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

A YOUNG WOMAN GOES TO THE STUDENT HEALTH CENTER FOR counseling. She has lost a close childhood friend, killed in an accident. She seeks a safe place to narrate her loss and someone to receive it with quiet and patience, someone who will not be waiting to pass on to the next subject of conversation, as even a close friend might, but who can linger with her in her pain. She seeks a place to talk of her friend who has died and perhaps to lament his passing in anger, expressing the injustice of a life cut short in its prime. She is offered an antidepressant on her second visit, when the therapist, not out of impatience or from an inability to console but as part of a routine procedure, judges her unable to deal with her loss. The student leaves, frustrated, and throws the prescription into the trash on her way out. The mourning process will continue, but it has hit a snag, temporarily obstructed by annoyance at a system that thinks grief should never be excessive.

Another woman visits a therapist, devastated over the end of her marriage, baffled at the sudden turn her life has taken, unable to deal for the moment with the stresses of everyday life. Before the first session has ended, the woman’s tears have provoked the therapist to suggest immediate commencement of an antidepressant, because “you can’t handle this pain right now.” The suffering is interfering with work, with parenthood, with everyday tasks, yet the patient came to the psychologist with a need to talk through her pain, to come to an understanding and to heal herself. The woman leaves, frustrated, and interrupts therapy until she can find someone who is willing to talk and listen and nothing more.

A New York Times opinion essay asks, “where have all the neurotics gone?,” noting the almost complete disappearance of neurosis as a meaningful term for the average American. A generation ago, the essay states, neurosis meant something: “It meant being interesting (if sometimes exasperating) at a time when psychoanalysis reigned in intellectual circles and Woody Allen reigned in movie houses.”¹ Today, writes the author Benedict Carey, a science reporter at the New York Times, even professors of psychology rarely use the term, which has been replaced with “anxiety” or “depression,” when in fact neurosis covers both of these. Carey makes two very important observations.

First, neurosis, in its heyday, functioned not only as a descriptor of a certain personality type but also as a kind of alert on the cultural level. In losing the conceptual range of neurosis from our cultural consciousness, “in the process we’ve lost entirely the romance of neurosis, as well as its physical embodiment—a restless, grumbling, needy presence that once functioned in the collective mind as an early warning system, an inner voice that hedged against excessive optimism.” In effect, the essay argues, the presence of neurosis in the collective mind served a kind of inoculatory effect, in the manner that I earlier described as “spiritual”:² “In today’s era of exquisite confusion—political, economic and otherwise—the neurotic would be a welcome guest, nervous company for nervous days, always ready to provide doses of that most potent vaccine against gloominess: wisecracking, urbane gloominess.” Today happiness, or at least the absence of anxiety and depression, seems to be a demand and an expected result from medical science. But perhaps the neurotic psyche—at both an individual and a cultural level—served an important purpose, one that should not be so easily dismissed or forgotten. Perhaps we have lost something in becoming so successful in eliminating the symptoms of psychic suffering. At least this seems to be implied in Kristeva’s discussion of melancholic art, which addresses melancholia precisely through melancholia, vaccinating itself against itself, and always retaining its small dose of “urbane gloominess.”

Second, and following from this, we tend to forget that neurosis is both a mental and a bodily affliction. Carey quotes the historian of mental illness Edward Shorter:

The bodily effects and causes of psychic suffering must be addressed in conjunction with their mental counterparts. In analogy with the body’s upright stance, rising up from the earth—with the brain, or the mind’s seat, lodged only at its vertical apex—the body and bodily chemistry must be addressed from the ground up and not from the top down; that is, for thought and self-sustaining psychic life to transpire, what is called for is not simply the tamping down of symptoms (a negative approach) but the positive provision to the body of what it needs to corporeally thrive.

This book has sought to explore in depth one philosopher/psychoanalyst’s engagement with depression and other social maladies not only at the level of the individual but also at the level of culture. Kristeva suggests, like Nietzsche in “On Redemption,” that the problem is not that most humans are, in a psychic sense, “cripples and beggars.”³ To be a human is to be damaged, vulnerable, and finite, and each of us is defined, as Lacan has shown, by a constitutive lack. Indeed, in Lacan’s famous formulation, anxiety rather arises when “the lack is lacking” or, as Nietzsche puts it, in those who “lack everything, except one thing of which they have too much.”⁴ Kristeva’s formulation of the one who has “lost her head” is a description of all of us, as simultaneously embodied and intersubjective beings interacting with one another through language and other forms of symbolic life. But how do we “forge” a “new” head? The suggestion that I have been pursuing throughout this book, following Kristeva, is that one productive way might be through aesthetic activity that engages with and through, rather than trying to suppress, anxiety and depression, those two cornerstones of neurosis.

The figure of the severed head is a particularly carnal and jarring one. The severed head has been portrayed in visual art repeatedly and graphically, exposing a whole range of unexpected affects and registers of meaning, all of which Kristeva addresses in The Severed Head. One aspect she spends less time on in that work, however, is the sheer fleshiness of the severed head, the way in which it immediately conveys to the viewer a sense of the pure and final interruption of life. This sense of the severed head is addressed, rather, in Kristeva’s detective novels.

We can see the register of meanings of pregnancy and birth in the themes that we have discussed in this book: the melancholia that characterizes the necessary separation from the maternal body and the depressive phase that is the condition for the possibility of symbolic life; the iconoclastic cut that “takes into account birth and void ,” the double movement of birth into materiality and history through the mother’s body, and annihilation or kenosis into thought;⁵ the uncanny experience of harboring an other, a foreigner, within oneself in pregnancy⁶ or in our relationship with our unconscious; suffering the loss of the mother as the condition for the possibility of sublimation; and the necessity of matricide, the emptying out of the maternal womb (catharsis), and pardon for matricide for the emergence of representation, law, and language.

In Almodóvar’s film Talk to Her, Benigno is the consummate caregiver; not content with merely keeping Alicia alive and comfortable, he talks to her, massages her, paints her nails, does her makeup, and cuts her hair, keeping her as beautiful as he knows her to be. As the story unfolds, we begin to realize that Benigno, far from being a family friend or even acquaintance of Alicia prior to her accident, knew her only from voyeuristically following her movements in the ballet studio across the way from his apartment. Benigno is also accused, eventually, of impregnating Alicia in her comatose state, and we are led to believe that he did rape her, albeit out of love and the belief that she has become his true spiritual partner through the care he has given her over the years. Despite this unnerving revelation, the protagonist, Marco, continues to believe in Benigno, visits him in jail, and arranges for his defense, and the audience continues to sympathize with Benigno. While Benigno eventually commits suicide in jail in the mistaken belief that Alicia has died in childbirth, and Lydia, the bullfighter, also dies, the real transformation in the film takes place in Marco and symbolically in Alicia herself. Alicia awakens from her coma, apparently through the trauma of childbirth (during which the child dies but she is resuscitated). Marco’s transformation is subtler; it is implied that Lydia did not do as well as Alicia partly because of Marco’s inability to care for her in the way that Benigno cared for Alicia: he did not talk to her (the injunction of the title) and only rarely even touched her.

Richard Kearney writes of carnal hermeneutics, arguing that even textual interpretation has an ineluctably carnal dimension. He writes that “to say that understanding is incarnate is to say that it answers to the life of suffering and action. Its application to human embodiment is its original and ultimate end. And here we return to its diagnostic role as a caring for lived existence—a listening to the pulse of suffering and solicitation between one human being and another.”⁷ On a more directly therapeutic level a group of physicians write in “Self-Care of Physicians Caring for Patients at the End of Life” of the practice of “exquisite empathy” among doctors caring for dying patients, naming touch as a way for the caregiver literally to remain connected to the patient and not to become drained or depleted by end-of-life care.⁸

In Talk to Her not only talking but also touching, in the form of holding hands, massaging, and putting lotion on the body of Alicia, all contribute to the “exquisite empathy”⁹ given to her by Benigno that eventually brings her back to life. Rhythm and touch share a close proximity to the body, to its repetitive processes that sustain life, and to its contours that abut the world. From her earliest work Kristeva has consistently been engaged with the interaction between body and meaning, between the semiotic and the symbolic. What art makes manifest is a more fundamental region, what Kristeva calls the last vestige of the sacred: the capacity for representation.

At the end of The Severed Head, Kristeva discusses modern art’s “belief in the body” or, rather, the belief, common to Rodin, Degas, and Cézanne, in “their own way of figuring the economy of bodies and being.” This conviction allows these artists to “abandon the spectacle, infiltrate the borders of appearances, and find there a kind of face that has not yet found its face, that never will, but that never stops seeking a thousand and one ways of seeing.”¹⁰

What would a face that has not yet found its face look like? This “inner face” requires a “transubstantiation” that in turn necessitates a “beheading,” a belief affirmed by Georges Bataille in his quest for inner experience. Bataille’s journal Acéphale (literally, “Headless”) articulated the attempt of its contributors to experience a kind of life that would sever the head of any sovereignty, whether religious, political, or academic. Bataille writes:

Man escaped his head like a prisoner escapes prison. Beyond himself he found, not God who is the prohibition of crime, but a being who does not know prohibition. Beyond what I am, I encounter a being who makes me laugh because he is headless, who fills me with anguish because he is made up of innocence and crime: he holds an iron weapon in his left hand, flames like a Sacred Heart in his right hand. In a single refinement he reunites Birth and Death. He is not a man. Neither is he a god. He is not me, but he is more than me: his belly is the maze in which he loses his way, loses me with him and in which I find myself again being him, that is to say, a monster.¹¹

For Kristeva, Acéphale “recalls the power of desires against which our capacity for representation stands firm.”¹² Referencing Bataille’s interest in human sacrifice as the ultimate inner experience, but also the very structure of human experience as sacrifice, and the idea that it is sacrifice that opens up onto the sacred, Kristeva suggests instead that it is the capacity for representation that allows access to the sacred, to whatever residue of it is left for us. Removing the head, she argues, allows for the only resurrection still possible for us today, that is, that of representation.¹³ “All vision is capital vision,” she writes at the very beginning of the catalogue for the exhibition. We need the “liberating utopia of ecstatic freedom” that this power of representation can offer us, particularly now, “in order not to die of virtual boredom before our computers, plugged into the true-false crashes of the stock markets: might we attain this not in the sacrifice represented by Acéphale, but … in the virtuosity, infinite and void, of representation itself, when it is devoted to envisioning the sacrifice that we inhabit?”¹⁴ Life is suffering, Kristeva acknowledges, but she also shows us that this suffering can promise and enable creativity: losing a head opens up the possibility of creating a head, whether it be through melancholic art, negative presentation, tarrying with the foreign, sublimating the drives that threaten to overwhelm us, or engaging with the other in a manner that avoids the master/slave struggle.

Hegel once wrote that “knowledge heals the wound that it itself is,”¹⁵ an admirably terse version of the Kristevan insight into spiritual inoculation, although the wound never completely heals in Kristeva’s and Benjamin’s version, and it is art and melancholic philosophy rather than knowledge that are the ingredients of the salve. Samuel Beckett writes in Worstward Ho, his late rumination on human existence and art: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” This may be the most powerful message we can gain from Kristeva’s reflections on art and philosophy in depressed times. It is not a matter of getting over the depression once and for all but of finding a way to live, write, create in and through it. Kristeva herself refers to Beckett in her piece on Louise Bourgeois. Discussing Bourgeois’s sculpture Topiary IV, a striking work in which a decapitated female figure sprouts a bejeweled tree from her neck, Kristeva calls it “the resurrection into paradise of Samuel Beckett’s Not I.”¹⁶ Not I is a dramatic monologue that takes place on a pitch-black stage, with a spotlight fixed on the mouth of the sole speaker, an aging woman, as she spews forth a logorrhea of tangled and fragmented sentences recounting a loveless, traumatized existence from birth to the present, a performance of depressed life, in which color, meaning, and passion have been drained from existence. She moves, in the monologue, from believing that her unhappiness is the result of a punishment from God, to an assumption of her own guilt for her existence, to the belief that if she continues to recount her life eventually she will stumble upon the necessary event or fault for which she can then seek forgiveness. At the same time the narrator continually insists that the event she describes never happened to her. Beckett traced the genesis of the piece to the image of the mouth of an old woman spectator in Caravaggio’s painting The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist,¹⁷ one watching a beheading transformed into one lamenting her own beheading.¹⁸

Bourgeois’s sculpture, which Kristeva links to the Beckett monologue, presents the female figure in a shapeless shift that could be a young girl’s dress or an old woman’s housecoat; she stands on only one leg, with a crutch propped under one tree-branch arm, clearly indicating a handicap that, to Kristeva, appears as the unabashed existential need for support. At the same time, the “head,” or what appears in place of it, is a flourishing and beautiful tree adorned with jewels, making no pretense of being natural or a simulacrum of a real head. Kristeva writes, in an uncharacteristically personal and lyrical way:

Of all beings on earth, after birds, I prefer trees. Flowers that have grown and grown; not content to defy beauty, they defy the storms of time. They seem to embody the best of what humans desire. Topiary IV is a tree-woman, the perfect anti-siren. Instead of exchanging the lower half of her body for a fish-tail dreaming of fresh water, the tree-woman knows that one day her legs will fail; she will need a crutch before dying. But she keeps the lower half of her body as it was; she even dresses it, with the satin dress of a young girl blossoming into puberty—and adds a proliferating head. Her sap has risen to the top and, defoliated though she now is, this tree-woman can seduce nonetheless through the tufts of jewels put forth from the tips of her branches. … The artist is man or woman—but certain women artists easily attain the psychic plasticity that transforms their ageing body into a blossoming tree. … The trunk and branches may be dry, but the thing proliferates nonetheless, ascends, ramifies, buds—not in juicy flavours, but in emerald jewels. The seduction of crystallization.¹⁹

The meaning and personal significance of this piece, for Kristeva, is clear. The figure, like Bourgeois, is a transplanted foreigner who has effected a rebirth into a new medium; bereft of her head, she nonetheless crafts for herself a new existence in which she is not immortalized but rather comes to terms with the specificities of her own finitude. Through her psychic plasticity she is able to ascend, ramify, bud; she has forged a head.