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

KRISTEVA’S DISCUSSIONS OF FORGIVENESS IN BLACK SUN AND Time and Sense revolve around the imaginary constructions of literature, specifically in Dostoevsky, who makes forgiveness an explicit theme of The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov, and in Proust, whose very writing style performs the “forgiveness” of transubstantiation, turning sorrows into words. In later works, however, she focuses instead on the ambivalent presence of hatred within the structure of forgiveness or “par-don.” In this chapter I will examine this new conception of forgiveness with reference to Kristeva’s readings of Hegel, Freud, and Klein. In her most recent work published in English, namely, Hatred and Forgiveness and This Incredible Need to Believe, Kristeva takes Hegelian themes from the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit and transforms them through her reading of Freud and Klein. At the same time, she insists that Freud himself cannot be understood apart from his romantic and idealistic heritage.

I will argue in this chapter that Kristeva’s concept of forgiveness, in particular what she calls “aesthetic pardon,” emerges from her dual commitment to Freud and to Hegel but is given its specific character through her reading of Klein. In particular, I will show the importance of forgiveness or pardon as a structural, transitional phenomenon rather than a psychological or agential action in Hegel, Klein, and Kristeva. Hegel’s use of forgiveness as the negative principle of dialectical movement translates into Klein’s description of the transition between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions, and Kristeva’s understanding of pardon as what brings a depressed patient, perhaps despite herself, out of her condition of being affectively frozen or stuck; what distinguishes Kristeva’s par-don and Klein’s reparation from Hegel’s forgiveness is the formers’ foregrounding of unconscious psychic elements. I will illustrate this continuity and distinction through Hegel, Klein, and Kristeva’s readings of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, all three of whom take the trilogy to illustrate the movement from parceling, revenge, and disabling repetition, on the one hand, to integration and signification on the other. For Kristeva, in addition, the “Orestes complex” that is manifest in contemporary art can both indicate and point the way out of current maladies of the soul. At the end of the chapter I will examine her analysis of the cinema of the thought specular as a form of Oresteian revolt relevant for today’s audiences.

At the very end of Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva insists on the importance of romanticism and Hegelian negativity as stages on the way to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. She writes that she does not intend to show the genealogy of psychoanalysis from Kant to Freud but rather to focus on Hegel’s account of foreignness and the Other, in particular in his analysis of Diderot.¹ In addition to Hegel, the German romantic preoccupation with the mystical, the exotic, and the fantastic provided Freud’s most notable examples in his essay on the uncanny. Freud’s work, as we have seen, inspired Kristeva to take this “foreigner,” who is a separate character in Rameau’s Nephew and in E. T. A. Hoffman’s The Sandman and to conceptualize it as an integral part of the psyche, both in a biological and in a symbolic sense.

Although Freud thought the notion of introducing forgiveness into psychoanalytical discourse and practice would be absurd, Kristeva claims that “pardon” in a new, nonpsychological and nonagential sense describes the analytic session and its interaction between psychoanalyst and patient, in particular the bonds of transference and countertransference that emerge between them. She also characterizes a process of writing and creativity as forms of a relationship to self that can be conceptualized in the language of forgiveness. Both of these senses of forgiveness are self-relations enabled by something external such as an aware interlocutor or a creative act of writing (or composing or designing) rather than any overt act of forgiveness on the part of another person.

Kristeva quotes a text not usually associated with the concept of the uncanny, namely, Freud’s treatise on religion, The Future of an Illusion, in part to point out Freud’s acknowledgment that at times aesthetics (and even philosophy) must step in to fill in where analysis leaves off. Kristeva points out that here we see Freud, who wrote this essay and the related Civilization and Its Discontents relatively late in his career, shifting from an analysis of either individual symptoms or artistic projects (as in the case of the uncanny) to the work of Kulturarbeit,² a process that she, too, undertakes in the progressive development of her intellectual work.

In this book Freud remarks that religion forms part of a drive toward civilization through the “great common task” of humanity to preserve itself against the superior power of nature.³ An important first stage of this task is the humanization of nature. By assigning a personlike status to forces and fates that seem to control our destiny, humans attain the ability to imagine that everywhere in nature and in the spiritual world exist beings of a kind that we can recognize. Because of this belief, “we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety.”⁴ Such a replacement of natural science by psychology, Freud writes, provides immediate relief but also points the way to further mastery of the situation. Eventually humans attribute superhuman powers to these “persons” who are embodiments of the force of nature, in line with the overpowering impression natural forces make upon them;⁵ this is the origin of the concept of the gods.

Whereas Freud describes civilization as a deliberate process of humanizing nature, Hegel’s systematic philosophical project can be described as a natural process whereby the human observer comprehends and thus contributes to the way in which nature in and of itself has already begun the process of becoming progressively humanized through giving rise to natural beings that have the capacity to become self-conscious and thereby to work and transform the natural world into a spiritual one. For Hegel this process is more than a human projection of psychological qualities onto nature; rather, it is a circular self-production by nature of its other, spirit (in humanity), with which it will ultimately become unified.

For Kristeva too, as we have seen, the natural being of the human individual—her constitution not only through care, thought, and deliberative action but also through the contradictory and conflicting economy of drive motility that Freud identified—informs a similar circle of self-production, although one that will never be fully unified or integrated. Negativity, for both Hegel and Kristeva, provides the driving force of and the organizing principle of this process. Forgiveness or par-don, I will argue, is a form of negativity, a dissolving and transforming power.

For Hegel and for Kristeva forgiveness is not primarily an intentional performative act of an agent. Rather, forgiveness is a structural phenomenon, a kind of transubstantiation that gives rise to new possibilities. What Kristeva refers to as the transformative capacity of the Hegelian conception of negativity in her earliest works ⁶ becomes the phenomenon of forgiveness in her later ones. I will examine this phenomenon first in Hegel, where I will argue that forgiveness as a structural phenomenon appears far earlier in the Phenomenology of Spirit than its manifestation as a concrete act of human agency late in the “Spirit” section of the text. In fact, forgiveness drives the dialectic from the earliest stages on, and this is why it can be seen to illustrate concretely the phenomenon of the negative, even for Hegel. Negativity, for Hegel, does not function merely by dissolving particular static states but enacts a dynamic concrete or content-full reversal and transformation.

In his essay “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” and in the Phenomenology of Spirit, forgiveness, while it is linked explicitly (at least in the early essay) to Christianity, functions more broadly as a kind of focal point or privileged example of the work of sublation (Aufhebung). At three key transitions in the Phenomenology Hegel uses forgiveness to illustrate a kind of “paradigm shift” from a unidimensional or abstract version of the particular moment in question toward a more complex moment informed by reflection or directedness back into the self. I will parse out these crucial transitions, showing both their parallels and the progressive enrichment of the figure of forgiveness as the dialectic moves toward more complex shapes of self-consciousness and spirit. For Hegel forgiveness functions as the privileged figure for the closure of a particular shape of spirit that, as the very life force of the dialectic, simultaneously opens up new possibilities and a new, more complex shape of spirit. More importantly, forgiveness has a temporal dimension in that, specifically in contrast to revenge or retributive punishment, it is a form of interiorization, one that allows for an interruption in and transformation of the flow of time understood as a sequence of identical units as well as the opening up of a new form of temporality.

Kristeva takes up the Hegelian dialectical understanding of forgiveness in her later writings but transforms it by virtue of the Freudian and Kleinian lens through which she reads it. In Intimate Revolt she defines forgiveness as “the logical possibility of a relief—Hegel’s Aufhebung: non-sense and sense, a positive jolt integrating its possible nothingness.”⁷ Forgiveness in this context does not refer to the possibility of simply overcoming a trauma and leaving it behind but rather to dealing with the traumatic situation or memory in a new way. Forgiveness performs a paradigm shift that allows one to go on when one is nearly paralyzed by grief or regret. In addition, forgiveness enacts a crucial form of self-restriction that is required for humans to live ethically together.

In his early writings Hegel presents forgiveness as a reconciliation of the infinite chain of opposition brought about by retributive justice. In “The Spirit of Christianity” the action of an aggressive revengeful action taken by an individual in a wrongheadedly antagonistic stance against another individual or group in turn rebounds against the perpetrator in the form of avenging fate: to act retributively against a wrong is to bring harm down upon oneself in addition to one’s opponent, awakening the vengeful Fates. Retributive justice only results in universal enmity, and in such a context “there is nothing left save physical dependence, an animal existence which can be assured only at the expense of all other existence.”⁸

Judaism introduces into this primitive “state of nature” a completely nonsensible ideal (God and law) that has as its rigidly separated counterpart a sensible nature that must be mastered and given meaning. Hegel describes this relationship as analogous to the Kantian moral imperative, which is counterpoised to the world of life and inclination. The word of god on this view is prior to and thus beyond the realm of sensible evidence.⁹ Positive law appears to be a solution to the problem of hostile nature, but Hegel argues that this lawfulness, which results in an unsurmountable dualism, merely reproduces the hostility and even exacerbates it by depriving the natural world, the realm of life, of any intrinsic worth.

Jesus’s doctrine of reconciliation, love, and forgiveness is introduced in order to overcome the self-defeating nature of positive law, according to Hegel’s reading. Jesus opposed “the subjective in general” to purely objective commands, which, as expressions of pure duty, of “ought” versus inclination, are irrevocably oppositional.¹⁰ The Sermon on the Mount, with its injunction to reconcile with one’s opponents and love one’s neighbors, teaches an attitude that fulfills the law by advocating a unification of inclination with law, thereby also canceling the law by making it superfluous. Hegel also calls this movement one by which “the concept is displaced as life.”¹¹ Life refers to growth, fluidity, and the possibility of overcoming opposition.

On Hegel’s reading Jesus makes the “cancellation of one’s hostile fate” a condition for the forgiveness of one’s own sins. This means giving up the quest for revenge against one’s enemies or retribution for their acts. In doing so the heart not only reconciles with the other but “reconciles the divine to itself.”¹² The heart recognizes the divine within it and thereby its own self-legislation. To see the divine as outside of oneself is to understand justice as mere equity rather than as life and thus to be fundamentally estranged from life, on Hegel’s view. In this early essay life just is the divine as externalized and embodied in humans’ spiritual actions. Faith actualized is a mutual knowledge of kindred spirits. Without this development, one remains at the level of bare faith, or the beautiful soul’s withdrawal from the world. To be reconciled with the other and with the world is the “cancellation of lordship in the restoration of the living bond.”¹³ Such a movement overcomes the restrictions of the Verstand (or merely analytical understanding) that Hegel associates with Kantian philosophy, and no longer posits an irreducible division between the finite and the infinite. Rather, in each human “there is light (phos) and life … not illumined by a light in the way in which a dark body is when it borrows a brightness not its own”; rather, each human “burns with a flame that is his own.”¹⁴ Hegel writes that the distinction between bare life (zoe) and life understood (light, truth, phos) will be overcome in this movement of nature becoming consciousness.¹⁵

The figure of forgiveness, with its religious scaffolding removed, reappears at every major transition point of the Phenomenology of Spirit. From this repetition we can see, perhaps, that for Hegel Christianity mattered less in the details of its theological doctrine than in the logic of development of its central figure of nature becoming consciousness. In what follows I will briefly trace the three major transitional moments of the Phenomenology of Spirit where forgiveness plays a key role, in order to draw out the complexity of Hegel’s concept of forgiveness.

Forgiveness first appears in the early section “Force and the Understanding,” where Hegel traces the path of consciousness from its early naiveté, or common-sense approach concerning the world, to a more sophisticated Kantian/Newtonian stance that understands invisible forces to be the supersensible “reality” underlying and manifesting itself in sensible appearances. Hegel describes the posited realm of forces underlying and purportedly forming the cause of the realm of appearances as the “tranquil kingdom of laws.” However, human consciousness eventually comes to realize that the concepts in its understanding are actually identical to concepts posited as inherent in things; force as understanding and force as effecting the thing perceived are indistinguishable from this perspective. This new realization results in the inversion of the inert realm of laws, which is now understood as the dynamic interaction between the concept as conceived and the concept within reality; the oscillation between the two perspectives is effected by attraction and repulsion, like a magnet.

Here Hegel aligns the stance of the metaphysical dualist, who unfavorably compares the realm of appearances to a truer and eternal supersensible realm, with the harsh judgment of one who considers a just punishment to consist in rigid parity, an eye for an eye. By contrast, the one who has understood the identity of concepts in the understanding, on the one hand, and concepts that inhere in reality, on the other, is compared to the administer of pardon or forgiveness.

If we consider this transformation superficially, the new inverted world seems to be merely the opposite of the first; however, according to Hegel, in the new inverted world there are no longer two separately subsisting substances, just as negative and positive poles are both simultaneously present in the same magnet.¹⁷ Only in this way does the second supersensible world overarch the first and incorporate it, becoming itself and its opposite in one unity. Its difference is now internal, rather than external to it; it is now difference as infinity, or a “difference which is no difference.”¹⁸

It is this transition to infinity that marks the beginning of self-consciousness; in the identity of consciousness (in explanation itself) with the forces it is describing, consciousness is essentially communing with itself.¹⁹ The human desire to know the world, to understand its own boundless significance within its finite existence, and to find its place in the world, as well as to shape and reflect itself within that world, is the most basic kind of absolute or infinite. It is only in the moment of self-consciousness, which comes about in a way that is analogous to forgiveness, that this realization can happen.

Here forgiveness functions formally as the shape consciousness undergoes in order to become self-consciousness; although forgiveness plays an important analogical role in allowing the reader to conceptualize this transformation, its content is not integral to the transition. This will not be the case once consciousness has actually made the transition to self-consciousness, when forgiveness will come to have an explicit significance for its own self-conception. In “Force and the Understanding,” forgiveness remains, despite its exemplarity at this stage, abstract and one-sided when examined in relation to other, more sophisticated transitional moments in the text. Forgiveness here represents an infinity that becomes preliminarily unified with the human understanding that it initially opposed, albeit in an uncomprehending way.

The second and third transitions in the Phenomenology where a version of forgiveness plays a pivotal role are both much more well known. The master/slave dialectic, probably the most studied section of the entire book, leads into the standoff of the unhappy consciousness, internally divided between a stoical consciousness, where the “master” universal human will or universal controls the “slave” particular of physiological existence and its vicissitudes, on the one hand, and a skeptical consciousness, where the purely particular “slave” consciousness simply rejects the “master” universal position altogether. These two unsatisfactory shapes of spirit are ultimately resolved in a third position, the “mediator,” also referred to as a “priest,” who allows the individual to find itself in “spirit,” where it “becomes aware of the reconciliation of its particularity with the universal.”²⁰ Here, forgiveness is styled as a personal reconciliation of the finite individual with the unchangeable universal. There is at least a rudimentary understanding on the part of consciousness of the fact that in its very particularity it implicitly carries within itself absolute being; this realization marks the transition to Reason (Vernunft). Nonetheless, the fact that an external mediator has to effect the reconciliation between the two sides of the unhappy consciousness signals the inadequacy of this shape of spirit. Its “forgiveness” is the result of outside mediation rather than of explicit self-reflection and comprehension.

Finally, at the end of the section on Spirit, Hegel discusses forgiveness explicitly in a manner that has also been discussed extensively in the literature.²¹ In the transition to Religion, consciousness renounces its self-divisiveness and its withdrawal from worldly existence, “makes itself into a superseded particular consciousness,” and thereby “displays itself as a universal.”²² Through forgiving the other it also renounces its “unreal” existence; correlatively, its language of reconciliation, its spoken word, becomes “objectively existing spirit,”²³ a concrete medium through which human individuals come together rather than being alienated from one another. Spirit is thus definitely no longer isolated in singularity but now concretely manifest in human language and action, as part of a network of rational intersubjectivity. This is the very meaning of the good conception of infinity for Hegel: the identity of particular and universal is manifest in a constantly self-renewing interchange, a process that forgiveness exemplifies.

Forgiveness’s explicit appearance at this stage of the Hegelian historical dialectic should not be taken as the manifestation of a completely new phenomenon but rather as the full actualization of a concept that has been present all along. Without the first opening up of the figure of pardon at the conclusion of “Consciousness,” a moment that appears to be simply an illustrative example but which in fact signals the move from consciousness to self-consciousness, forgiveness as it appears at the end of spirit does appear to be the act of an agent, that is, of the acting consciousness or of the beautiful soul. Yet as we have seen, each step, from inversion to external mediation to full-fledged forgiveness, is not a paradigm shift but rather a gradual actualization of a concept that was present from the beginning. Forgiveness drives the dialectic and is the privileged figure of sublation, the transition that preserves and lifts up one moment of human development into the next, transforming it yet guaranteeing the continuity and coherence of the process as a whole.

First, it is most important to underline that for Kristeva, just as for Hegel, forgiveness provides the condition for intersubjectivity; as Kelly Oliver puts it, intersubjectivity is an effect, rather than a cause, of forgiveness.²⁶ Kristeva writes, quoting Thomas Aquinas, that forgiveness is the “act of ‘bestowing a gift’ that ‘prevails over judgment,’”²⁷ that is, over the kind of calculative rationality or discernment that often seems to be equated with agency and that also fuels revenge. It thus goes beyond an act of the ego, and though it remains an act, it is not linked, in her primary sense, to deliberative agency. Second, Kristeva calls forgiveness a “temporary suspension of the time of the ego,”²⁸ which, as we will see, also aligns her conception of forgiveness with that of Hegel.

Third, Kristeva conceptualizes forgiveness as a self-renewing interchange, or as interpretation.²⁹ As we have seen, Kristeva links the re-eroticization of sublimation with intersubjectivity, in particular through the trope of forgiveness, which she initially reads within the context of Dostoevsky’s novels. In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva compares the network of shared language and symbolic forms (the Lacanian symbolic order) to Kant’s notion of the enlarged mind that is capable of thinking from the standpoint of everyone else as well as to the Freudian work of civilization building and thus to the inception of a transformed sense of freedom.³⁰

According to social contract theory, of which Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents can perhaps be considered an example, the human being in the state of nature has a kind of basic freedom, that is, the freedom to roam freely, to take what she needs, and to undertake any action to preserve her life. This kind of freedom can be characterized negatively, as an absence of constraint. The only hindrances to the natural human’s freedom come from the superior strength of natural forces or other animals and the limitations of her own body. When human beings enter into social bonds, however rudimentary, they necessarily agree to give up some of their negative freedom in order to gain the protection and other benefits of the group. The formation of social bonds and, eventually, of a civilization allows for the experience of a new kind of freedom, one that has been called positive freedom. This new concept of freedom relies upon the social bonds to give humans the necessary protective and nurturing structure out of which they may gain self-mastery or autonomy and the possibility of what Kristeva, quoting Kant, calls “the possibility of ‘self-beginning,’ Selbstanfang.”³¹

Thus one kind of restriction (the limitation of individual negative freedom in order to protect others in the community and the community’s own needs as a whole) opens up another, positive kind of freedom, namely the freedom of intersubjectivity, of family bonds and political ties. Freud points out that the development of civilization seems to entail self-restriction both because insofar as a desire is thought and spoken, it involves “the necessity to accept the death of the other as well as of oneself,”³² and because without the first kind of constraint the second kind of freedom, or “self-beginning,” cannot come about.³³ This interdependence of the two kinds of freedom can be illustrated through the Hegelian notion of the inverted world, in which the second freedom, the freedom of pardon and reformation, is achieved through an “inversion” of the first freedom, or the unrestricted freedom to avenge oneself. This inversion opens up into the possibility of forgiveness and infinitely self-related universality.

If we specifically compare this Hegelian inversion to Freud’s notion of the self-restriction that must take place in order for civilization to arise, we can see that what Hegel calls revenge is comparable to the action of the raw life-preserving or self-gratifying drive (Eros) that Freud describes, whereas forgiveness involves a complex binding of the primary drives of Eros (desire) and Thanatos (aggression). This binding allows for the emergence of ethical life, but at the same time, according to Freud, it makes us unhappy or discontent. The discontents that Freud thought were a self-evident result of civilization mark perhaps the biggest difference of his description from that of Hegel. This discrepancy can be tempered, however, by noting that Freud lived in the twentieth century and witnessed not only world war but also the decline of the human belief in inevitable progress.

Kristeva notes that Selbstanfang’s inception in the community links it to the enlarged mentality of the sensus communis that Kant describes in the Critique of Judgment. Yet at the same time that she celebrates the positive conception of freedom in its contribution to the achievements of Western civilization, she also bemoans the reemergence and preponderation, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, of the archaic sense of negative freedom. In late capitalism, this freedom is reconfigured as “the capacity to adapt to a ‘cause’ always outside the ‘self,’ and which is less and less a moral cause, and more and more an economic one.”³⁴ We once again have become victims of a logic of the bad infinite, but this time in terms of the desire always to possess and express the new in the form of products, fashion, and so on.

The only way to combat the reemergence of this primitive, negative conception of freedom is through critique and a cultivation of the positive sense of freedom, and it is this effort that Kristeva thinks psychoanalysis and art can nurture. At some level it is this hoped-for renewed transition from negative to positive freedom that Kristeva references in her chosen title of Hatred and Forgiveness; we might want to read it as from hatred to forgiveness. At the same time that this dialectical movement goes on at the level of the formation of civilization, however, Kristeva also describes it at the level of the development of the individual in her relation to culture, and the child’s ambivalent development in relation to its mother.³⁵ The analytical situation, in which a patient works through her trauma with the help of a skilled listener, is one that “neither judges nor calculates,” in the sense of the reason that leads to retributive justice, but “is content to untangle and reconstruct, in the sense of pardon. Only such a process can renew the unconscious and confront hate, which, in its self-generating circularity, is the other side of desire.”³⁶

Although Kristeva describes forgiveness or par-don (through or thorough giving) as a continuation of theological pardon’s promise of a “re-birth of the subject in a new temporality” and in terms of relations with others, she nonetheless insists that it is “post-moral.”³⁷ Where religion promised rebirth in the sense of an eternity beyond death and morality might advocate forgiveness for the sake of social harmony in the here and now, forgiveness in a Freudian sense addresses the psychological need for an “opening up of psychic space” within the temporality of the finite but also relating back to the timelessness of the unconscious.³⁸ This forgiveness may be given in art; indeed, Kristeva writes that all forgiveness is essentially, and in the first place, aesthetic in the sense of a “setting up of a form,” a poiesis.³⁹ The etymology of “forgiveness,” however, ties it to letting go, or exhalation, so the setting up of a form is also a setting free.

Forgiveness is always a kind of excess; Jacques Derrida calls true forgiveness “hyperbolic,” in that it gives without any expectation of a return.⁴⁰ In Black Sun, Kristeva writes: “Forgiveness: giving in addition, banking on what is there in order to revive, to give the depressed patient (that stranger withdrawn into his wound) a new start, and give him the possibility of a new encounter.”⁴¹ The “giving in addition” would be a par-don, a gift that goes beyond what is required, therefore a gift in the true sense of the word. True forgiveness thus may be the condition for the possibility of all other symbolic encounters, an idea we will develop more in the next section.

In Black Sun, Kristeva discusses Gerard de Nerval’s Aurelia, a work in which the poet evokes a network of melancholic streams like molten metal that crisscross the world in the manner of blood vessels in the brain. The poet’s perception of this “transparent network” of correspondences is, in Kristeva’s interpretation, a “transposition of drives and their objects into destabilized and recombined signs” that, through their transfiguration, allow the writer to share his sorrows and his joys with others, by letting them live through these experiences as their own.⁴² This network will closely resemble her analysis of the “thought specular” in contemporary film, a subject we will examine toward the end of this chapter.

Dostoevsky, too, ventured his own melancholic subjectivity to the point of losing his identity, “down to the threshold of evil, crime, or asymbolia,” not merely to represent these stages “but in order to work through them and to bear witness … from elsewhere,” speaking or writing violence rather than committing it.⁴³ This working through would definitively separate aesthetic from religious forgiveness. Aesthetic forgiveness takes up where religion no longer has power; rather than lifting the “sinner” beyond her sin, it “identifies with abjection in order to traverse it, name it, expend it,” and be reborn again from it.⁴⁴ Kristeva writes that there is “no beauty outside the forgiveness that remembers abjection and filters it through the destabilized, musicalized, resensualized signs of loving discourse.”⁴⁵ This semiotically informed inscription allows the writer to alternate between the unsurpassability of suffering, on one hand, and flashes of forgiveness, on the other; the “eternal return” of their alternation constitutes the entirety of the writer’s work.⁴⁶

The “time” of forgiveness is neither an eternity removed from this life nor a pursuit of retribution to redress one’s suffering. It is a time that keeps suffering and injustice in mind, that does not allow it to be forgotten or erased, but “without being blinded as to its horror, banks on a new departure, on a renewal of the individual.”⁴⁷ Kristeva calls forgiveness a “renewal of the unconscious,” which is “constituted by preverbal self-sensualities that the narcissistic or amorous experience returns to me.”⁴⁸ This forgiveness operates both on the level of the unconscious, which knows no time, and on the level of love, which inaugurates a new relation with the other through a rebuilding or rebirth.⁴⁹

Although she does not elaborate very much on the idea, Kristeva suggests that we live a new kind of temporal existence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, one characterized by pathological repetition of identical time segments, in the manner of a machine. In this “modern age,” psychic space and psychical time are “threatened with destruction by the rise of technology.”⁵⁰ The psyche, she writes in New Maladies of the Soul, “represents” the bond between the “soul” (from the Greek psyche) and the image, in particular with reference to the speaking being’s relation to the other. In the psychoanalytic situation, the speech of the analysand and the analyst, too, “incorporate different series of representations.” However, modern life outside of the analyst’s office has for the most part dispensed with the representation of psychic life. Contemporary men and women attend instead to a series of distractions: they “spend money, have fun, and die.”⁵¹ Instead of representations of psychic life, people sate their need for images with mindless entertainment, advertisements, and mundane alternate realities that merely repeat the commercially informed world in other guises. Forgiveness suspends time and allows for a new beginning and a new “intersubjective configuration.”⁵²

This double relation takes place thanks to a separation of the psyche from the tyranny of the unconscious, through the activity of a transference to a new other (the analyst) or a new ideal (the artwork, the imaginary “I”). Forgiveness constitutes from the outset a schema, the barest of outlines: the idea that meaning, however indeterminate, does exist. Forgiveness allows the subject the possibility of identifying with a loving, imaginary “father” or of becoming reconciled with a new symbolic law.⁵³ This process is a “transubstantiation” that allows the artist and perhaps the reader/spectator to live a “second life,” one of forms and meaning.⁵⁴ It exceeds a merely psychological transformation in that it requires language, the act of naming and of composing the narrative form.⁵⁵ Writing conveys affects without repressing them, transposing them in what Kristeva calls a “threefold, imaginary, and symbolic bond.”⁵⁶ The writer translates forgiveness as an emotional impulse into a tangible form: affect becomes effect.⁵⁷

André Green analyzes the relationship between representation and the feminine in his essay on Greek tragedy and specifically on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a tragic trilogy that I will discuss in the next section to illustrate the Hegelian and Kristevan dialectic of transgression and pardon. Green defines representation in a way that is also helpful in understanding Kristeva’s use of the term: as “the process … which consists in performing an action constructed around a fable or story.”⁵⁸ This process may be external, as in the theater, or internal, as when the mind figurally reproduces some situation or previously perceived object in order to bring it back into consciousness. Thus “representation is that delegation by which the activity of the drives is manifested so that it assumes a form through which it becomes known.”⁵⁹ This definition of the process could therefore equally well describe what ideally goes on in an analytic situation, as the analyst helps the analysand to the point where she can articulate, and thus know, unconscious factors that are affecting her conscious life. In Greek tragedy, in some cinema, and in psychoanalysis, desire is given representation, which accounts for the emotional response all of them may arouse.⁶⁰

Green points out that in Moses and Monotheism Freud interpreted the Oresteia in a classical way as a representation of the transition from a matriarchal social order to a patriarchal one.⁶¹ For Green, and Klein, Kristeva, and even for Hegel, the tragedy represents a more complex interaction of forces and outcome. We now turn to these interpretations to see what Green means when he calls tragedy “the representation of representation itself.”

Aeschylus’s Oresteia arguably enacts a kind of a translation of affect through representation into symbol, or the inception of a third. The trilogy tells the story of a family curse, a chain of impassioned murder and revenge that is passed down from family member to family member and that only comes to an end when retributive justice is transformed into the first court of law. This tragedy constitutes an important cultural reference for Hegel, Klein, and Kristeva, for its explicit thematization of the theme of a transformation from nature into culture, from particular and immediate revenge into mediated and universal law, from matricide into symbolic life, and from hatred into forgiveness. The “third” that is created is the realm of law and symbolic life.

The story of the Oresteia is of a generations-long family curse. The house of Atreus, the site of the family curse, traces its origin back to Tantalus, famous for having endured eternal punishment in Hades by remaining eternally thirsty yet just out of reach of drink. Aeschylus traces the curse to Atreus and his brother Thyestes, the sons of Pelops and grandchildren of Tantalus, who quarrel after Thyestes has an affair with Atreus’s wife Aerope. Banished from the kingdom, Thyestes plies Atreus to allow him to return and reconcile, and Atreus appears to agree, but at the banquet with which he welcomes his brother home, he serves him the roasted bodies of Thyestes’ own two slaughtered sons. Horrified upon being informed of this treachery, Thyestes leaves the country again, cursing Atreus and his house. In Aeschylus’s account, Thyestes’ one infant son survives. This son, Aegisthus, returns to Argos upon the departure of Atreus’s son Agamemnon for the Trojan War and becomes the lover of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. The Oresteia tells the story of the family’s multiple deaths: of Iphegenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sacrificed to the gods by Agamemnon in order to allow his ships to sail to Troy; of Agamemnon, murdered at the hands of his wife upon his return in retribution for her daughter’s death; and of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, killed by Orestes, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son, for her murder of his father. It is only when Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, or Furies, for the crime of matricide, seeks refuge with Athena, the goddess of justice, that the curse is brought to an end by the instantiation by Athena of the legal system of Athens that will henceforth adjudicate matters of life and death through law rather than revenge.

Green makes the dramatic claim that the Oresteia, along with the Oedipodeia, constitutes an essential archetype “in which the problematic of all tragedy—and perhaps of all human endeavor—is situated,”⁶² precisely because of this movement from affect to symbol, from retribution to law, and from drive to representation. It is notable, however, that in the Oresteia truth comes from the lips of a woman (Cassandra), whereas in the Oedipodeia it issues from the lips of a man (Teiresias), both divinely possessed. In fact, in Green’s words, “in the Oresteia, everything proceeds from the women,” from Helen’s infidelity to Artemis’s restraint on Agamemnon’s ships, to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the wrath of Clytemnestra, the incitement of Electra, and the concluding judgment of Athena.

In particular, Green links Clytemnestra’s prophetic dream, prior to being killed by her son Orestes, of a snake nursing at her breast and bringing forth a clot of blood to Klein’s discussion of the mother’s good breast/bad breast. This would put Clytemnestra, symbolically speaking, in the place of the mother whose matricide would give rise to a replacement or consolation in symbolic life. According to Green, representation plays a double role in the Oresteia: on the one hand, the conclusion of the tragedy clearly privileges thought over representation, the law of the father over the image of the mother. Green writes that “this opposition overlaps that of the imaginary and symbolic, as set out by Lacan.”⁶³

At the same time, however, this truth of thought’s victory over representation is itself presented in the tragedy by means of representation, or rather the “representation of representation”: “representation is born from the absence of the object; the representation of representation gives the object more life, embodies it and gives it a new existence.”⁶⁴ Tragedy exists “at the crossroads of this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible … yet belongs to neither.”⁶⁵ Representation brings the unconscious to consciousness, and this is what allows for the emergence of symbolic life; representation performs the transition from unconscious to image to word. Quoting Hegel inexactly, Green says that the tragic hero “externalizes the internal essence.”⁶⁶ It is in the Oresteia that this process is first made explicit. The trilogy is “the theatre of a number of overlapping oppositions”: the feminine against the masculine, the family against the city, and representation against speech. It is in this sense that the Oresteia and, in particular, the final tragedy, the Eumenides, might be seen as the foundation or touchstone for the story of forging a head in order to forge ahead.

Hegel’s discussion of the Oresteia follows a similar trajectory. For Hegel, however, the trilogy provides the stage for a conflict that is broader and more universal than the individual oppositions mapped out by Green; he argues that the tragedies bear witness to the inevitable discrepancy between the spirit of a particular people and the absolute spirit that appears within it. The residue, also called “fate,” or “the inorganic,” is the element of necessity with which the individual and the community must ultimately be reconciled. Hegel characterizes the history of natural law, a discussion of which is the context for his evocation of the Oresteia, as a tragic one:

As I have discussed elsewhere,⁶⁸ Hegel’s early writing on natural law uses the Eumenides as a privileged example of the inception of the law, which is accomplished symbolically with a vote, when the people of Athens judge between Apollo and the Erinyes in deciding whether Orestes is to be considered justified in having killed his mother (in order to avenge his father) or whether he is to be condemned as having committed the unforgivable crime of matricide. When the result is a draw, however, Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, steps in to break the tie, siding with Orestes in order to put an end to the cycle of perpetual retribution and to restore the living to an existence freed from the past. Just as in the Phenomenology of Spirit, forgiveness performs a paradigm shift whereby the interconnectedness and interdependence of human lives is recognized, here the instantiation of a judicial system allows the individual to transcend the need to destroy the one who has injured him (an act which will only assure his own self-destruction in return).

In her short essay “Some Reflections on the Oresteia ,” Melanie Klein aligns the family curse of the house of Atreus with the Hellenic term hubris, which she defines, quoting (the translator of the Oresteia) Gilbert Murray, “the typical sin which all things, so far as they have life, commit.”⁶⁹ For Klein, the acts of retributive justice carried out by Thyestes, Clytemnestra, and Orestes can be aligned with human life, or existence in its most fundamental form. Hubris “grasps at more, bursts bounds, and breaks the order.”⁷⁰ When the order has been broken, hubris is followed by Dike, or Justice, which reestablishes order. Gilbert argues that the “rhythm—hubris-Dike—Pride and its fall, Sin and Chastisement—is the commonest burden of those philosophical lyrics which are characteristic of Greek tragedy.”⁷¹

Klein writes that hubris can be aligned with certain emotions within an individual that are felt to be dangerous to the self and others. This kind of emotion may be sensed at a very early developmental stage by a child as an insatiable desire that is accompanied by the expectation of being punished by the mother for wanting too much of her.⁷² Klein compares this archaic greed to the Greek concept of moira, elucidated by Murray as “the portion allotted to each man by the gods.”⁷³ In the Oresteia, the story of the family curse is not only a story of wrongdoing and retribution but also a story of envy, sibling rivalry, and the primeval desire to destroy others or to have what is theirs, accompanied by an anxiety or fear of punishment should this desire be acted on.⁷⁴ Klein sees this set of affects in child development, where the child wants to possess the attributes first of the mother, then of the father and its own siblings. Coextensive with this envy and desire to appropriate what the other has, the child feels what Klein appears to think is a healthy anxiety that she is responsible for any trouble or illness which might befall the envied other. “This leads to a constant fear of loss which increases persecutory anxiety and underlies the fear of punishment for hubris.” Klein quotes Clytemnestra to the effect that “who feareth envy, feareth to be great.”⁷⁵

In the first play of the trilogy Oresteia, Agamemnon, Agamemnon displays a great degree of hubris; returning triumphant from the Trojan wars, to which he embarked by sacrificing his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to give his ships favorable winds, he feels pride in having destroyed Troy and in having brought back a captive lover, Cassandra. He feels no apparent sorrow, however, for having left his people and his family alone for ten years in order to avenge the insult against his brother Menelaus at the elopement of Menelaus’s wife Helen with Paris, prince of Troy.

Considering this excess of hubris, Klein writes, “Clytemnestra in a sense is the tool of justice, dike.”⁷⁶ Yet at the moment that she kills Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, too, begins to suffer from hubris, and it is her son Orestes who in turn will act as the agent of dike in murdering her. But this repetition of hubris-dike is a pathological rhythm. It gives sterile birth again and again only to life-destroying hubris. Orestes must undergo a dramatic change in order to become the agent of a transformative act that stops the repetitive cycle and gives birth to a new, life-affirming shape of human life.

According to Klein, it is Orestes’ emergent feeling of guilt for having killed his own mother that allows him to be helped by Athena in the end.⁷⁷ While Orestes feels no guilt over the murder of Aegisthus, his mother’s lover, he is in severe inward conflict over the death of his mother. He had wanted to avenge his father, with whom he identified, but not explicitly to triumph over his own mother.

Klein identifies the transitions through which Orestes passes in the course of the Eumenides with her own articulation of the stages of child development, as a movement from hatred and parceling through depression, guilt, and desire for reparation. She writes:

In my view he shows the mental state which I take to be characteristic of the transition between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position, a stage when guilt is essentially experienced as persecution. When the depressive position is reached and worked through—which is symbolized in the Trilogy by Orestes’ changed demeanour at the Areopagus—guilt becomes predominant and persecution diminishes.”⁷⁸

Orestes is able to overcome the need for retribution and self-recrimination because he never ceases to attempt to purify himself by making reparations after his crime and because he continues to consider the position of the people of the kingdom over whom he presumably intends to rule justly in the future.⁷⁹ This desire to make reparations, along with his act of flinging himself upon the mercy and protection of Athena, is a kind of implicit plea for forgiveness. Athena’s act of founding a court of justice—and sparing Orestes from punishment by death on the condition that he accept the rule of law and of the people—is a kind of pardon that allows him to return to Argos.⁸⁰

Klein argues that the “demon” or curse of the house of Atreus “comes to rest when Orestes is forgiven and returns to Argos”:

It is of interest that the demon, who since Pelops’ time exerted a reign of terror in the royal house of Argos, comes to rest—so the legend goes—when Orestes has been forgiven and suffering no more, returns, as we may assume, to a normal and useful life. My interpretation would be that guilt and the urge to make reparation, the working through of the depressive position, breaks up the vicious circle, because destructive impulses and their sequel of persecutory anxiety have diminished and the relation to the loved object has been re-established.⁸¹

Although it may seem far from his analysis of the Oresteia in Natural Law, Hegel’s description of the movement from desire to self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit has an analogous implicit meaning to the one outlined by Klein here. Hegel’s word for what Klein calls hubris, or greed for life (a human quality that, while it might be deemed sinful, is also inevitable, since it is what “all things, so far as they have life, commit”), is “desire,” a drive to consume and make the world a part of oneself. Desire is what characterizes life, for Hegel, but it is not until one desiring individual comes up against another that this hubris is transformed, through the struggle that ensues, into dike, or, as Hegel calls it, self-consciousness. Self-consciousness’s constitution through a face-to-face encounter also paves the way for the inception of intersubjectivity and ethical life, the beginning of the “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and the ‘We’ that is ‘I.’”⁸³ As Klein puts it, Athena “achieves a change in the Furies towards forgiveness and peacefulness. This attitude expresses the tendency towards reconciliation and integration.”⁸⁴

Kristeva’s discussions of the Oresteia mainly filter through her reading of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose play The Flies is a modern version of the Eumenides, set in the context of World War II France. In her book on Melanie Klein, Kristeva also discusses Klein’s essay on the Oresteia, however. It is here that Klein answers the question why we have symbols at all, according to Kristeva. The answer: because the mother is insufficient. The message of symbols, Kristeva writes, were they able to talk, would be that they come to fill in where the mother’s care breaks off. The murder of Clytemnestra and the restitution of Orestes’ subjectivity in the establishment of a court of law is itself a symbolic enactment of this substitution of symbolic life for the mother’s care. Of course, the point is not to kill one’s mother.⁸⁵ Indeed, “crimes and other aggressive actings out are merely failures of the symbol; they represent a failure of the imaginary matricide that, by itself paves the way to thought.”⁸⁶ In other words, psychic life is no longer fully represented in a great deal of writing and in art. Instead, we have portrayed in both popular culture and in countless contemporary media accounts a spate of gratuitous killings and “mindless robots without a soul.” The failure of resolution of what we might call the “Orestes conflict”—the lack of guilt in our pleasure in such gratuitous violence—results in one of the “new maladies of the soul” that Kristeva and Klein have documented, those patients whose psychic realm has been broken into bits.⁸⁷

In her reading of Sartre’s The Flies, Kristeva analyzes the contemporary message of the play to be that freedom is antinature, if nature is the mother. The human can only attain freedom by wresting itself from nature and asserting itself as antinature.⁸⁸ Kristeva describes this antinatural quality as a kind of alienation or foreignness, citing Sartre’s speech where Orestes addresses Zeus:

Unlike Green, Kristeva does not see the tendency toward fragmentation in an entirely negative light. Psychoanalysis, she writes, may be wise to turn its attention to Orestes given current social crises and the manifestation of borderline states not only within individuals but on a social and cultural level. The predominance of fragmentation in so-called avant-garde art and literature may be a symptom of social crisis, but it also signals a new “freedom to be foreign.” Orestes as the “culmination of Oedipus, the completion of his rebellious logic and the announcement of an unthinkable foreignness” is a “socialized psychosis” rather than an individual one; although it poses personal and political risks, it also heralds the possibility of a “civilization of freedom.”⁹²

What remains is to articulate the difference between this foreign, fragmented art, which puts forward an image commensurate with yet potentially transformative of the society of the spectacle, and the spectacle itself. In Intimate Revolt Kristeva insists that the proliferation of vampires and massacres in popular film effects a new kind of catharsis, one that “no longer occurs through Oedipus, Electra, or Orestes”; moreover, “the stupider it is, the better.”⁹³ Kristeva argues that the attraction of the medium of film for today’s troubled subjects lies in its capacity to transform a flat image (a denotative sign) into a symptom (a specular),⁹⁴ a logic of fantasy in form if not in content.

Borrowing the term lekton, or “expressible,” from the Stoics in order to denote this “subjective alchemy” of image into phantasmic form, Kristeva nonetheless distinguishes between the lektonic efficacy of films of popular culture and those of Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. While films like the Twilight saga, on the one hand, and slasher films, on the other, present foreignness or violence in their bare denotative form, other styles of cinematic representation effect catharsis in subtler and richer ways, through connotation, the production of aesthetic ideas, and alternation of the ruthless and monotonous rhythms of daily life.

Whereas most popular films merely expresses the specular directly, the films of the “thought specular” form a version of the specular that, as we have seen, distances itself from itself, creating a logic of “visible signs that designate fantasy and denounce it as such.”⁹⁵ All specular is fascinating, Kristeva writes, “because it bears the trace—in the visible—of … aggression, of this nonsymbolized, nonverbalized, and thus nonrepresented drive.”⁹⁶ This explains the allure of unmediated images of violent and sexual aggression. But the thought specular goes beyond mere fascination, “capturing” these signals, cutting them up, and arranging them “in such a way that the phantasmatic thought … invites you first to locate your own fantasies and then to hollow them out.”⁹⁷ In this mode of the thought specular, fantasies “exercise their power of fascination while at the same time mocking their fascinating specular.”⁹⁸

The cinema of the thought specular displays the logic of the semiotic, or the “lektonic traces” that put into play those parts of signification that are supplemental to it yet always underlie it. The interplay of these lektonic traces closely resembles the logic of fantasy, the “energies of the pulsing, desiring body.”⁹⁹ At the same time, the films that Kristeva considers do have a recognizable narrative and are full of denotative images. It is in the interplay of these two registers that Kristeva finds the capacity of the cinema to “hollow out” fantasy in the manner of “Orestian revolt.”

For example, she discusses a seminar of the famous Russian director Eisenstein, where a scene of confrontation is being mapped out by the director and his students. On the one hand, there is a clearly recognizable conflict: a soldier returns home from a long time at war (in the manner of Agamemnon) to find his wife pregnant. Eisenstein organizes the space of the scene along two tendencies, “a straightforward, frontal tendency and an oblique, diagonal tendency.”¹⁰⁰ The pattern created by the cross-deployment of these two tendencies creates, where successful, a spatially organized rhythm in which one can dynamically apprehend the signifier “not in the cold sign of phenomena, but … in the innumerable multiplicities of its particular, ever-changing manifestations.” In so doing, “the signifier rids itself of its indirect character of plodding word play or deadly symbol.”¹⁰¹

We can see that the same effect is created by Aeschylus’s trilogy. The repeated violence against close family members creates an agonizing tension, but at the same time, the visible also organizes itself along a countertendency that eventually leads Orestes to Athena and to the creation of a court of law. The straightforward narrative is also crisscrossed with the rhythmic tones and chants of the chorus and the eruption of the Erinyes. The lektonic traces, which signify something real yet neither material, representational, nor conceptual, add a “rhythmic, plastic dimension” to the plainly visible, thereby encoding the anxiety of the tragic structure in a way that elicits that of the viewer more profoundly than would a linear narrative or a series of denotative images or “image information” that stares the viewer in the face.¹⁰² Such a process invites the spectators “first to locate [their] own fantasies and then to hollow them out.”¹⁰³ This “hollowing out” (évider) evokes the ancient Greek aesthetic concept of tragic catharsis.

Indeed, the transformation of the Erinyes into the Eumenides provides an almost perfect exemplification of the lektonic transfer that takes place in the audience of the tragedy. Whereas the affect the Erinyes evoke is fear, aggression, and horror (the “nonsymbolized death drive” as the end result of the specular),¹⁰⁴ when transformed into the Eumenides, spirits who retain a ruling influence on the “city” yet who are kept “underground” or safely harnessed, they “hold the spectator—still plunged in fantasy—at a distance from fascination.” Rather than a repressed sadomasochistic fantasy, the tragedy enacts a demystification of fantasy¹⁰⁵ that provides a therapeutic “hollow” for their own self-injuring fantasies.

In our own day, the cinema of the thought specular performs the same function as did the tragedy in ancient Greece. It purges the viewer of anxieties that terrorize every human being by virtue of developing up and away from the “mother” and toward a symbolic life. The Eumenides, the final tragedy of the Oresteia, performs this movement, beginning with the waking of the sleeping Erinyes (Furies) by the ghost of the slain Clytemnestra, who demands vengeance. The Erinyes represent, arguably, the conflicted feelings of Orestes himself. He has killed his mother, committed an unspeakable crime, and he feels the need to punish himself. The externalization of these superegoic pangs in the form of the newly awoken Erinyes is sternly repudiated by Apollo, who cries:

Here the Erinyes are aligned with castration and decapitation, just as Orestes is labeled a matricidal murderer, one who has taken justice into his own hands and interpreted it purely retributively. At the end of this third play of the trilogy, however, the Erinyes will have been transformed into the Eumenides, benevolent goddesses of fertility, and Orestes will be restored to his rightful throne with the backing of an official and universal court of law. The madness of Orestes and the madness of the Erinyes both cease; as George Devereux puts it, “the exoneration of Orestes and the appeasing of the Erinyes represent … a kind of ritual ‘psychotherapy’ which appeases the rage of both the killer and the avenger.”¹⁰⁷

Most importantly for our thesis in this book, the story of the Oresteia, in particular the conclusion in the Eumenides, is a story of matricide followed by pardon and the forging of something creative out of that wound. Symbolically, the story of Orestes’ murder of Clytemnestra and his “rebirth” through the surrogate or substitute “mother” Athena represents the story of forging a new head out of the severing of the old one, and it is the Erinyes that accomplish the severing and the Eumenides who create the new head (though of course they are the “same” entities). Through Athena’s par-don of Orestes, he is granted a second beginning through language and law rather than through retribution (which, though natural, is also destructive of others and of self). He kills his mother then rediscovers her in symbolic life.

It is significant that Orestes decapitates both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Aegisthus, as the false father who has usurped the throne of the real father, must be killed in order to eliminate a false path, and Orestes does so summarily. It is much more difficult for Orestes to kill Clytemnestra, his real mother. To shield his eyes from his own deed, he puts his cloak between his sword and his mother and stabs her neck through it. In inciting him to this deed, the chorus urges him to behead Clytemnestra in the way that Perseus beheaded Medusa the Gorgon.¹⁰⁸ Both Perseus and Orestes carry out their tasks with the help of Athena, who shielded the vision of Perseus against the gaze of Medusa, which turned men into stone. Likewise here the cloak shields Orestes from the vision of his own matricide. He is tormented by his deed, first inwardly, by himself, then outwardly by the Furies; unlike his slaying of Aegisthus, he does not take matricide lightly but cries that from now on he will be an eternal foreigner, welcome at no hearth.¹⁰⁹

The pardon that Athena effects allows for the establishment of a legal system, a symbolic realm common to all, where justice will be meted out not individually and retributively but according to a commonly agreed upon code. The figure of decapitation is not, on Kristeva’s reading, one of pure violence and fragmentation. It marks a severance, but one that will be productive of an enriched form of subjectivity and culture. At the same time, decapitation’s lineage in a kind of state of nature where wrongs are addressed through violence cannot be denied.

In By Blood, a 2012 novel by Ellen Ullman, a comparable transformation takes place. The narrator of By Blood, who becomes a kind of life enabler despite being initially depicted as creepy or sick, is an eavesdropper and a covert stalker. A university professor, on leave while a charge against him of misconduct toward a student is investigated (one which seems to involve an obsessive stalking to the point that the student has disappeared), the unnamed eavesdropper has rented an office in an old building next to a psychoanalyst’s office and happens one day to listen in on the conversation of the analyst and a patient who, disliking the white-noise machine used to mask such conversations, asks for it to be turned off.

Parallel to this story of searching for the mother and for one’s cultural heritage, and engaging with the traumatic elements of one’s place in the world, the professor is also gradually coming to terms with his own personal demons, his furies. He is, in fact, engaged in writing a lecture on Aeschylus’s Eumenides. He refers repeatedly to the “furies” that haunt him, in particular at those times when he cannot listen in on the patient’s sessions. At the start of the novel, which begins at the end then flashes back to the narrative arc that preceded it, the narrator suggests that the vicarious process of listening in on and engaging with another’s analysis and dissipation of trauma has also allowed him to work through his own demons. He says, “I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me. At the end of it, I was a changed man. I am indebted to her; it was she who changed me, although I never learned her name.”¹¹⁰ His Erinyes are transformed, at least provisionally, into Eumenides. Yet the real end of the story is unknown, for at the denouement, the patient realizes that she has received the information about her mother from an unknown source, and the analyst finally begins to suspect an eavesdropper in the adjacent office. The white-noise machine is turned back on, and it descends like a curtain between the reader and the ultimate conclusion, just as it always is for both analysand and analyst in the therapeutic session.

By Blood is a story of a traditional psychoanalytic “talking cure” with an unexpected effect by and on a third person, but the reference to Aeschylus’s Eumenides and in particular to the furies opens up the story onto a rhythmic counterpart, the rhythm of the ecstatic chorus of Greek tragedy. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his analysis of Greek tragedy, insisted that in ancient music-drama there were always “two worlds” of the senses: the world of the eyes (vision), found in the narrative of the tragedy, and that of the ears (tone, rhythm), found in the choral interludes. These two “worlds” coexisted in the tragedy with no attempt made to mediate them; rather, precisely and only in their sharp confrontation could the “truth” of the drama be revealed. Nietzsche writes that Euripides tried to tame the rhythm of the Dionysian dithyramb, from which the tragedy evolved and which remains in the chorus in older versions of tragedy, into words.¹¹¹ Such a reconciliation brought about the decline of tragedy, since by definition the ecstatic dithyramb articulated nonverbal content through music and dance. In Aeschylus, by contrast, the tragedy is simultaneously dythrambikos and esukastikon, the “incomparable convulsive power of tones” brought into an “architecture” that recalls the Kristevan lektonic skeleton, allowing for a translation of rhythm into images.¹¹²

The self-distancing involved in this stance—Nietzsche also describes the Aeschylean Dionysian aesthetic as “something like, when one dreams and at the same time [that is, within the dream] recognizes the dream as a dream”¹¹³ and adds that “In such a way the servant of Dionysos must be in rapture and simultaneously lie lurking behind himself as observer.”¹¹⁴—marks the experience as one of “self-aestheticization,” as Molly Rothenberg has described it.

Through the gesture of self-aestheticization, Rothenberg writes, the “acephalous subject” (to use Žižek’s terminology,¹¹⁵ particularly appropriate here) “does not seek to act on the social field but rather to reveal its true relation to the social field … by explicitly appearing as the excessive dimension in itself and making visible what cannot be accommodated within the encyclopedia of the situation.”¹¹⁶ The subject accepts her constitution through others but also “frames” or brackets her ontic properties in such a way that they can be appropriated for new meanings.

In a 2012 paper Rothenberg illustrates this process of self-aestheticization in her account of an individual analysand’s treatment, in which the patient recounts a dream in which she sees her traumatic memories individually outlined in the sky, in frames that she is able to reach out and pluck down one by one. In the dream she now has a book of photos “in her hand that she could open, flip through, and close at will. From this time on, she would be free of her nightmares and no longer have dissociative episodes. We began to make significant progress in the analysis.”¹¹⁷ The images can now be directly examined and eventually discarded, whereas before their appearance in memory or dream caused the patient to flinch and look away. Nietzsche writes, similarly: “that which we call ‘tragic’ is exactly that Apollonian clarification of the Dionysian: if we lay those interwoven sensations that the rapture of the Dionysian creates beside each other like a row of pictures, this row of pictures would express what is to be clarified, the ‘tragic.’”¹¹⁸

Nietzsche’s a account of tragic rhythm and temporality uncannily evokes the relationship of the professor and his “dear patient” who is almost an extension of himself, another person stained “by blood” and trying to work out the ramifications of heritage and subjectivity in their individual existence, and also the limits of calculation in bringing this about (the professor acts as a medium of revelation for the patient, and likewise the patient’s discourse and situation bring about a correlative transformation in the professor, though they never intend this outcome, meet, or, even, at least on the patient’s side, know of the other’s existence). The experience of the artwork, Nietzsche implies, brings about a conscious awareness of the ineluctable ambiguity of the human condition, as simultaneously actor and spectator, agent and medium of her own life.¹¹⁹

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud notes something he had earlier established, namely, that the study of dreams may be “the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes.”¹²⁰ He remarks upon, in particular, dreams that repeatedly bring a patient back into her traumatic experience, even when she is not necessarily much occupied with it in waking life.¹²¹ The persistent repetition in dreams of a traumatic event seems to provide evidence of the unconscious’ unproductive reworking of a blockage that cannot come to consciousness. Here, repetition appears to be only a symptom of obstruction.

Simple repetitive rhythmic alterations can have therapeutic effects, however. This can be seen in Freud’s famous observation of a child’s coming to terms with his mother’s periodic absence for stretches of time, by playing a game in which he rolls or throws away and then retrieves a spool or any other small object, accompanying the retrieval with a loud drawn-out “o-o-o-o” and other signs of satisfaction. Repeated observation of this activity, which became well known as the fort-da game, caused Freud to note that simple rhythmic repetitions can aid children and adults in coping with stress and even trauma by turning a passive experience (being left by the mother) into an active one (throwing the object away and retrieving it). Freud notes that children’s play often involves repetition of activities, such as being examined by a doctor, that were unpleasant or even painful when they were actually experienced.

He goes on to note that “artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences yet can be felt by them as highly enjoyable.”¹²² Freud takes this phenomenon to be proof that there are ways in which even unpleasurable and painful experiences can be made into subjects that are capable of being recollected and worked over in the mind.¹²³ There are two kinds of repetition associated with trauma, therefore: one that diabolically or obsessively replays the trauma, rendering the subject a passive victim of it, and one in which the subject masters (and herself creates) the repetition in such a way as to process and overcome it.

The contemporary psychologist Francine Shapiro has taken this idea in its simplest, nonaesthetic sense to initiate a relatively new form of therapy, called “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,” or EMDR, in which, under the guidance of a doctor, a patient will learn how to decode and reprocess repressed memories that produce in them a feeling that something is holding them back in life and causing them to think, feel, and behave in ways that don’t serve them well.¹²⁴ The process of decoding and reprocessing the memory involves a series of doctor-guided rapid eye movements back and forth, left and right, that take place while the patient is training her attention on a sensation of anxiety or depression that can be located and focused on corporeally, even if the patient is unsure of its exact origin in a particular life experience. The apparent simplicity of this process belies its effectiveness.

Shapiro recounts how the idea for EMDR came to her. She was completing a doctorate in English literature at New York University when she was diagnosed with cancer. One day, she went for a walk to take a break from and to try to shake the depression and disturbing thoughts she began feeling as a result of this life-threatening diagnosis. She writes: “Previous experience had taught me that disturbing thoughts generally have a certain ‘loop’ to them; that is, they tend to play themselves over and over until you consciously do something to stop and change them. What caught my attention that day was that my disturbing thoughts were disappearing and changing without any conscious effort.”¹²⁵ What Shapiro came to theorize was that when disturbing thoughts came into her mind, her eyes spontaneously started moving very rapidly back and forth in an upward diagonal, and that when she did this the strength of the thoughts would dissipate and even disappear. The walking may have contributed to this effect, as others who have subsequently studied the techniques of EMDR have argued.¹²⁶

What is especially interesting to me in this story is the combination of Shapiro the literature student, a self-professed believer that she was doing the important work of one who “shed light on our culture and literature—with its delicate nuances, rich textures, and the intricate lives of characters,”¹²⁷ and Shapiro the behavioral psychologist (she later earned another Ph.D., in clinical psychology). While the technique of EMDR seems to be purely mechanical and contentless, it nonetheless has something in common with the process Shapiro describes of creating characters that, if “drawn true to life and set loose … then create their own plots.”¹²⁸ It seems to me that this is precisely the way in which one could describe the process of “creating a head,” in Kristeva’s sense. To “lose one’s head” is to lose the sense that one springs forth fully determined to be who one is and to recognize one’s responsibility for acknowledging one’s wounds and finding a way to heal them through the “creation” of a “plot.” This process has both a cognitive, intentional component, and one that is bodily, rhythmic, and perhaps triggered by processes that we can neither fully know nor completely master. We must learn to repeat the past, not in the debilitating, passive manner of one seized by a traumatic memory that one cannot escape and that haunts one with relentless persistence of the “loop” (as in Hegel’s discussion of revenge and Nietzsche’s articulation of ressentiment) of disturbing thoughts described by Shapiro, but in the transformative, aesthetic sense explored by Kristeva that we discussed in chapter 2. This aesthetic repetition shares the attempt at mastery found in the fort-da game and in artworks that engage with, rather than try to avoid, suffering and that in doing so sometimes manage to give rise to pleasure through the suffering.¹²⁹ To do so is to forgive ourselves and others for the inevitable ways in which we the fabric of our existence will inevitably be rent.