungen, or sequential or continuous “long experiences,” and for its ability to communicate across individual experience.²⁸ For Benjamin, Erlebnis considered in isolation from Erfahrung is a product of modernity; it is only when individualism and secularism split the subject from her collective past that Gedächtnis (memory) is transformed into Erinnerung (recollection) and Erlebnis becomes the primary way of thinking about experience, as inner and subjective.

In Proust, according to Benjamin, the amalgamation between involuntary memory and the story told by the narrator gives rise to experience (Erfahrung) in a manner that might best be explained by means of a detour through Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Before considering the details of Benjamin’s argument, I will return to the doublet that Kristeva finds distinctive of Proust’s Erlebnis and Benjamin of Erfahrung. It is important to note that both authors are reading Proust through German philosophers—Kristeva through Heidegger, Benjamin through Freud—meaning that the distinctions they are drawing are not found explicitly in Proust himself.

Kristeva calls Proustian experience “transubstantial,”²⁹ in that (1) through ideas and words memory can regain the shock of Erlebnis, which she reads as prior to, although retroactively constituted by, Erfahrung, and (2) in that Proust presents himself as a body wanting to be resurrected by a book. Kristeva calls the first of these reasons an “imaginative embodiment of the word.”³⁰ In other words, Erlebnis is aligned with the imaginary, yet in such a way that it is not opposed to language but rather makes of language its instrument, “so that spatio-temporal continuity and its fragmentation are not an antithesis to pure time but its servant, the preferred means for attaining time regained.”³¹ Proust’s writing is an embodiment of the imaginary in the terms of the symbolic. Perhaps this is true of all literary writing; what makes Proust’s text exemplary is that the very experience of “regaining time” is the experience of the imaginary, but rather than being isolated or limited to a particular place and time:

This strange and new experience of time regained resides in the dynamic of subject and meaning. It also causes signs, which exist within time, to be ordered into syntax as well as to unfold the music of metaphors into sensations, which are on the edge of time and which extend beyond signs and elude signs even if they can only be perceived through what is superimposed on them.³²

If the imaginary is aligned with timelessness and the symbolic with time, this transubstantiation allows for an experience on the edge of time, on the border between both, in the way that Kristeva argues the semiotic can be reevoked from within the symbolic. Thus through literature time is being accessed metaphorically. Indeed, the idea of “imaginary experience,” which Kristeva indicates we can all share with Proust’s narrator, is a metaphorically conceived concept, given that we access it only through the language of the author. But metaphor should only be understood in the sense that Kristeva discusses it in Tales of Love:

Here the term metaphor should not bring to mind the classic rhetorical trope (figurative vs. plain) but instead, on the one hand, the modern theories of metaphor that decipher within it an indefinite jamming of semantic features one into the other, a meaning being acted out; and, on the other, the drifting of heterogeneity within a heterogeneous psychic apparatus, going from drives and sensations to signifier and conversely.³³

Proust’s version of experience is unique, according to Kristeva, in that the first flash of Erlebnis occurs always in pairs. The famous petite madeleine, for example, which inaugurates the entire sequence of reminiscences, exists in the context of both present and past. The narration follows the continuous sequencing of the plot, “while remaining caught in the pincers of the immediate metaphor that removes it from temporal duration and adorns it with the exhilaration of ‘pure time.’”³⁴ This double movement, which recurs throughout the novel and which Kristeva calls a “primal metaphorical condensation,” is experienced simultaneously by both the narrator and the reader.

Kristeva calls this experience one of “rapportive language,” in which understanding depends on a preexisting affinity of some sort between the communicator and her audience. The primary representative of such a language is religious discourse, which to be understood requires faith. However, Kristeva argues that since religion and even morality have lost their hold on us because of their excessive restrictiveness or their inability to be heard, the novel has become the one place in modernity where rapportive language can still make a claim on us. This affinity can be understood as an imaginative identification with the narrator that occurs purely through language, without the mediation of a community or an expert;³⁵ that is, it is an imaginary experience that is nonetheless mediated through the symbolic.

The temporal dynamic that the identificatory appropriation characteristic of great literature serves can be understood as “the dynamic between love and hate that makes me a living being.”³⁶ In Proust, in particular, psychic life, as translated into a narrative, is manifested in its full complexity: as simultaneously painful and ecstatic, sensuous and spiritual. It pushes the reader toward a full consideration of her own psychic/bodily life: “It opens me up to myself, pushes me as far as I can go, makes me surpass myself—and offers me a space where I can meet other people or where I can become lost. It is a chance I have to take.”³⁷ Without this kind of rapportive language, Kristeva suggests, the current “death of values … may have reached a point of no return.”³⁸ Experience, which can be regained through certain kinds of literary writing, “is the unique configuration by which we attain jouissance,” at the boundaries of the body and of ideas, between love and hate.³⁹

Benjamin discerns a parallel possibility in Baudelaire’s description of his poetic process. In modernity, where shock has become the norm—Benjamin writes that “the shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated ‘experiences’ of the worker at his machine”⁴⁰—Erfahrung can no longer quilt together Erlebnisse in the same way that lyric poetry did. Baudelaire puts shock “at the center of his work,”⁴¹ the blows “opening up a path through the crowd.”⁴² In this discussion of Baudelaire’s poetic process, Benjamin and Kristeva converge in their analyses of experience in modernity and art’s role in bearing witness to the shock, performing and possibly transforming it.

Benjamin’s reads the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, on the one hand, and between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, on the other, with recourse to Freud’s discussion of the origin of consciousness in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud hypothesizes a correlation between involuntary memory and the emergence of consciousness. Freud speculates that becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are incompatible processes within the same system, for if permanent traces of all excitation remained conscious, it would soon limit consciousness’s capacity for receiving new stimulation.⁴³ He thus postulates that consciousness arose in place of a memory trace, as a kind of external layer so modified by stimulation that it was no longer capable of being further modified by the depositing of memory traces but instead developed the most favorable conditions for the reception of perceptions from the external world and from the mental apparatus while also relieving stimuli of their original intensity as they passed through into the underlying layers of the psyche.⁴⁴ Consciousness thus emerged as a form of protection against stimuli.

Benjamin notes that Theodor Reik, Freud’s student, drew a distinction between memory (Gedächtnis) and recollection (Erinnerung) based on Freud’s theory. Memory, according to Reik’s view, serves to protect impressions, that is, Freud’s external stimuli that leave unconscious traces; recollection, by contrast, since it is conscious, aims at their dissolution.⁴⁵ Applying this process to Proust’s distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory (or mémoire d’intelligence), Benjamin writes, “this means that only what has not happened to the subject as an isolated experience (Erlebnis) can become a component of mémoire involuntaire.”⁴⁶

It is Erfahrung, the poetic quilting together of a sequence of events, that, although it is associated with conscious recollection, protects involuntary memory and allows for its appearance. Thus Benjamin, too, identifies the importance of Proust’s style in the form of the doublet, the metaphorical pairing that allows for the unconscious trace to be resuscitated along with the conscious, linguistic narrative. It is in the linkage of collective and individual experience that memory can be regained.

Kristeva quotes Proust in calling this kind of experience a “transubstantiation.”⁴⁷ In Proust, we encounter a highly modified narrative structure: sentences are elongated, metaphors multiply exponentially, characters cross over between life and the story. Kristeva writes:

I venture that these changes in the narrative have as their basis, or purpose, to cross through repression where the language of canonical narration operates, thus enabling a real surge of sensorial experience—its “indexation” or its “equation” found within words, or even, according to the Freudian model, in a return of “word-presentations” to “thing-presentations.” Proust himself points to this exorbitant change of language in his narrative—“words” becoming “things”—explaining that the purpose of literature is to create the “transubstantiation” proclaimed by the Catholic Mass.⁴⁸

Just as the bread and wine, according to Catholic doctrine, transform into the total substance of the body and blood of Christ in being consecrated and consumed during Mass, Proust’s words or word presentations are designed to transform themselves into the sensations of experience proper, that is, experience as impression, as thing presentation, for the reader as it was for the narrator. Retroactively, then, the reader designates an experience that she reads as her own; the experience indicated in the narrative will have been my own when I have finished reading it. This experience of transubstantiation does not involve the fantasy of the possibility of transmitting a pure sensory experience immediately from one perceiver to another. Transubstantiation suggests that the experience will always have to be mediated through the symbolic: through bread and wine, or through words.

ART, SUBLIMATION, AND WORKING THROUGH

In a section entitled “Proust, or the Power of Sublimation,” Kristeva accords literature and other artistic endeavors a potentially liberatory effect: “the power of sublimation is often neglected as a retake of the trauma, emptying out and evidencing trauma.”⁴⁹ This wording seems to put literary writing, or sublimation, very close to the activity of working through in analysis. Working through is a form of nonidentical repetition, in which a repressed memory, perhaps of a traumatic event, that has been repeating itself through neurotic symptoms is remembered and repeated in a way that is fundamentally modified by interpretation (by the analyst), ideally resulting in a capacity in the analysand to accept certain repressed elements and eventually to be freed from the cause of the debilitating repetition. Freud writes that the process of working through allows the patient to pass from mere intellectual acceptance of a resistance she has to a particular interpretation to what Freud calls a conviction based on lived experience (Erlebnis) of the repressed instincts that are “feeding the resistance.”⁵⁰ This would be the kind of flashing up that Kristeva associates with experience, and in integrating this new awareness within one’s self-understanding, one would bring it together in the kind of totality that Benjamin describes as Erfahrung. In living through the experience of the repression, brought about by the intervention of the analyst and the particular interpretation she has put forth, the patient is able to continue with the process of working through and potentially free herself from the debilitating repetition compulsion.

However, in another passage, Kristeva writes:

Sublimation is not necessarily a process of working through, even though many passages of In Search of Lost Time testify to a conscious awareness of the ambivalent link that makes the asthmatic child cling to his mother, for example, or of the homosexual bedrock of jealousy, etc. We come across this in analytic treatment; before any “understanding” or “intellectualization,” the mere fact of naming affect in order to return it to the other/the analyst is a mediation/meditation that mitigates its death instincts, and renders them bearable, livable, perhaps even agreeable and pleasant.⁵¹

Here sublimation seems have the same relation to working through that the unconscious has to consciousness. If Freud and Lacan seem to equate literature and art with sublimation, Kristeva characterizes Proust’s process in In Search of Lost Time as more of a process of working through, one that has both unconscious and conscious elements. Indeed, Kristeva argues that Proust endeavors, as closely as possible, to give expression through language to the inexpressible, the unrepresentable, that is, to the feelings and drives that both motivate and threaten him.⁵² It is in this sense that the work of art is a sublimation; like the theory of the sublime in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, sublimation makes present, through means that mask and are necessarily inadequate to it, that which by nature is unpresentable.

As an example of the distinction between and continuity of working through and sublimation, we might consider the two steps Kristeva details at length in Proust’s process of transforming his own experiences into literature. First, hiring Céleste Albaret as a housekeeper gave Proust a sublimatory surface (like that of the analyst) against which to bounce his experiences and memories, a surface that did not respond: “he spoke to her and his words rebounded. There was no dialogue, for she simply activated his monologue by relaying it and starting it up again. He forgot her; he took her in; she vanished just as he did. There were no longer any ‘selves,’ just the I that spoke through her.”⁵³ Like the soundproof seal of cork around his bedroom, Céleste’s ear “guaranteed the hermetic seal of the sheltered universe where involuntary memory remade and undid its sprawling sentences and searched for sounds, colors, and tastes.”⁵⁴ Second, the narrator Marcel furtively enjoys the pleasure of observing sadomasochistic sex, which he subsequently works through, displaces, and translates into the language of the text.

Kristeva refers to Proust’s peculiar form of sublimation as a “profanation,” insofar as it concerns, as she reads it, “the destruction of the divine.”⁵⁵ The divine here is associated with the paternal image, the phallus, the name of the father, and the paternal law, and profaning it results in “the metaphor of the capacity to represent—which characterizes human nature at the highest level: of our capacity to hallucinate/imagine/talk/symbolize.”⁵⁶ Understood as such, the divine of our own time “still confronts the analyst,” although it is in the guise of “an extremely complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered capacity” comprising both the unconscious and the conscious, both the imaginary and the symbolic realms. If the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to overcome resistance, to optimize psychic life, to enhance sublimation, then Proust undertakes this aim through a fragmentation of the divine understood as the capacity to represent. Extreme sorrow is the only means by which certain ideas reach our consciousness. Furthermore, this shattering, although necessary, can subsequently be drawn into a kind of unity, into a narrative work.⁵⁷

Yet the narrative unity presented by Proust is not an ordinary linear narrative. The confusion that results from the proliferation of metaphor, the undecidability of multiple subordinate clauses, the fluidity of certain characters who seem to interchange qualities with one another, all give rise to: “The feeling and thought, which are a true experience of holding the divine—in the sense of possessing the aptitude for making sense, both in the possible eclipse, and its threatening nullification, and in its polyphonic magnificence.”⁵⁸ This is certainly a very radical sense of the divine, one that can be sustained while being threatened with nullification, just as the kind of language that Proust uses is, arguably, a radical profanation of the symbolic order that can be shattered and simultaneously maintained. Kristeva refers to this process as a kind of atheism, a sublimity that would result not, as in the Kantian version, in a reconciliation of the supersensible and the sensible but in a process of “exploding the divine, on the edge of the risks that threaten psychic integrity, as do all the great adventures of contemporary art.” The divine would then encompass the shattering of meaning that is nonetheless “still contained in the polyphony of [Proust’s] poetic narrative.”⁵⁹ At the same time, the sorrow evoked would be the means for an idea that is “not of the order of time” to arrive in consciousness.

The dissolution of the paternal function would not simply be the result of an arbitrary literary act; Proust’s atheism is not a purely personal one. Rather, the willed nullification of the capacity to represent mirrors a decline that is already taking place, a historical and cultural decline that Proust refers to as “the spectacle.” The ascendance and subsequent hegemony of science and capitalism, together with the decline of the Catholic Church, gives rise to a new sensibility as well as a new sense of temporality. Hereafter, language itself reflects this transformation. Proust’s metaphors and sentence structure both mimic and subvert this temporality of infinite exchange and constant upheaval, the dynamic of the new that replaces itself eternally, the pursuit of the everchanging entertainment of the spectacle.

A HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF SUBLIMATION

In 1910, Freud published an essay on Leonardo da Vinci in which he argued that Leonardo exemplified the healthiest and happiest fate of the infantile drive toward sexual research after the developmental point when the sexual drive and the drive for knowledge have been separated. I will argue in this section that Proust’s literature exemplifies a similar “happy fate” on Kristeva’s reading. According to Freud, in children the sexual drive and the instinct for research or knowledge are bound together, with the instinct for research working in the service of sexual interests. When the period of infantile sexual research (epitomized in the question “where do babies come from?”) comes to an end through the inevitable sexual repression that comes with age, three vicissitudes are open to the instinct for research that is bound to the sexual drive. In the first possible vicissitude, the instinct for research might be repressed along with sexuality perhaps because of religious inhibition, resulting in a form of neurosis. If intellectual development in the individual is sufficiently strong, however, the instinct for research might resist repression yet still remain imbricated with the repressed sexual drive, aiding it in its own attempt to avoid repression and thereby “allowing suppressed sexual activities to return from the unconscious in a form of compulsive brooding,” resulting in a sexualization of thinking.⁶⁰ In this second form, research becomes a sexual activity evading any possible solution or resolution and also completely avoiding explicitly sexual themes. We might recognize Proust and Kristeva’s characterization and critique of the spectacle in this second vicissitude. Third, in the vicissitude of which Leonardo da Vinci is a model type, the libido avoids repression altogether by being sublimated from the outset into curiosity and becoming attached to the instinct for research as a reinforcement rather than a goad. In this form of sublimation, research becomes a substitute for sexual activity without remaining attached to infantile sexual research.⁶¹

Freud implies that it is the very precociousness of Leonardo’s inclination toward sexual curiosity, its inability, thanks to his early age, to become clearly fixated on an object, that allowed for such a large portion of his sexual drive to be sublimated into a general urge to know.⁶² Leonardo’s artistic inclinations, which manifested themselves secondarily to his drive for knowledge, eventually gave way to his original sublimation of the sexual drive into the drive for research; while initially his investigations were in the service of art, eventually they led him away from art.⁶³

At the end of the essay, Freud admits that the nature of the artistic function is ultimately inaccessible to psychoanalysis, given its links to the drives. He indicates that only biological research can give insight into artistic achievements. Nevertheless, Freud continued to discuss sublimation in his theoretical works, albeit never at great length. In his earliest published use of the term “sublimation,” in the 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud speaks of the shift in the consideration and the progressive concealment of the body with the advance of civilization. The progressive concealment of the body keeps sexual curiosity alive and ultimately results in the diversion of the sexual drive away from the genitals toward the body as a whole. This diversion, or “sublimation,” leads to the concept of beauty, which, Freud speculates, has its roots in sexual excitation but eventually came to signify a disinterested enjoyment of aesthetic form.⁶⁴

By 1908 Freud was defining sublimation as “the capacity [of the sexual instinct] to exchange its originally sexual aim for another one, which is no longer sexual but which is psychically related to the first aim,” a capacity with particular value for civilization.⁶⁵ Yet in one of his 1909 lectures on psychoanalysis given at Clark University he equivocates, calling sublimation a process in which “the energy of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains ready for use—the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual.”⁶⁶ I emphasize this equivocation because it is often summarily assumed that sublimation is de-eroticization, and I want to argue, through Kristeva and drawing support from the arguments of André Green, Leo Bersani, and Joan Copjec, that this may not be unambiguously the case and that the art or literature that results from sublimation may give rise to a pleasure that would not inaccurately be called erotic, even if it is not directly sexual.

In particular, it seems to me that Kristeva’s argument about melancholic writing that we examined in chapter 1 can be bolstered through her use of the term “sublimation” to characterize the narrative of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. There, we saw how she argued that in order for a melancholic to come back to signification, a certain re-erotization of existence, and precisely an erotization of suffering, might be effected through art. I will ultimately also consider the relationship between melancholia and sublimation in Freud’s account of ego formation. In many places in Kristeva’s writings we can discern a strange alliance between eroticization and sublimation, to the extent that they seem to share the same logic, a logic of deflecting the death drive or, through a process of muted sexuality, an eroticization that is no longer individual but intersubjective, directed back, from the shelter of the symbolic position, toward the lost maternal bond, taking the edge of the destructive drive complex aimed at the ego.

SUBLIMATION BETWEEN EROS AND THANATOS

In his “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-analysis” (1912), Freud writes that sublimation is one of the primary ways in which patients suffering from neurosis might be brought to a healthier psychic existence. The temptation for many analysts, Freud writes, might be to prescribe sublimation as a direction for the employment of psychic energy that might be released through the lifting of neurotic inhibitions. However, Freud writes:

The doctor should hold himself in check, and take the patient’s capacities rather than his own desires as guide. Not every neurotic has a high talent for sublimation; one can assume of many of them that they would not have fallen ill at all if they had possessed the art of sublimating their instincts. If we press them unduly towards sublimation and cut them off from the most accessible and convenient instinctual satisfactions, we shall usually make life even harder for them than they feel it in any case. … It must further be borne in mind that many people fall ill precisely from an attempt to sublimate their instincts beyond the degree permitted by their organization and that in those who have a capacity for sublimation the process usually takes place of itself as soon as their inhibitions have been overcome by analysis. In my opinion, therefore, efforts invariably to make use of the analytic treatment to bring about sublimation are, though no doubt always laudable, far from being in every case advisable.⁶⁷

If sublimation is the most successful cure for neurosis, nevertheless, not every patient is capable of sublimating. The purpose of analysis is to lift inhibitions and overcome repressed memories, but the liberated psychic energy needs somewhere to go once it is released. Thus working through (or the process of analysis) and sublimation are related to each other in that without working through there can be nothing to sublimate, yet sublimation is not the inevitable result of the process of working through.

In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, a series of twenty-eight lectures that Freud gave at the University of Vienna in the years 1915 through 1917, he attempts to delineate the characteristics of a true artist and also to understand how an artist manages to create pleasure for others through his or her exploration of his or her own fantasy life. A true artist, Freud writes, “understands how to elaborate his day-dreams, so that they lose that personal note which grates upon strange ears and become enjoyable to others.” Moreover, the artist also “knows how to attach to his reflection of his phantasy-life so strong a stream of pleasure that for a time at least the repressions are out-balanced and dispelled by it.”⁶⁸ The artist’s activity gives the spectators or audience a means to “find a way back to” their own unconscious sources of pleasure, offering them comfort and consolation for what they have given up and thereby garnering their admiration and gratitude. Through this process the artist may also gain, then, those things that previously were the objects of his fantasy: honor, power, and the love of women.⁶⁹

It was not until the publication of The Ego and the Id in 1923 that Freud’s discussion of sublimation took on a new, more metapsychological significance in the account of ego formation through the transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido. In “On Narcissism” (1914), Freud had aligned secondary narcissism with the self-preservative, or ego, drives, rather than the sexual drives, because it withdraws energy from objects and invests it instead into itself.⁷⁰ Freud distinguishes this secondary form of narcissism from the autoerotism of the infant, which is objectless and does not distinguish between id and ego, in identifying it as the result of “something added to autoerotism—some new operation in the mind” that allows for the formation of the ego.⁷¹ Secondary narcissism coincides with the awareness of the infant of her mother and especially of her differentiation from the mother, and it is a normal developmental process.

The development of the ego thus occurs through a transformation of erotic libido into ego libido,⁷² a “desexualization,” that is a form of sublimation. The ego “forces itself,” as it were, on the id as a love object, and by sublimating some of the libido that is causing tension for the id, aids the id in mastering that tension.⁷³ Defusing the erotic and death instincts, sublimation gives the death instincts in the id assistance in gaining control over the libido; in doing so an inclination to aggression and destruction is released, which ultimately results in the formation of the superego, which is also a result of this sublimatory action.⁷⁴ As Sara Kofman writes in The Childhood of Art, “sublimation … finds its condition of possibility in the plastic nature of the sexual drive, a plasticity which stems from the death drive inhibiting the aim of the sexual drive and dividing it originarily into partial drives.”⁷⁵ Nevertheless, Freud insisted that sublimation is a product of Eros, albeit one that opens the ego up to Thanatos as well. This is because in The Ego and the Id Freud assigned to Eros not only the uninhibited sexual drive proper but also the aim-inhibited self-preservative instinct of the ego derived from it.⁷⁶ Sublimation is, thus, in a strange way, erotic, although only in the sense of a transformation and redistribution of energy.⁷⁷

According to Kofman’s reading, art provides the beautiful form that is needed in order to divert the attention of the ego when what is required is the lifting of inhibition and the possibility of discharge of excess energy. The work of the artist thus effects a release of energy tout court, without its being relocated or reinvested elsewhere.⁷⁸ Kofman argues that the artist tries to repeat what the child does in play, that is, to repeat ever differently. Calling sublimation a “little death” in that it effects a separation and thus partial liberation of the death drive, Kofman argues that culture is possible only through regression, that is, through a liberation of death forces,⁷⁹ a “mimicking death in life.”⁸⁰ The relation of sublimation to ego formation (the transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido) means that “the artist is not really the ‘father’ of his works … that it is instead the works that engender their father and are constitutive of his identity.”⁸¹

Kofman emphasizes the narcissistic pleasure that is both a motivation for the creation of art and an effect of the experience of artworks. She cites André Green’s description of the artwork as a “transnarcissistic object,” in that both artist and public can share in the narcissistic pleasure it arouses.⁸² The artist repeats herself, doubles herself in her work, implying “a nonpresence to oneself, an originary dissatisfaction, death immanent in life, and the absence of any simple and full origin.”⁸³ Furthermore, the double of art can also be linked to the repetition compulsion and the death drive as its “principle of intelligibility.”⁸⁴

In Tales of Love Kristeva also explores the art in relation to narcissism, in particular developing Freud’s idea of the “father of individual prehistory,” which “offers itself to me as a model” or as a pattern to be imitated.⁸⁵ Following Freud, Kristeva calls this “model” an “imaginary father”; it is imaginary because it precedes object relations, and therefore is immediate and direct, and a “father” because it is a model outside of the fused relationship with the mother, and it thereby precisely represents that which is the object of the mother’s desire as something other than the infant. This “father” is an odd locution because “there is no awareness of sexual difference during that period, and such a ‘father’ is the same as ‘both parents.’”⁸⁶ It is only with the establishment of this secondary narcissism that the child withdraws some of its “libidinal covetousness” toward the mother, a process that allows for the potential for normal, mediate identifications to occur.⁸⁷ Identification is conceived of as being always already within the symbolic order, within the realm of language. Therefore primary identification is of necessity metaphorical, since it concerns a nonobject in that it takes place prior to the establishment of object relations.⁸⁸ Here Kristeva understands metaphor as “movement toward the discernible.”⁸⁹ This establishment of a metaphorical “object” allows for the psychic split from the maternal container that enables subject formation.⁹⁰

Kristeva seems to be interested, in all her discussions of literature and psychoanalytic transference-countertransference, in identifying a process analogous to this development of secondary narcissism, but at the level of the already constituted subject. In other words, she is concerned with identifying processes or practices in the already constituted subject that she thinks operate analogously to the way the imaginary father functions in presymbolic life, but from within the realm of language. Such processes or practices would effectively translate the imaginary into the symbolic, but without reifying it. In acting in a manner parallel to secondary narcissism, these processes, through sublimation, might succeed in, as it were, retroactively creating that place of immediate identification necessary for successful subject formation, in particular in situations in which it had initially been effected in a way that was damaging to the individual, for example, when fusion with the mother had not been completely overcome or when the mother was introjected in a melancholic fashion. Modifying Lacan’s view, developed out of his critique of ego psychology, that all imaginary identification is based on a process of self-deceptive misrecognition of oneself in an external image that is prior to the entrance into language, Kristeva acknowledges a place for imaginary identification subsequent to the subject’s orientation in and through the symbolic order.

Kristeva reaches this speculative position through a reading of Melanie Klein and André Green. In her book on Melanie Klein, Kristeva notes Klein’s divergence from Freud (for whom a newborn’s drives have a source and an aim but no object) in that she posited an object toward which the newborn’s drives are directed, namely the maternal breast. Furthermore, for Klein, “even a newborn has the capacity for a rudimentary form of sublimation, which allows it to overcome the pain of the absence of this desired object.”⁹¹ In Envy and Gratitude Klein describes the first three or four months of life as the “paranoid-schizoid position,” in which the child experiences persecutory anxiety from both internal and external sources, including the fear of annihilation stemming from the experience of birth and frustration at the periodic absence of the breast.⁹² The breast, at this point strictly speaking only a part object, is split into good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) and further into an internal, introjected good/bad breast (which Klein calls the core of the superego) and an external good/bad object. These good/bad internal and external objects are the result of the struggle of the destructive or death impulses with libidinal impulses. In the second quarter of the first year of life, the feelings of love and destructive impulses reach an uneasy synthesis, giving rise to what Klein calls the “depressive position,” a feeling of guilt and the urge to make reparation to the injured loved object, the good breast. Klein relates this introjection of objects to Freud’s description of ego formation as a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes.⁹³ The drive toward reparation derives from the life drive and therefore “draws on libidinal phantasies and desires,” a tendency that “enters into all sublimation.”⁹⁴ Klein describes the development of a complex psychic life as originating out of the ego’s defense against anxiety. “My mother is disappearing, she may never return, she is suffering, she is dead. No, this can’t be, for I can revive her.”⁹⁵

The depressive position interests Kristeva because it is at the origin of all thought and language, symbolization being the only way in which we can maintain a stable and satisfying relation with objects.⁹⁶ Klein believed that the child at six months was capable of experiencing the loss not just of a part object like the breast but of a whole object. This loss coincides with the introjection of the object, which leads to an integration of the ego, now experienced as a whole distinct from others. The feeling of guilt that accompanies the depressive position, guilt at possibly having lost the object through the infant’s own destructiveness, leads to a desire for reparation. The desire for reparation, in tandem with the discovery of the distinction between real things and their symbols, fantasies and external reality, is at the root of the drive to create art, for “the work of art functions as an autoanalytic activity that absorbs guilt as well as the acknowledgment of guilt.”⁹⁷

Klein understood sublimation within the context of reparation during the depressive stage, according to Green’s reading. While most readers emphasize Freud’s articulation of sublimation as desexualization,⁹⁸ Klein focuses instead on sublimation’s inception in the work of Eros as a “reparative re-binding.”⁹⁹ Kristeva follows Hanna Segal in noting the proximity of Klein’s position to Proust’s. Segal writes that Proust’s work illustrates the process whereby depressive fantasies give rise to the wish to repair, restore, and recreate the lost object within the ego, which in turn is at the root of later sublimation and creativity.¹⁰⁰ For Proust, “it is only the lost past and the lost or dead object that can be made into a work of art.”¹⁰¹ Segal likens Proust’s writing of a book to a work of mourning in which external objects are given up and then reinstated in the ego as they are re-created in the novel. Just as for Freud sublimation is the result of the renunciation (through redirection) of a drive, for Proust writing emerges out of the loss of a world. The realization and symbolic expression of the depression that results from giving up an object necessitates an acknowledgment of the death drive, in all of its destructive aspects, even as it sublimates this position. Segal goes so far as to claim that “to the sensitive onlooker, every work of beauty still embodies the terrifying experience of depression and death,” as the artist’s experience of detachment is unconsciously relived by the audience.¹⁰² Beauty is nothing more than the fullest expression of both the conflict between and the unity of Eros and Thanatos.

Kristeva writes that “Klein’s hypothesis finds unexpected support in none other than Marcel Proust, who wrote ‘ideas come to us as the substitutes for griefs.’”¹⁰³ But is sublimation inextricably tied to reparation? Several theorists have argued against this interpretation. Green is concerned with questioning, on the one hand, sublimation’s equation with desexualization, and, on the other, with the implications of the term “reparation,” which suggests that art has a quasi-moral function. Green also provides a corrective to Kofman’s reading of sublimation as a transformation of energy or as a detour or deviation of sexuality. He quotes from The Ego and the Id to argue that sublimation is an abandonment rather than a diversion of sexual aims, calling it instead a “purification” or “spiritualization” of sexuality.¹⁰⁴

In The Work of the Negative, Green makes the suggestive claim that he “would happily qualify sublimation as ‘neg-sexuality,’ just as one says negentropy.”¹⁰⁵ This definition addresses both the issues of sexuality and of reparation with reference to sublimation. In theoretical physics, the concept of negative entropy is the reverse of entropy, which is the tendency toward disorder or the wasting away of energy. Negative entropy expresses, by contrast, a kind of building up of order or energy such that a system may be mobilized and maintained coherently. Negative entropy, or NegEntropy, is the process by which a system or organism not only avoids the effects of entropy but actually increases order and the productive usage of energy. Death might be considered a state of high(est) entropy; life is a low-entropy or, particularly in its most complex forms, a negative-entropy state. With the term “neg-sexuality” Green seems to imply that these terms are analogous to the forces of Thanatos and Eros in Freud. The death drive would be aligned with entropy, and, as “neg-sexuality” sublimation would be aligned with the death drive as well. However, Green is not content with thinking sublimation merely as the absence of the sexual. Instead, the prefix “neg-” in conjunction with “sexuality” also seems to indicate for him the productive and mobilized energy associated with neg-entropy.

Green writes:

On the one hand, sublimation appears to be a vicissitude of the sexual drive, a purified form which has its place among other possible vicissitudes but which remains within the patrimony of Eros, and, on the other, sublimation is the adverse counterpart of Eros which, far from serving its aims, sides with those forces which are antagonistic to its purposes (Thanatos). The paradox cannot easily be overcome, and this is the path which Freud’s work (the product of his sublimation) will follow.¹⁰⁶

The larger context of Green’s work is a consideration of the concept of the negative within psychoanalysis. Considering Green’s influence on Kristeva’s thought, this discussion of sublimation can be tied to her interest in negativity. Recall that it is through negation that thought can be generated out of affectivity, both at the developmental level, as in the child undergoing the depressive position and acquiring language as a substitute for the lost maternal object, and on the level of psychoanalysis, where the patient’s unconscious can be accessed and verbalized through the intermediary of negation.

Green understands sublimation as a process whereby “sexuality lays siege to thought, involving itself in the partial jouissance of looking,” yet subjecting the excitation of the original relation to the object to an “intellectual displacement.”¹⁰⁷ Citing Jean Laplanche, Green states that in what is sublimated we are to find “‘sexual energy’ alone, itself ‘desexualized,’ dequalified, put at the service of non-sexual activities.”¹⁰⁸ Yet in artistic activity, as well as in the formation of the ego through sublimated object attachments, there is not only desexualization but also a kind of “enticement … the sublimated desexualized ego does not so much give up satisfaction as it claims to be a ‘superior’ jouissance.”¹⁰⁹ This superior jouissance would be jouissance sublimated in the sense of “preserving while surpassing,” of “spiritualization,” in a seemingly completely Hegelian sense of Aufhebung.¹¹⁰ However, Green warns that idealization and sublimation are distinguished in Freud, since idealization concerns the object whereas sublimation is a vicissitude of the drive.¹¹¹ It is Klein’s position that exacerbates a tendency toward the blurring of the two actions.

Whereas Freud postulates sublimation as a diversion of the libido toward a nonsexual or desexualized aim, Klein postulates the transformation of narcissistic libido into object libido as the process of sublimation. For example, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud focuses on a childhood memory that da Vinci recounts in one of his scientific notebooks, in which Leonardo recalls being in his cradle as an infant when a bird comes down to him, opens his mouth with its tail, and strikes him many times against the lips.¹¹² This “memory,” which Freud reinterprets as a childhood fantasy formed at a later date and transposed retroactively to childhood, is cited as evidence by Leonardo of his own destiny to be a researcher into the flight of birds. Freud interprets the fantasy as one of being suckled by the mother (an oral, sexual drive) that is transposed into a bird, a symbol for the drive to research via the sexual researches of his childhood into the origin of children.¹¹³ This memory, then, is a clear example for Freud of sublimation, in which the drive is reoriented in a nonsexual way, and object libido becomes narcissistic libido.

Klein, by contrast, interprets the memory in a converse way, emphasizing, as Green puts it, “the ego’s predisposition to attract to itself erotic investment in order to transform it into narcissistic investment (by the formation of symbols), by identifying with erotic objects (nipple, penis, and bird’s tail in the case of Leonardo).”¹¹⁴ Rather than exchanging object libido for narcissistic investment, as Freud postulated in The Ego and the Id, Klein emphasizes instead the child’s highly developed capacity for object identification. Narcissistic libido is transformed into object libido in the process of sublimation, which involves a kind of mourning as the child gives up the desires of infancy and makes reparation in the face of her guilt at having possibly caused this loss through her own destructiveness, through the acquisition of symbols. Green asks whether one could rightly call this revised form of sublimation a desexualization.¹¹⁵

In fact, Green argues that one cannot and that Freud himself gestures in this direction in speculating on the child’s identification with the father of individual prehistory.¹¹⁶ This “paternal” function, that in fact is identical with “both parents,” is neither object nor nonobject, preceding object relations yet also the condition for the possibility of their emergence. Green interprets this transition between nonobject and object through D. W. Winnicott’s analysis of cultural objects as existing “in the intermediate area between external and internal reality, an area which he defined as accommodating objects and transitional phenomena.”¹¹⁷ Winnicott was concerned with enumerating the characteristics specific to the work of art, which, he argued, cannot be adequately articulated according to the criteria of the judgment of existence, since they are neither, strictly speaking, real nor nonexistent.¹¹⁸

Using Klein’s concept of the internalized good breast, the breast consumed upon the acknowledgment of the loss of the external breast, Winnicott postulates art as a “salvaging” of the object on the periphery between inside and outside, at the very point at which it might disappear.¹¹⁹ Just like the blanket or other transitional object a child clutches as something whose appearance and disappearance, unlike that of his mother, he can control, the artwork functions as a transition between an internal realm of fantasy and the external world, or between subjective and objective reality. In Winnicott’s words, the transitional object and transitional phenomena, such as babbling and other prelinguistic oral activities, “start each human being off with what will always be important for them, i.e. a neutral area of experience which will not be challenged.”¹²⁰ This intermediate area of experience “is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work.”¹²¹

Green compares this idea of transitional phenomena with Freud’s notion of a father of individual prehistory, which, we recall, Kristeva describes as a “model” or “pattern,” a metaphor in that it carries over from the subjective to the objective realm. In this way, he employs the concept of negation, taken from Freud’s essay, as paradox, a mode in which the seemingly mutually exclusive oppositions of the Freudian and Kleinian interpretations of sublimation can coexist. This third realm, which Green names the realm of creativity, the mode of existence of sublimated objects, may give rise to a “new pleasure”¹²² that is other than the pleasure associated with the directly sexual: “It cannot be denied that sublimation is not only socially appreciated but is genuinely an innovative source of pleasure. And I do not mean to limit the import of this remark to creative, artistic sublimation; it applies to all the forms of sublimation which creativity implies when process of psychical transformation are brought into play.”¹²³ Here we can see the roots of Kristeva’s understanding of the link between the analytic experience and the experience of creating and appreciating art.

Green concludes that sublimation might best be thought of as the work of the negative torn between the psychical forces of life and death, objectalization and disobjectalization.¹²⁴ Writing, with the work of Proust being perhaps the most exemplary form of this process, constructs an object of its own, a space that might be best described as transitional in Winnicott’s sense. It is impossible to determine whether the reality of the work is one that really exists or ever existed, or whether it is exclusively a product of the author’s inner, subjective world.¹²⁵ Yet while Green concords with Freud’s claim that sublimation is allied with the forces of death, in that art remains continually connected with delusion and is therefore to a certain degree irremediably impotent, he also argues that art stimulates and excites the psyche, exacerbating the conflict between reality and fantasy.¹²⁶ Sublimation is both necessary to (even the necessary condition of) symbolic life, which in turn is the condition for human social organization and a cause of dissatisfaction.

SUBLIMATION AS RE-EROTICIZATION? LACAN, LAPLANCHE, BERSANI, AND COPJEC

When Lacan considers sublimation in Seminar VII, it is within the context of a discussion of the ethics of psychoanalysis, precisely because of sublimation’s linkage with social recognition.¹²⁷ For Lacan, the human being’s first subjective orientation is to an original “Thing.”¹²⁸ This orientation is characterized by primary affect, prior to any repression.¹²⁹ It is in the “same place,” writes Lacan, that “something which is the opposite, the reverse and the same combined, is also organized, and which in the end substitutes itself for that dumb reality which is das Ding—that is to say, the reality that commands and regulates.”¹³⁰ The Thing “only presents itself to the extent that it becomes word” or is symbolized or signified, yet it remains that which is beyond signification. The Thing is the lost object, lost through the inception of language; subsequent to the shift into signification, the lost Mother occupies the place of the Thing. As in Kristeva and Klein, it is through the loss of the Mother/Thing that the human begins to speak, and human endeavors such as science and art are formed around this empty place.

Lacan writes that sublimation takes an object and raises it to the dignity of the Thing.¹³¹ He gives the example of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, a painting in which a central enigmatic form, a kind of stain on the floor between the two figures, transforms itself, when looked at from a particular angle, into a death’s head. Sublimation organizes form around emptiness in the manner of anamorphosis; Lacan writes that “to a certain extent a work of art always involves encircling the Thing.”¹³²

Lacan insists that although works of art may imitate objects, they do not seek to represent them, and even the imitation of an object may make something different of it. The artwork presents the object in relationship to the Thing, rendering it both present and absent. Like courtly love, which uses the technique of holding back or suspension of direct erotic contact in order to make the object of love stand out in its ultimate inaccessibility, the artwork, too, “purifies” the object through a series of “repetitive restatements” in order to show that it points at something else that cannot be represented.¹³³ Sublimation, therefore, is transgression, but it is incorrect to say that it is desexualization. Lacan writes:

Sublimation is not, in fact, what the foolish crowd thinks; and it does not on all occasions necessarily follow the path of the sublime. The change of object doesn’t necessarily make the sexual object disappear—far from it; the sexual object acknowledged as such may come to light in sublimation. The crudest of sexual games can be the object of a poem without for that reason losing its sublimating goal.¹³⁴

Jean Laplanche argues that although sometimes sublimation works in opposition to sexuality, the two may also complement each other, with the result that “sublimation can be linked to a kind of neogenesis of sexuality.”¹³⁵ Referring to psychoanalysis’ almost total neglect of the aesthetic fields of gastronomy and cooking, places where the drive to self-preservation and the sexual drive overlap, Laplanche wonders aloud what difference this would make to the notion that sublimation is always desexualized.

Leo Bersani pursues Laplanche’s inquiry into sublimation in his essay “Sexuality and Aesthetics.” As Laplanche notes, Freud writes in the discussion of Leonardo da Vinci that sublimation originates when a portion of sexual desire escapes repression and is transformed into intellectual curiosity. Since this component of sexual instinct never attaches to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, Bersani writes, this means that the intellectual interests in whose service it operates cannot be considered substitutive formations of the drive to sexual research but rather “in this form of sublimation sexuality would therefore provide the energy of thought without defining its terms. Or … we would have a nonreferential version of sexualized thought.”¹³⁶ This situation would result in a kind of “mobility of thought which somehow makes the statements of thought impotent or inoperative.”¹³⁷ Nonreferential thought would be thought unmoored from signification without thereby becoming incoherent. We might again compare this process with Keats’s “negative capability,” in which sexualized thought would tolerate uncertainty and doubt without insisting that its terms being defined. This sexualized energy would be the origin of or equivalent to creative or aesthetic thought.

Here we can refer to two examples for clarification. One, from Lacan, concerns Cézanne’s depiction of apples, concerning which, Lacan writes, “everyone knows there is a mystery … for the relations to the real as it is renewed in art at that moment makes the object appear purified.”¹³⁸ Cézanne does not imitate apples but presents them in such a way that it becomes evident that, rather than an illusion of represented-apples-as-real, the painting “aims at something else” through the depiction of apples.

The second example comes from Proust and is presented by Bersani in another essay, “Death and Literary Authority: Proust and Klein.”¹³⁹ Bersani argues that in In Search of Lost Time Proust does not present art as an essentialized version of “real life” but rather as “an annihilating and redemptive replication of experience … a kind of posthumous responsiveness to surfaces.”¹⁴⁰ Bersani’s point is that to read Proust’s novel—and sublimation itself—as merely an annihilation of appearances such that their essence can be manifest in its atemporal significance is to overlook the fact that in the very erasure of lived sensation through the symbolic significance it takes on within the text, it is nonetheless the sensuous surfaces that have the last say. Quoting a striking passage taken from the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, Bersani shows how, in Marcel’s very lament about the sorrowful sacrifice of past experiences he has to undergo every day symbolically, what shine through or are particularly “visible” are precisely those phenomenal details whose disappearance is being mourned. There is, then, in the work a simultaneous symbolization and desymbolization (or destabilization of symbolization) operating, in a way that signifies both a profit, in the sense of a purification or essentialization of past experiences that would imply a loss of sensuous detail, and, simultaneously, a loss of Marcel and an unprecedented gain in pure appearance.¹⁴¹ For Marcel “—but perhaps not only for Marcel—to desymbolize reality may be the precondition for re-eroticizing reality.”¹⁴² This desymbolization is a counterpart to Kristeva’s description of the semiotic register of language.

Indeed, in The Culture of Redemption, Bersani argues that sublimation at the highest extreme, far from being a transcendence of the sexual, is rather “grounded in unalloyed sexuality.”¹⁴³ Here he argues that certain cultural activities, and above all, art, should be thought of as “nonfixated sexual energy … movements … which partially dissolve the materiality of the activity, which blur its forms and its identity and allow us fleetingly to experience a pure excitement.”¹⁴⁴

Bersani returns to Freud’s “On Narcissism” to consider that “something,” that new psychical action that must be added on to autoerotism to bring about the narcissism that is necessary for ego formation.¹⁴⁵ This move back from object to ego can be thought of, according to Bersani, as a kind of self-shattering. The need to repeat this experience can in turn be thought of as an originary sublimation,¹⁴⁶ in that for Freud the transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido is a desexualization and therefore a kind of sublimation; there is a move away from an externally oriented drive toward an internally directed one (which in turn may be redirected toward another aim). The “self-shattering” is a result of a split in consciousness that will eventually lead to the distinction between inwardness and outwardness, but it is a paradoxical split in that it ultimately leads through a process of self-reflexiveness to integration and a “move from fragmented objects to totalities.”¹⁴⁷

Bersani refers to this originary sublimation as a pure burning; rather than a transcendence of the sexual it is a refinement of the sexual down to its unadulterated quiddity and can be found in the specific “symbolization” of art, where the symbol refers to nothing external to the work or “in the world” but rather symbolizes the very libidinal energy with which it is invested.¹⁴⁸ Such a pure sublimated sexual energy is entirely nonreferential. It is, Bersani writes, “as if it had become fascinated with the prospect of initiating sexuality through self-reflection.”¹⁴⁹

Joan Copjec agrees with Bersani’s identification of sublimation as the “new psychical action” that is added to autoeroticism in order to give rise to the primary narcissism necessary for ego formation, and she concurs that sublimation can give rise to a kind of sexual enjoyment but disagrees that sublimation can be objectless.¹⁵⁰ She notes, furthermore, that for Freud the development of the ego consists in a departure from, rather than directly out of, primary narcissism.¹⁵¹ Following Lacan, Copjec interprets the split that occurs with the positing of primary narcissism as one between the mother and the breast: “Rather than two objects, mother and child, we have now three: mother, child, and breast, with the last operating as a strange ‘delegate’ or ‘representative’ of the primordial mother.”¹⁵² What is sublimated, then, is the drive that would demand the mother as its only satisfaction. The breast, in its truncation from the mother, represents a whole series of “objects of lack” (rather than a lack of objects), which will stand in for the mother. Thus, as Freud too insists, narcissism is only accessible indirectly, through object cathexes.¹⁵³ As an example, the subject who is in love “so wills the object of his or her love that what comes from without, from the beloved, is indistinguishable from what the subject chooses.”¹⁵⁴ What we love in the loved object is ourselves, not simply as a reflection of our own image; rather, “one finds … in the jouissance loving it affords a corporeal experience of the self.”¹⁵⁵

Returning to Proust, we might interpret In Search of Lost Time in the way that Copjec reads Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, as a continual search for oneself through the other, through sublimation, in Proust’s case in the form of recollection through the medium of the embellished narrative, the pseudoautobiography. This is not so much a reparation as a creation of oneself as other, through art, through writing. Art is a double, an internal division of the self from the self, a repetition, achieved through the medium of an object that is self-reflective because self-chosen.

KRISTEVA: SUBLIMATION, LOVE, AND DEATH

Kristeva reflects on sublimation in both Black Sun and in her trilogy The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, and she emphasizes the notion of identification/sublimation as repetition. She identifies the “object” of the sublimated narcissistic libido as the imaginary father,¹⁵⁶ although the mother, as the object of the very first mimetic yearnings, shares this space toward which reeroticization is oriented. This makes sense as a compromise position between Bersani and Copjec, for the imaginary father (and the mother as the prototype of the object prior to the establishment of object relations) is neither a whole object nor an objectless position but lies somewhere in between these two antitheses. Furthermore, although identification with the imaginary father paves the way for full object relations to come about, Freud insists that it “takes place earlier than any object-cathexis.”¹⁵⁷ Identification with the father of individual prehistory takes place through sublimation, for it transforms the desire for the mother into an identification with the mother’s desire; it acknowledges that the mother desires something other than the infant. It thus turns the infant toward the external world, wresting it from autoeroticism, and enacts a separation from the mother with whom the infant had been psychically fused.

In Tales of Love Kristeva makes explicit the relation between sublimation and the imaginary father. She qualifies her description of identification with the imaginary father as “not of the order of having” but of “being-like.”¹⁵⁸ She further notes the continuity between the incorporating orality of the infant in the depressive stage and the capacity for language of which it is the substrate. The “father” of individual prehistory is a model or schema for the speech of the other, a nonobject that nonetheless leads to a first possibility of unification with others. To be capable of such an identification a restraint on my libido must first be effected; “my thirst to devour had to be deferred and displaced to a level one may well call psychic’ … in being able to receive the other’s words, to assimilate, repeat, and reproduce them, I become like him.”¹⁵⁹ This primary identification with a metaphorical other and with the schema of language allows for the eventual possibility of secondary identifications with others and with objects. At first the metaphorical identification, the naming of which Kristeva claims “perhaps represents the condition for sublimation,”¹⁶⁰ is at the level of the heterogeneous, of the drive, of sensuousness, of sounds and intonation—the semiotic level, the level of the nonobjectal—that must be deciphered. This heterogeneity in turn lays the foundation for the symbolic matrix that will eventually allow the child to interact as a subject within language.¹⁶¹

This “father” is the mother’s desire beyond her response to the infant’s demands, and indeed her capacity quite simply to refuse them.¹⁶² Kristeva writes: “The imaginary father would thus be the indication that the mother is not complete but that she wants … Who? What?—the question has no answer other than the one that uncovers narcissistic emptiness: ‘At any rate, not I.’ … And it is out of this ‘not I’ … that an Ego painfully attempts to come into being.”¹⁶³ Primary narcissism emerges out of this struggle as a defense against the void of separation, along with a host of images, representations, identifications, projections, and ultimately words, which become the consolation for the subject who is in this version of the depressive position. But this narcissism is a form of desexualization, a sublimation, therefore, that opens the newly formed ego up to the death drive in unbinding Eros and Thanatos.¹⁶⁴

The sublimatory process that gives rise to language and art is thus profoundly ambivalent. Kristeva calls the Freudian account of the emergence of thought out of this sublimation of libido and resulting liberation of the death drive—which in turn will menace the newly formed narcissistic ego—dialectical, Hegelian, pertaining to signifiance, the dynamic meaning-producing register of language. She writes: “The human being is one who speaks inhabited by Eros-Thanatos and by a third constituent which is neither language nor drive, but which overdetermines both of them: signifiance. The two scenes of conscious and unconscious are adjoined to a third, that of the extra-psychical.”¹⁶⁵

In identifying sublimation as the psychical action that effects the passage from autoeroticism to primary narcissism, Freud tells us in effect that the death drive is implicated in the process of subject constitution from the outset, in the transformation of drive into signifiance, which in turn leads to the possibility of imagining, signifying, thinking, and speaking. The thought process is thus always set in motion at the price of the unbinding of the death drive, which threatens the integrity of the speaking subject.¹⁶⁶ As Kristeva writes, “the psyche is founded by [sublimation] through and through, for it is the capacity of signifiance (representation-language-thought) based on sublimation that structures all the other psychical manifestations.”¹⁶⁷

The most striking evidence of this threat lies in the link Freud exposed between melancholia and sublimation: left to itself, sublimation disintricates the drives and in so doing exposes the ego to melancholia. The root of art, sublimation, is also often the cause of melancholia. What, then, allows some artists not to succumb to melancholia? The answer, Kristeva writes, as she had in Black Sun, is that certain artists are able to resexualize or re-eroticize sublimated activity in such a way that the unbinding is not simply reversed but instead that a secondary, not directly sexual pleasure can arise. This might take place through the recounting of erotic fantasies, through the creation of images, or through a richness or intensity of language itself.

Or through love. The psychical state of being in love, Kristeva writes, returns us to, or is an “archaic reduplication” of, the state of identification with the father of one’s individual prehistory, prior to any object cathexis. Furthermore, the “love” present in the analytic situation allows the analyst provisionally to occupy the site of the symbolic Other, the field in which every person is constituted as a speaking subject, insofar as he or she is the metaphorical object of the analysand’s identification.¹⁶⁸

The provisionality of this position can be related to Kristeva’s reading of the poetic imaginary as allegorical, which simultaneously eschews classical and religious stability and nonetheless remains desirous of creating new meaning, a temporary salvation.¹⁶⁹ Sublimation, she writes in a reading of Nerval’s poetry, “is a powerful ally of the Disinherited, provided, however, that he can receive and accept another one’s speech.”¹⁷⁰ Sublimation in this homeopathic sense is, then, a love directed back toward the mother through the protective filter of the imaginary father, or through language. What is reeroticized is the maternal bond, but it is a bond renewed and transformed through its immersion in the symbolic order.

CONCLUSION: THE NOVEL, THE IMAGINARY, AND FORGIVENESS

At the end of her volume on Proust, Kristeva posits the idea of writing as forgiveness. If for Dostoevsky forgiveness drives the narrative as an explicit theme and brings it to a close, with Proust, “forgiveness is turned into a novel.”¹⁷¹

No longer a thematized theological pardon for crime or for human finitude, in Proust forgiveness is transubstantiation, endowing “what is infinitely small—or infinitely abject—with signification.”¹⁷² The novel translates the smallest and seemingly most insignificant moments of memory and of sensation, and of the borderline between the two, “not by drawing attention to such phenomena but by breathing new life into them.”¹⁷³

Here Kristeva returns to the idea of the imaginary as allegorical, but this time she writes that the imaginary is novelistic, in Proust’s sense.¹⁷⁴ The “image” that constitutes the imaginary is not a copy of an external object but rather in the novel is a “discourse” or a “vision.” For Proust, a vision is “an indefinite construction of signs that descend on one another to become impressions and sensations.”¹⁷⁵ The temporality of the imaginary is an “always ahead of itself,” but ahead of itself in multiple branching ways, the imaginary of a polyphonous “I.”¹⁷⁶ This “I” can come back to itself only in language; it is an imaginary “I.”

The imaginary I seduces the reader because it embodies what Kristeva calls a “chiasmus of incarnation,” neither as a fully individuated subjectivity (the “I” of a particular person), nor as the pure I, the anonymous universality common to all persons.¹⁷⁷ The imaginary I occupies a place between the object and the concept. It operates between “natural” time as a measurable sequence of uniform “nows” and the time of impressions or of the subject. Proust’s novel manifests two distinct temporalities, that of the immediate temporality of the events that constitute the plot and those of the narrator’s involuntary memory, which reverse time and return as if by magic to the past, reconstituted in the present. Kristeva speculates that Proustian time “seeks to reveal the essence of the novelistic imaginary by forming a union between an ontological temporality and an ontic time.”¹⁷⁸

The imaginary narrator evades the ontic/ontological distinction. It remains in an intermediary stage, “neither in the status corruptionis of the drunken sin or in the status integratatis of a pacified conceptual understanding, but rather in the status gratiae.”¹⁷⁹ This “state of grace” evokes the Greek word charis in that it connotes an intense regeneration.¹⁸⁰ Our time has lost faith in religion and in revolutionary fervor; where religion and political passion exists, it seems to have succumbed to the emptiness and repetitiveness of the spectacle and of technical prowess and commodity culture. The only space in which an alternative temporality exists today, according to Kristeva, is in the space of the imaginary:

The imaginary space remains the only one that harbors the unattainable singularity that is always fleeing ahead of itself and against itself. The polymorphous imaginary offers an alternative to sublime pages (as long as they are accessible) and to stutterings or eruptions of banality that drown a world hereafter poised in front of a video screen, in front of a “sight” without “knowledge.” It paves the way for a third option, one that lies between the impatience of a history whose promises and disasters we reject, on the one hand, and the passion of bodies reduced to utilitarian languages that forgo metaphors and subtleties, on the other. The imaginary-novel incarnates us and displaces us; it takes us in and pushes us away. We wander off, becoming increasingly lost and then found again. We are diverse, divergent, and authentically inappropriate. … We are all new patients of the imaginary; we are the basically lucid or distraught subjects or consumers of this mode of speaking and being that has transferred Being into grace.¹⁸¹