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

1. For a version of this story in children’s literature, see In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, retold by Alvin Schwartz (New York: Harper Collins, 1999). Some interesting historical facts have been linked by other commentators to this story and its enduring fascination. One explanation of its inception connects it to the fashion that arose during the French Revolution of dressing for so-called bals des victimes, fashionable balls to which entrance was accorded only to relatives of victims of the guillotine. Women would accessorize their outfits with thin red ribbons tied tightly around their necks, signifying the cut of the guillotine. This also, apparently, is the origin of the necklace called the “choker,” which became popular far beyond the borders of France. The fashion signifies sympathy with the victims of the Terror, as well as a kind of acknowledgment of human suffering and finitude generally. See Ronald Schechter, “Gothic Thermidor: The Bals des Victimes, the Fantastic, and the Production of Historical Knowledge in Post-Terror France,” Representations 61, Special Issue: Practices of Enlightenment (Winter 1998): 78–94. See also Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 122.

2. Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

3. Ibid., 6.

4. This argument will be developed in chapter 3.

5. Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 239.

6. Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 89.

7. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 5.

8. I will discuss this transition in the Oresteia at length in chapter 5.

9. When I use the term “symbolic order,” I am referring to Jacques Lacan’s term for the links of language and law that precede and constitute subjects and their connections to one another (intersubjectivity).

10. Hélene Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?,” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 42.

11. Lacan argues that all speaking subjects, masculine and feminine, are “castrated” by their entrance into the symbolic order.

12. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?,” 43.

13. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?,” 49.

14. Julia Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” Parallax 4, no. 3 (1998): 6. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 177–178.

15. Ibid., 6.

16. Ibid., 7.

17. Ibid., 6.

18. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

19. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007).

20. Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 139–140.

21. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994).

22. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), AK 316.

23. Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia University Press), 70.

24. Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” 7.

25. Ibid.

26. Julia Kristeva, “From Symbols to Flesh: The Polymorphous Destiny of Narration,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 81 (2000): 778.

27. Ibid.

28. Julia Kristeva, “The Paradise of the Mind,” interview with Rubén Gallo, in Paradiso/Inferno, catalogue for the photography exhibit curated by Alfredo Jaar (Stockholm: Riksutställningar, 2000).

29. Ibid., 1.

30. Kristeva, The Severed Head, vii.

31. I will examine Kristeva’s discussion of the iconoclastic tradition in religion and its relation to contemporary art in chapter 2.

32. Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” 8.

33. Julia Kristeva, interview by Nina Zivancevic, Paris, March–April 2001, found on Verve Fine Art Gallery Facebook page, May 20, 2011.

34. I will examine the history of the psychoanalytical concept of sublimation, including Kristeva’s unique version of it, in greater depth in chapter 4.

35. Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” 13.

36. Ibid., 12.

37. Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keefe (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002), 55.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 55–56.

40. Ibid., 57.

41. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1981), 14:237–258.

42. I will discuss this parallel in chapter 1.

43. Among them, Andrew Samuels, a psychoanalyst at the University of Essex, discusses events that are immediately relevant to the contemporary context of the twenty-first century. Samuels writes that “the West is stuck in a profound cultural depression caused in part by its own strength, just as depressive anxiety in an individual is fuelled by … fantasies of destroying someone or something.” Andrew Samuels, “War, Terrorism, Cultural Inequality and Psychotherapy,” http://www.andrewsamuels.com.

44. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989).

45. Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1986), 300.

46. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 193–194.

47. Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 103.

48. Ibid., 110–111.

49. Ibid., 109.

50. Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” 11.

51. I will consider Kristeva’s reading of Arendt and Kant in greater depth in chapter 3.

52. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

53. See Elaine Miller, “The Sublime Time of Art in Kant and Nietzsche,” Eidos (June 1997).

54. Julia Kristeva, “Louise Bourgeois: From Little Pea to Runaway Girl,” in Louise Bourgeois, ed. Frances Morris (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 12.

55. This theme of willfully remaining foreign will also be the subject of chapter 3.

56. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

57. Cited in Kristeva, “Louise Bourgeois,” 249.

58. Ibid.

59. Melancholia and its “treatment” through “poetic revolution” will be the theme of chapter 1.

60. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990).

61. See Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, 2:507–530 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). I will discuss Benjamin’s philosophy of photography in chapters 2 and 3.

62. Angelica Rauch, “Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of Trauma,” Diacritics 28, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 113.

63. Donald Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). See also Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.

64. I will discuss the phenomenon of the “countermemorial” in Germany in chapter 1.

65. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 31.

66. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literatur e, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 168.

67. This is, of course, a reference to Soren Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian dialectic in Fear and Trembling and Repetition. However, this parallel is not discussed further.

68. I use the Kantian term “aesthetic ideas” throughout to designate a singular image whose connotations proliferate and resonate with our capacity for cognition and conceptualization in general in a relation that Kant refers to as “spirit” (a term that would become incredibly important for German idealism after him) rather than denoting any particular determinative representation or concept. Kant writes that the aesthetic idea is a “presentation of the imagination which is conjoined with a given concept and is connected, when we use imagination in its freedom, with such a multiplicity of partial presentations that no expression that stands for a determinate concept can be found for it. Hence it is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 316.

1. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3.

2. Julia Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” Parallax 4, no. 3 (1998): 16.

3. Kristeva, Black Sun, 100.

4. I have been using melancholia and depression interchangeably, which Kristeva also does in Black Sun. However, we must necessarily conceptually separate the melancholia at the origin of language, imagination, and even thought from the disabling depression that affects so many today, even while recognizing that Kristeva addresses both structural melancholia and the psychic disorder.

5. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 7.

6. Ibid., 8.

7. Ibid., 9.

8. This phenomenon might be compared to what Benjamin calls habitual distracted perception in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its [Mechanical] Reproducibility,” second version, in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3:120.

9. Kristeva, Black Sun, 9.

10. Ibid., 5.

11. The idea of a depressive position as part of infantile development was put forward by Melanie Klein. The depressive position, which is posited to be reached at about the fourth month of life and overcome over the course of the first year, is conceived of as analogous to the clinical picture of depression. It is correlated with a series of developmental changes that affect the relationship between the ego and the object. At this stage the mother begins to be perceived as a whole, separate person; the relationship between the infant and the mother loses its exclusiveness; and the child begins to enter the early stages of the Oedipus complex. See J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 114–116.

12. Kristeva, Black Sun, 6.

13. Ibid.

14. I discuss this idea, based on Melanie Klein’s positing of a “depressive position” at the origin of language, at greater length in chapter 4.

15. Kristeva, Black Sun, 6.

16. Ibid., 7.

17. Ibid., 22.

18. Ibid., 97.

19. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25.

20. Ibid., 50.

21. Ibid., 13.

22. Ibid., 70.

23. Ibid., 70, 79.

24. In her conversation with the audience at the conference “Julia Kristeva: 1966–1996,” Kristeva stated that it is her preoccupation with language that distinguishes her theoretical consideration of melancholia from Freud’s. She writes, “In certain cases, the discourse of the melancholic is so impoverished that one wonders on what could one base an analysis. … The first task of the cure, therefore, is to reestablish the bond with language.” Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” 16.

25. Kristeva, Black Sun, 6.

26. Ibid., epigraphs.

27. Ibid., 100.

28. Ibid., 101.

29. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1981), 14:237.

30. See Kristeva, Black Sun, 9–10; see also Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 2–3.

31. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243.

32. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 251.

33. Ibid., 249.

34. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton, 1960), 24.

35. Ibid., 24.

36. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 1967), 142.

37. Ibid., 143.

38. Ibid., 149.

39. Ibid., 202.

40. See Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul. In an online interview, Kristeva also identifies the cultures of Eastern Europe as “stuck and depressed.” See the interview with Josefina Ayerza at http://www.lacan.com/perfume/kristeva.htm.

41. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 15.

42. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 139. I have changed the translation of the word Trauer from “mourning” to “melancholia” because it seems more appropriate in this context. Benjamin does not make the conceptual psychoanalytical distinction between melancholia and mourning in this work.

43. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation, War, and Death, ed. John Rickman (London: Hogarth, 1968), 2.

44. Ibid., 97.

45. Ibid.

46. Arguably, terrorism has provoked this kind of cultural trauma, most notably, perhaps, in the U.S. reaction to the events of 9/11. Where there is an acknowledgment of trauma, efforts are often made to mourn too quickly, but too-successful mourning can be as disabling as melancholia. Sometimes a traumatic event is left behind or memorialized in a triumphant fashion that betrays almost a complete absence of working through the trauma. Following the bombing of the World Trade Center, David Eng notes that “in [U.S.] attempts to repress any reckoning with the future, the mania of nationalism incited by the politics of state mourning reduce[d] the globe to an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ while producing a truly unprecedented New World Order of American sovereignty” that is paranoid in its intensity—you are either with us or against us. David Eng, “The Value of Silence,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 87.

47. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 174 (McMillan 1963 ed.).

48. Julia Kristeva, “Diversité, c’est ma dévise,” http://www.kristeva.fr/diversite.html. My translation.

49. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3:344.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Kristeva, Black Sun, 42.

53. Santner, Stranded Objects, 147.

54. Ibid., 7.

55. Theodor W. Adorno, A esthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 132.

56. Kristeva, “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” 14.

57. Ibid., 15.

58. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:96–97.

59. Ibid. See also Rebecca Comay, “The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and Fetishism,” in Walter Benjamin and History (New York: Continuum, 2006), 90.

60. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 159.

61. Ibid., 160; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 383–384.

62. Hegel, in Lectures on Aesthetics, uses this kind of language (perfect adequacy of form to content) to describe postsymbolic, or classical Greek, art, which he took to be the apotheosis of art. Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (160), uses Hegelian language to critique what he considers to be the typically romantic conception of both art and the subject. He writes that “its heart is lost in the beautiful soul,” a locution Hegel also used to criticize the romantics. See also Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 383–384. It is important to note that (1) Hegel does criticize romanticism, but for reasons that oppose Benjamin’s, just as (2) Hegel does critique symbolic art, but again, for reasons opposing Benjamin. For Hegel, symbolic art is art in which the form is not adequate to the content. Romantic art is art in which the content exceeds all possible form. Thus, for Hegel, neither symbolic art nor romantic art, for different reasons, insists on an indivisible unity of form and content.

63. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 160.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 161.

66. Ibid., 162.

67. Ibid., 165.

68. Ibid., 166.

69. Ibid., 183.

70. Ibid., 193.

71. Ibid., 224.

72. Ibid., 224.

73. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:164.

74. Ibid., 4:171.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 4:173.

77. Ibid., 4:174.

78. Ibid., 4:183.

79. Ibid., 4:186.

80. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 165–166. See all of his chapter 4 for a comprehensive reading of Benjamin on melancholia and modernity, in particular on the allegorical writing of Baudelaire.

81. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 209.

82. Rebecca Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot ,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 47.

83. Ibid., 45.

84. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 183.

85. Ibid., 193.

86. Ibid., 183–184.

87. Ibid., 184.

88. Ibid., 185.

89. Kristeva, Black Sun, 99.

90. Ibid., 100.

91. Ibid., 101.

92. Ibid., 102.

93. Ibid., 98.

94. Ibid., 99.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., 102.

97. Ibid., 65.

98. Ibid., 43. Cited in Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, “Kristeva, Levinas: Mourning, Ethics, and the Feminine,” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993), 72.

99. Ziarek, “Kristeva, Levinas,” 73.

100. Kristeva, Black Sun, 102.

101. Ibid., 103.

102. Ibid., 128, my emphasis.

103. Ibid., 129–130.

104. Ibid., 130. In analogy to the infantile depressive moment, presumably; here, the depressive moment involves separation from the divine.

105. Ibid.

106. Ibid., 132.

107. Ibid., 133.

108. Ibid., 131.

109. Ibid., 136.

110. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 476.

111. Kristeva, Black Sun, 136.

112. Ibid., 136–137.

113. Ibid., 137.

114. Ibid., 138.

115. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 265.

116. Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keefe (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002), 55.

117. Of course, Kristeva is not referring to the most pathological form of melancholia when she discusses melancholic artworks. Melancholia in its strongest form would be disabling and preclude the use of language or the creation of artworks, so there is a tension in the very name “melancholic artwork.”

118. Kristeva, Black Sun, 19.

119. I would like to acknowledge and thank Emily Zakin for her help in formulating this notion of re-erotization.

120. Kristeva, Black Sun, 19.

121. Ibid.

122. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1978.

123. Ziarek, “Mourning, Ethics, and the Feminine,” 73.

124. See chapter 2.

125. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 189–190.

126. Ibid., 166–167, my emphasis.

127. Ibid., 104.

128. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 176.

129. Julia Kristeva, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 367.

130. See Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 459.

131. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 60.

132. Kristeva, Black Sun, 100.

133. Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 10.

134. Ibid.

135. Ibid.

136. Ibid.

137. Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Artist, trans. Peter Wortsman (Hygiene, Colo.: Eridanos, 1987), 61.

138. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), 22.

139. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do (New York: Verso, 1991), 272.

140. Ibid., 273.

141. Ibid., 273.

142. The question quite naturally arises as to why no American artist has proposed—or at least been supported in an effort to construct—a countermonument to a comparable moment of the country’s shameful past, such as the institution of slavery or the mass killing of American Indians.

143. Bartomeu Mari, “The Art of the Intangible,” in Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 64.

144. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 93.

145. Rosalind Krauss, “X Marks the Spot,” in Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 77–78.

146. Rachel Whiteread, Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 33.

147. Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 60.

148. Ibid.

149. Ibid., 61.

150. Ibid., 59–60.

151. Ibid., 60.

1. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19. It should be acknowledged, as it is by Kristeva, that Hegel’s own philosophy does indicate a place for the unconscious, even if Hegel only begins the description of the trajectory of spirit with consciousness. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel’s discussion of the feeling soul as that part of the individual soul whose “determinations develop into no conscious and understandable content” articulates an unconscious realm that is the foundation and condition for the possibility of (individual) consciousness and (collective) spirit. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), §403f. Kristeva also refers to Hegel’s discussion of Denis Diderot’s nephew in The Phenomenology of Spirit. For more on this subject, see Jon Mills, The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2002).

2. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 169–170.

3. Christoph Menke refers to Adorno’s aesthetics as “aesthetic negativity” for its dual claim that (1) the relationship between art and nonart is negative because it conceives of art as a critique of nonaesthetic reality and (2) because it sees art as a place where the intensity of lived experience is increased vis-à-vis that of nonaesthetic reality. See Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 4. However, Menke sets these claims up only in order to refute them, calling them at the outset “misconceptions” because they do not, according to Menke, explain the concept of aesthetic autonomy. I will be arguing against this position, reading Adorno’s aesthetic negativity instead through his materialist reading of the ban on graven images. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2005), 207.

4. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1994), 23–24.

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1: 72.

6. Ibid., 1:70.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 1:175.

9. Ibid., 1:11.

10. Ibid., 1:421.

11. Ibid., 1:517.

12. Ibid., 1:252.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 1:255.

15. Ibid., 1:518.

16. Ibid.

17. Donald Kuspit, “The Will to Unintelligibility in Modern Art: Abstraction Reconsidered,” in Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 114–115.

18. Donald Kuspit, “Sincere Cynicism: The Decadence of the 1980s,” in Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 273–274.

19. Donald Kuspit, “Contemporary Iconoclasm,” in The Intellectual Conscience of Art, L & B, ed. Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 11:84–85.

20. Donald Kuspit, “Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis,” in Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 304.

21. The French psychoanalyst André Green, whose work has deeply influenced Kristeva’s own, refers to this transformative capacity of the negative in terms of Keats’s “negative capability,” a capacity described by Keats in a letter as a situation in which “a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817, quoted in André Green, “The Primordial Mind and the Work of the Negative,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 79 (1998): 657. The aim of analysis, according to Green, citing Wilfred R. Bion as the originator of this thought, is not to claim to reach anything beyond approximation (ibid.). To grasp too eagerly for readymade solutions is a symptom of psychic immaturity or dysfunction. Kristeva’s embrace of iconoclasm implies a similar judgment concerning some political positions.

22. Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11.

23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 204.

24. Ibid., 205.

25. Ibid., 204.

26. Ibid., 205.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 206.

29. Ibid., 207.

30. Theodor W. Adorno, A esthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 54.

31. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207.

32. Ibid., 205.

33. For a comprehensive account of Adorno’s appropriation and materialist transformation of the theological ban on images, see Elizabeth Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 3 (2002): 291–318. Adorno makes references to the ban on graven images throughout his work, including in “Reason and Revelation,” Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Minima Moralia.

34. Freud, “Negation,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 216.

35. Ibid., 213.

36. Jean Hyppolite, “A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung ,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), 749.

37. Freud, “Negation,” 216.

38. Ibid., 214–215.

39. Hyppolite, “A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung ,” 751.

40. Ibid. See also Freud, “Negation,” 215.

41. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69.

42. Ibid., 109.

43. Ibid., 113.

44. Ibid., 109.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 124.

47. Ibid., 69.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 155.

51. Ibid., 163.

52. Ibid., 118.

53. Ibid., 159.

54. Ibid., 163.

55. Ibid., 164. For the specifically political implications of Kristeva’s concept of negativity, see Coole, Negativity and Politics; and Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005).

56. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 123.

57. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 242.

58. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 57.

59. Ibid., 58.

60. Kristeva writes of defilement rites that they “effect an abreaction of the pre-sign impact, the semiotic impact of language” in ibid., 73.

61. Ibid., 58. Freud, too, calls the ban on images of the divine a “triumph of intellectuality over sensuality … an instinctual renunciation, with all the necessary consequences.” Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Origins of Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey et al. (New York: Penguin, 1990).

62. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 61.

63. Ibid., 104.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 105.

66. Ibid., 61.

67. Ibid. See also Freud, “Negation,” 215; and Hyppolite, “A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung ,” 751.

68. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 62.

69. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Vesta, or the Place of Being,” Representations 1 (February 1983): 91.

70. Ibid., 95.

71. “What distinguishes the poetic function from the fetishist mechanism is that it maintains a signification. … No text, no matter how ‘musicalized,’ is devoid of meaning or signification; on the contrary, musicalization pluralizes meanings.” Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 65. To claim that poetic language falls under the category of fetishism would be to say that the poet recognizes the castration of the mother (in language) but nonetheless cannot believe it; the mother’s missing penis would then be displaced onto nonsignifying language.

72. Again, we can recognize the appeal to the “negative capability” of Keats advocated as a healthy psychic attitude by Bion, Green, and, presumably, Kristeva. See note 21, above.

73. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 122.

74. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 38.

75. Ibid., 26.

76. Ibid., 27.

77. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 121.

78. Ibid.

79. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 202.

80. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

81. Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the (European) Subject, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2000), 153.

82. Kristeva also points to Hans Holbein’s position between iconoclasm and representation in Black Sun (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 124–125.

83. Ibid., 211.

84. Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 55.

85. This is a continuity that we might call Hegelian, and Kristeva does make this connection.

86. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 59.

87. Ibid., 58.

88. Ibid., 57–58.

89. Ibid., 59.

90. Ibid.

91. See chapter 3.

92. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, referred to in Kristeva, The Severed Head, 61.

93. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 62.

94. Ibid., 63.

95. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, cited in Kristeva, The Severed Head, 64.

96. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 64.

97. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 55.

98. Kristeva’s description here is very close to Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas. Kant writes that when we “use imagination in its freedom, with such a multiplicity of partial presentations that no expression that stands for a determinate concept can be found for it … it is a representation that … quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), AK 316.

99. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 56.

100. Ibid., 57.

101. Ibid., 58.

102. Ibid., 61.

103. Ibid.

104. Kristeva, Crisis of the (European) Subject, 154.

105. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 92.

106. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207.

107. For further reading on Benjamin and photography, see Diarmuid Costello, “Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 164–184; David Ferris, “The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce: Benjamin’s Attenuation of the Negative,” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 19–37; and Shierry Weber Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997).

108. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:518.

109. Ibid., 2:517.

110. Ibid., 2:518.

111. Ibid., 2:507.

112. Ibid., 2:508.

113. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” second version, in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3:104–105.

114. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 2:508.

115. Ibid., 2:510.

116. Ibid.

117. See Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:237–247, for more on this comparison. Here Benjamin also calls Proust the only writer to reveal correspondences in our everyday life (244).

118. Freud himself makes the connection between Nachträglichkeit and the photograph when he compares the unconscious to the photographic negative, which may be developed immediately, much later, or not at all, in Moses and Monotheism.

119. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510.

120. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 117.

121. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 511–512.

122. Ibid., 510.

123. “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions. Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 117.

124. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:722.

125. Roland Barthes, “Rhetorique de l’image ,” cited in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1984), 217–218.

126. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:696.

127. Ibid.

128. Rebecca Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot ,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 56.

129. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 325; J 54,2.

130. Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot ,” 49.

131. Ibid., 50–56.

132. In this sense we could align Kristeva’s notion of the image with Benjamin’s conception of the symbol in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kristeva’s icon with Benjamin’s conception of the allegory, in which there can be no ultimate reconciliation between visual being and spiritual meaning. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), esp. 159–160; Kristeva, Crisis of the (European) Subject, 153–154.

133. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 2:518.

134. Ibid.

135. Ibid., 2:519.

136. Ibid.

137. Ibid., 2:527.

138. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 105.

139. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 2:527.

140. Julia Kristeva, “Visible Language: Photography and Cinema,” in Language: The Unknown, trans. Anne M. Menke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 44.

141. Alfredo Jaar, Paradiso/Inferno catalogue for photography exhibit, curated by Alfredo Jaar (Stockholm: Riksutställningar, 2000), 1.

142. Kant, Critique of Judgment, AK 316.

143. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 8.

144. Shierry Weber Nicholson argues otherwise in “Adorno and Benjamin, Photography and the Aura,” in her Exact Imagination, Late Work. I will discuss her argument in the chapter on the uncanny. I agree that Adorno’s commentary on Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” and his essays on Kafka demonstrate that Adorno valued the metaphor of the photographic negative as a way of thinking about redemptive art. However, it is unclear that he would say the same of actual photographs.

145. Cited in Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 190. Thanks to Joann Martin for bringing this artist’s work to my attention.

146. Thanks to Sina Kramer for this formulation.

147. Lacan, Écrits, 258.

148. Ibid., 259.

149. The thought specular expresses the dual nature of critical film in that it both manifests the drives in images (fantasy) but also includes critical reflection in the form of the symbolic. See Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 68–80.

150. http://www.deflamenco.comon4/16/2012. As the website states, this article originally appeared in December 1969 in the Flamenco Information Society Letter 2, no. 12, and was edited for Deflamenco.

151. http://www.timenet.org/detail.html.

152. Cited in Marsha Kinder, “Pleasure,” in Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 37.

153. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 74.

154. Ibid., 75.

155. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Rhythmic Drum,” in Method. Cited in a note to “The Psychology of Art,” in The Psychology of Composition, ed. and trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988), 102n16.

156. It is interesting that ten years after the production of Talk to Her, the German director Wim Wenders, who created a documentary of Pina Bausch’s work, recounts that he, too, was brought to tears the first time he watched a performance of her work, to which he was unwillingly dragged by a friend. See http://entertainment.time.com/2011/12/29/wenders-pina-dance-crazy/#ixzz1rMOBTYbT.

157. Ibid.

158. Ibid.

159. Raimund Hoghe, “Für Pina Bausch,” in Detlef Erler, Pina Bausch: Fotografien von Detlef Erler (Zürich: Edition Stemmle, 1994), 12–13, my translation.

160. John Lechte, “Julia Kristeva and the Trajector of the Image,” in Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2009), 81.

161. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 78.

162. Ibid., 78.

163. Kristeva, Black Sun, 122.

164. Ibid., 125.

1. Note again the parallel structure Kristeva assumes between individual and state.

2. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

3. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, “The Uncanny Style of Kristeva’s Critique of Nationalism,” Postmodern Culture 5, no. 2 (January 1995).

4. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 67.

5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 59, Ak. 216.

6. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 103.

7. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 103–126.

8. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1981), 17:219.

9. Ibid., 17:220.

10. Ibid., 17:245.

11. Ibid., 17:241.

12. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 192.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 2.

15. Ibid., 3.

16. In his 2004 review of Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s book on Benjamin and Cohen, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen: Jüdische Werte, Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000). http://www.iaslonline.lmu.de/index.php?vorgang_id=2201.

17. Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 27.

18. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 133.

19. Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, 29.

20. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 4.

21. Ibid., 3.

22. Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, 28.

23. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 5.

24. Ibid., 9–10.

25. Ibid., 7.

26. Ibid., 10.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 133.

29. Ibid., 133–134.

30. Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 89.

31. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:607.

32. Hegel primarily has the German romantic writers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, who explicitly embraced irony, in mind here.

33. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 213–214.

34. Ibid., 212.

35. Ibid., 214.

36. Roland Barthes, preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 502; cited by Kristeva in ibid., 212.

37. Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense, 214.

38. As Kristeva writes, following Lacan: “language, constituted as symbolic through narcissistic, specular, imaginary investment, protects the body from the attack of drives by making it a place—the place of the signifier—in which the body can signify itself through positions; and if, therefore, language, in the service of the death drive, is a pocket of narcissism toward which this drive may be directed, then fantasies remind us, if we had ever forgotten, of the insistent presence of drive heterogeneity.” Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 49. See also Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), 301.

39. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 139.

40. Cited in ibid.

41. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 138, my emphasis.

42. Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, 35.

43. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 10.

44. Ibid., 147.

45. See, for example, Bonnie Honig’s critique in Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 62–67.

46. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 146.

47. Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 20.

48. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 43.

49. Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in The 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus, 1988), 214.

50. Marx’s notion of property revises the common, crude, or one-sided understanding of property as having, rather than Hegel’s conception of property. Hegel, too, distinguishes between mere possession and property in the Philosophy of Right, 42. For Hegel, “the fact that I make something my own as a result of my natural need, impulse, or caprice, is the particular interest satisfied by possession. But I as free will am … an actual will, and this is the aspect which constitutes the category of property, the true and right factor in possession” (ibid.). Hegel considers mental aptitudes, artistic skill, talents, and so on to be things that can be considered my property in the sense of propre, ownness. In addition, Hegel understands that property implies a social reality. However, at this stage of the philosophy of right (abstract right), consciousness is not yet aware of this reality.

51. Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” 214.

52. Ibid., 215.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 137.

56. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 181.

57. Ibid., 182.

58. Ibid., 183.

59. Julia Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,” in Desire in Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

60. Ibid., 210.

61. Ibid., 218.

62. Ibid., 220.

63. Ibid.

64. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 120, Ak. 261.

65. Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,” 221.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 222.

68. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–235.

69. Ibid., 249.

70. Ibid., 234.

71. Ibid., 252–254.

72. Ibid., 252.

73. Ibid., 253.

74. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 187.

75. “Wiesengrund Adorno to Benjamin, Berlin 17.12.1934,” in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 66.

76. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 462; N2a4.

77. Ibid., 465; N3,1.

78. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:807.

79. Ibid.

80. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462; N2a4.

81. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:315.

82. Ibid.

83. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3:33.

84. Ibid., 3:33–34.

85. For a much more in-depth discussion of the fairy tale motif in Benjamin, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989), esp. chap. 8.

86. Buck-Morss (ibid., 253) writes that Benjamin’s “theory is unique in its approach to modern society because it takes mass culture seriously not merely as the source of the phantasmagoria of false consciousness, but as the source of collective energy to overcome it.”

87. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 458; N1, 10.

88. Ibid., 470; N 7, 7.

89. Ibid., 470; N7, 6.

90. Ibid., 470; N 7,5.

91. Ibid., 470; N 7,2.

92. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:391.

93. Ibid.

94. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:498.

95. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” 2:810.

96. Ibid., 2:811.

97. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 244.

98. Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 66.

99. Shierry Weber Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997), 183.

100. Ibid., 187.

101. See David S. Ferris, “The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce: Benjamin’s Attenuation of the Negative,” in Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), 31.

102. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1984), 203.

103. Ibid.

104. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:510.

105. See Ferris, “The Shortness of History.”

106. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:405.

107. Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 67.

108. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967), 269. We could compare this locution to Adorno’s materialist inversion of the ban on graven images, which Comay describes as an “unholy marriage of theology and materialism.” Rebecca Comay, “Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot ,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 32–33. See also Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2005), 207. Adorno himself calls Kafka an upholder of such a ban.

109. Adorno, Prisms, 269.

110. Ibid.

111. Ibid., 253.

112. Ibid., 256.

113. Ibid., 253.

114. Ibid., 252.

115. Ibid.

116. Ibid., 253.

117. Ibid., 257.

118. Elizabeth Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 3 (2002): 309.

119. Adorno, Prisms, 264.

120. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Anniversary of His Death,” 2:810.

121. Ibid., 2:808.

122. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207.

123. Adorno consistently links the theological ban on images to the promise of immortality or the resurrection of the soul after death. In the materialist reinterpretation of this ban, what is assured is only the resuscitation of the bodily (see chapter 2).

124. Adorno, Prisms, 271.

125. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:210; my emphasis.

126. Ibid., 2:210.

127. Ibid., 2:208.

128. Ibid., 2:216.

129. Ibid., 2:218.

130. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 87.

131. Ibid., 89.

132. Ibid.

133. Ibid.

134. Ibid., 90.

135. Ibid., 88.

136. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, 1:31.

137. Helga Geyer-Ryan, “Effects of Abjection in the Texts of Walter Benjamin,” Modern Language Notes 107, no. 3 (1992): 499–520. Although this is a tempting distinction, I think it is too simplistic.

138. Ibid., 502.

139. Geyer-Ryan argues that Benjamin’s writing is also transgressive in this latter sense.

140. Kafka’s diary from February 2, 1922, cited in Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 107.

141. Franz Kafka, diary entry of January 31, 1922, in The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1883–1924, trans. Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1948–49), 217.

142. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 88.

143. Ibid.

144. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 134.

145. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §174.

146. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 134.

147. Ibid., 135.

148. Ibid., 136.

149. Ibid., 139.

150. These include taking as correct Arendt’s identification of critical taste in Kant with the physical sense of taste, and identifying plurality with sociability.

151. It should be noted that I take as established the influence of Kant’s third Critique on Hegel in G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1977).

152. Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 141.

153. Ibid., 183.

154. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 183.

155. Ibid., 187.

156. Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, 85–86.

157. Ibid., 105.

158. Ibid., 194–195.

159. Julia Kristeva, in her speech accepting the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, December 2006. http://www.kristeva.fr/Arendt_en.html.

160. Arendt, The Human Condition, 169.

161. Ibid.

162. Ibid., 173.

163. Kant gives an example of the mathematical sublime the consideration of the “Milky way system” in comparison with the earth, in Kant, Critique of Judgment, 256. Although this may seem very close to Adorno’s example, the latter focuses on the perspective of the Earth from space, that is, on a view of something close and familiar from a perspective that is radically out of the ordinary and that thus produces the feeling of the uncanny. Today, however, arguably the two experiences could be said to be commensurable.

164. Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, 64.

165. See Jason Alber, “Force of Nature: Artist Puts Petal to the Metal for Electrifying Images,” Wired 17, no. 7 (June 22, 2009). http://www.wired.com/culture/art/magazine/17-07/pl_art.

166. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/antoni/clip2.html.

167. Ibid.

168. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 243.

169. Ibid., 244.

170. Ibid.

171. Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 247.

172. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 241.

173. Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” 240.

1. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 168.

2. Ibid., 171.

3. Julia Kristeva, “From Symbols to Flesh: The Polymorphous Destiny of Narration,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 81 (2000): 771.

4. Ibid., 772.

5. Ibid., 773.

6. Ibid., 772.

7. Ibid., 775.

8. See chapter 2.

9. Kristeva, “Symbols to Flesh,” 775.

10. Ibid., quoting from her own “La fille au sanglot: du temps hystérique,” L’Infini 54 (Spring 1996): 27–47.

11. Kristeva, “Symbols to Flesh,” 772–773.

12. Ibid., 775.

13. Ibid., 774.

14. Ibid., 777.

15. Ibid., 773.

16. Ibid.; see also Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 144.

17. Kristeva, “Symbols to Flesh,” 774; see also Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 145.

18. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2005); see also Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:313–355.

19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962), 46n1.

20. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 133.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 194.

24. Ibid., 196.

25. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Selected Writings, 4:313–355 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 319.

26. Because Kristeva assumes the subject who is a stranger to herself, that is, the copresence of consciousness and the unconscious in the subject, her conception of Erlebnis actually avoids Benjamin’s concern and also contains this shock element.

27. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 316.

28. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 802.m2a4.

29. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 194.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 196.

33. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 37. In Tales of Love Kristeva is discussing metaphoricity in terms of identification with the imaginary father. Recall that this preoedipal father of individual prehistory is the guarantor of identity and the bridge by which the child succeeds in leaving behind its fusion with the mother and moving toward an identification with the formal paternal function associated with language and law.

34. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 194.

35. Ibid., 195–196.

36. Ibid., 198.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 329.

41. Ibid., 319.

42. Ibid., 321.

43. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 27–28.

44. Ibid., 29–30.

45. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 317.

46. Ibid.

47. Kristeva, “Symbols to Flesh,” 777.

48. Ibid., 777–778.

49. Ibid., 778.

50. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (abbreviated SE, with volume number), 24 vols., ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1981), 12:155.

51. Kristeva, “Symbols to Flesh,” 778.

52. Ibid.

53. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 182.

54. Ibid.

55. Kristeva, “Symbols to Flesh,” 781.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 782.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in Sigmund Freud 14: Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey et al. (New York: Penguin, 1985), 170.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., 225.

63. Ibid., 226.

64. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 22.

65. Freud, SE 9:187.

66. Freud, SE 11:54, my emphasis.

67. Freud, S E 12:119.

68. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Washington Square Press, 1960), 384–385.

69. Ibid., 385.

70. Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 57–58.

71. Ibid., 59.

72. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton, 1960), 45.

73. Ibid., 47.

74. Ibid., 56.

75. Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art, trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 161.

76. Freud, Ego and the Id, 37.

77. Kofman, Childhood, 161. Freud himself makes this point explicitly in The Ego and the Id (44) when he writes that “sublimated energy … would still retain the main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and binding—in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego.”

78. Kofman, Childhood, 111.

79. Ibid., 130.

80. Ibid., 128.

81. Ibid., 127.

82. Ibid., 118.

83. Ibid.; see also Freud, SE 15:99.

84. Kofman, Childhood, 130.

85. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 26; Kristeva, Tales of Love, 25.

86. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 26n; Kristeva, Tales of Love, 26.

87. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 27.

88. Ibid., 29.

89. Ibid., 30, my emphasis.

90. Ibid., 31.

91. Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 12.

92. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (London: International Psycho-Analytical Library, 1975), 61–62.

93. Ibid., 67; see also Freud, Ego and the Id, 24.

94. Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 75.

95. Ibid., 75; see also Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 43, where Kristeva specifies that this revival or retrieval takes place through language.

96. Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 73.

97. Ibid., 188.

98. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 44.

99. André Green, The Work of the Negative, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Press, 1999), 233.

100. Hannah Segal, “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics,” in The Work of Hannah Segal (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 206–207.

101. Ibid., 208.

102. Ibid., 219.

103. Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 77.

104. Green, Work of the Negative, 223; see also Freud, Ego and the Id, 25.

105. Green, Work of the Negative, 223.

106. Ibid., 219.

107. Ibid., 218.

108. Ibid., 222; see also J. Laplanche, Problématiques III (1980), cited in ibid., 111.

109. Green, Work of the Negative, 226.

110. Ibid., 216.

111. Ibid., 232.

112. Freud, “Da Vinci,” 172.

113. Ibid., 178–183.

114. Green, Work of the Negative, 233.

115. Ibid.

116. Ibid., 234.

117. Ibid.

118. Ibid., 235.

119. Ibid., 236.

120. Donald Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 95; cited in J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 465.

121. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 97.

122. Green, Work of the Negative, 238.

123. Ibid., 239.

124. Ibid., 240.

125. Ibid., 250.

126. Ibid., 251.

127. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis [Seminar VII], trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 107.

128. Lacan takes an initially Kantian perspective, for he perceives a proximity of his own concept of das Ding, as the “beyond-of-the-signified,” to Kant’s Ding-an-sich.

129. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54.

130. Ibid., 55. It is to this opposite Thing that Lacan compares Kant’s Thing-in-itself, and in both cases it will be the focal point according to which a moral action can be qualified.

131. Ibid., 112.

132. Ibid., 141.

133. Ibid.

134. Ibid., 161.

135. J. Laplanche, “To Situate Sublimation,” in Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, trans. Richard Miller, October 28 (1984): 23–24.

136. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 45.

137. Ibid., 45.

138. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 141.

139. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7–28.

140. Ibid., 243.

141. Ibid., 242.

142. Ibid., 243.

143. Ibid., 37.

144. Ibid.

145. Ibid.; see also Freud, Metapsychology, 59.

146. Bersani, Culture of Redemption, 37.

147. Ibid.

148. Ibid., 18.

149. Ibid., 37–38.

150. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002), 57–58.

151. Ibid., 54.

152. Ibid.

153. Ibid., 66.

154. Ibid., 64.

155. Ibid., 79.

156. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 54.

157. Freud, Ego and the Id, 26.

158. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 26.

159. Ibid.

160. Ibid., 45.

161. Ibid., 27.

162. Ibid., 40.

163. Ibid., 41.

164. Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense, 47.

165. Ibid., 59.

166. Ibid., 55.

167. Ibid., 56.

168. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 25.

169. Kristeva, Black Sun, 170–171.

170. Ibid., 172.

171. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 331.

172. Ibid.

173. Ibid.

174. Ibid., 319.

175. Ibid.

176. Ibid., 311.

177. Ibid., 308.

178. Ibid., 307.

179. Ibid., 319.

180. Ibid.

181. Ibid., 325.

1. See chapter 3.

2. See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 189.

3. Sigmund Freud, The Future of An Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 19.

4. Ibid., 20.

5. Ibid., 21.

6. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press), 1984.

7. Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 20.

8. G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 192.

9. Ibid., 196.

10. Ibid., 209.

11. Ibid., 215.

12. Ibid., 237.

13. Ibid., 266.

14. Ibid., 241.

15. Ibid., 258.

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 97.

17. Ibid., 98.

18. Ibid., 99.

19. Ibid., 101.

20. Ibid., 128. Translation altered.

21. See in particular Jay Bernstein, “Confession and Forgiveness: Hegel’s Poetics of Action,” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Shannon Hoff, “On Law, Transgression, and Forgiveness: Hegel and the Politics of Liberalism,” Philosophical Forum 42, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 187–210.

22. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 407.

23. Ibid., 408.

24. Kristeva writes in The Feminine and the Sacred, that Judaism is not unfamiliar with collective sin but that the Bible “metamorphoses it into election, that is, into the rite of love.” Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 96.

25. Sigmund Freud, “Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, November 25, 1928,” International Psychoanalytical Library 59 (1928): 125.

26. See Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space, 185–194.

27. Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 192.

28. Ibid.

29. Kristeva and Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred, 165.

30. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 228. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 160.

31. Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 14.

32. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 228.

33. Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 14.

34. Ibid., 15.

35. Melanie Klein, Love, Hate, and Reparation, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), 4. Klein describes love and hate as the fundamental tendencies that all humans have within them.

36. Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 194.

37. Ibid., 372.

38. Ibid., 371–372.

39. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 206.

40. See Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” trans. Michael Collins Hughes, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001).

41. Kristeva, Black Sun, 189.

42. Ibid., 170.

43. Ibid., 200.

44. Ibid., 190.

45. Ibid., 206.

46. Ibid., 195.

47. Ibid., 203. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 240n7.

48. Kristeva, Black Sun, 205.

49. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 326.

50. Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 193.

51. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 7.

52. Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 16.

53. Kristeva, Black Sun, 207. See also Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 20.

54. Kristeva, Black Sun, 207–208.

55. Ibid., 214.

56. Although Kristeva is referring here to Lacan’s “trinity” of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, she discusses it within the context of the Orthodox understanding of the Christian trinity as both unified and contradictory, that is, polyphonic. Kristeva attributes her notion of forgiveness to the Orthodox tradition, which deeply influenced Dostoevsky and in which she herself was steeped due to her Bulgarian upbringing. See ibid., 208–214.

57. Ibid., 217.

58. André Green, The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 70.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 70–71.

61. Ibid., 73.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 75.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 76.

66. Ibid., 77.

67. G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 104.

68. See Elaine P. Miller, “Tragedy, Natural Law, and Sexual Difference in Hegel,” in Bound by the City, ed. Denise McCoskey and Emily Zakin (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2010), 149–176.

69. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (London: International Psycho-Analytical Library, 1975), 29.

70. Gilbert Murray, cited in ibid., 29.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., 30.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 33.

77. Ibid., 34.

78. Ibid., 37–38.

79. Ibid., 38.

80. Ibid., 48.

81. Ibid.

82. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, lines 175–181, in Oresteia, trans. Peter Meineck (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1998).

83. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §177.

84. Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 51.

85. Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 133.

86. Ibid., 134.

87. Ibid., 135.

88. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 160.

89. Cited in ibid., 161.

90. Ibid., 161–162.

91. Green, Tragic Effect, 84.

92. Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense, 163.

93. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 77.

94. Ibid., 74.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid., 75.

100. Sergei Eisenstein, Complete Works, vol. 4:60, cited in Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 76.

101. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 76.

102. Ibid., 76.

103. Ibid., 74.

104. See ibid., 79.

105. Ibid., 80.

106. Aeschylus, “The Furies,” lines 184–188, in Oresteia.

107. George Devereux, Dreams in Greek Tragedy: An Ethno-Psycho-Analytical Study. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 160.

108. Aeschylus, “The Libation Bearers,” line 835, in Oresteia.

109. Ibid., line 1039.

110. Ellen Ullman, By Blood (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2012), 3.

111. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music” (draft), in Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 7:277. My translation.

112. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Dionysian Worldview,” in Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 1:557. My translation.

113. Ibid., 555. In other words, the Dionysian cannot be understood as a “reality” that lies “behind” the dream as appearance. Rather, the Dionysian implies a radicalization of individuation. Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer, even before he writes The Birth of Tragedy, for positing a dualistic structure of being in which the greater “reality” (the will) can only be described in opposition to what is accessible, namely representation.

114. Ibid. The same formulation is found in “The Birth of Tragic Thought,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 1:583.

115. The “acephalous” or “headless” subject is described by Žižek as the “properly political subject,” one who loses her “head” in order to “assume the position of the object.” This transforms the subject from one who acts intentionally or calculates a position in order to bring about the future she desires into rather a Möbius topology where the subject encounters the objective dimension and identifies with the excess of the situation, a genuinely revolutionary position. Although the terminology of the “acephalous” subject obviously resonates with Kristeva’s consideration of decapitation and recapitation, it is outside the bounds of this project to engage with it further. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 76.

116. Molly Ann Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010), 186.

117. Molly Ann Rothenberg, “Picturing the Past: Aestheticization in the Treatment of Trauma in a Chinese Analysand,” 13, paper presented at the conference After the Unthinkable: Trauma, Nachträglichkeit, and Coming to Terms, Boston College, 2012.

118. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 7:192.

119. For more on the existential and even cosmic rhythm of life with respect to Nietzsche’s work see Amittai F. Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), esp. chapter 8, “Meaning, Form, and the Nietzschean Sublime.” Aviram ties Nietzsche’s discussion of rhythm to the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva. For more on the ambiguity of the human condition, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 1948).

120. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 11.

121. Ibid., 12.

122. Ibid., 17.

123. Ibid.

124. “Consults: Experts on the Front Line of Medicine,” New York Times blog (February 27, 2012).

125. Francine Shapiro, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (New York: Guilford, 2001), 71.

126. See, for example, Thom Hartman, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well Being (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street, 2006).

127. Shapiro, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, xi.

128. Ibid.

129. I have also discussed this kind of transformation of repetition with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s work in “Saving Time: Temporality, Recurrence, and Transcendence in Beauvoir’s Nietzschean Cycles,” in Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler, ed. Shannon Mussett and William Wilkerson (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2012).

1. Benedict Carey, “Where Have All the Neurotics Gone?” New York Times (April 1, 2012).

2. See chapter 1.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), 137.

4. Ibid., 138.

5. Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 54.

6. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

7. Richard Kearney, “What Is Diacritical Hermeneutics?” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (2011): 9.

8. Michael Kearney et al., “Self-Care of Physicians Caring for Patients at the End of Life: ‘Being Connected … A Key to My Survival.’” Journal of the American Medical Association 301, no. 11 (2009): 1161.

9. “Exquisite empathy” is a term coined by trauma therapists, defined as “highly present, sensitively attuned, well-boundaried, heartfelt empathic engagement” carried out by the caregiver, care that allows him or her to be “invigorated rather than depleted by their intimate professional connections with traumatized clients” and thereby protected against “compassion fatigue and burnout.” See ibid., 1162.

10. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 127.

11. Georges Bataille, “Le labyrinthe,” Acéphale 1 (January 24, 1936). Cited in ibid., 128–129.

12. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 129.

13. Ibid., 130.

14. Ibid.

15. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1998), 106.

16. Julia Kristeva, “Louise Bourgeois: From Little Pea to Runaway Girl,” in Louise Bourgeois, ed. Frances Morris (Rizzoli, 2008), 251.

17. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 622.

18. The murder victim of Kristeva’s own novel Possessions seems likely also based on Beckett’s character, given her garrulous nature and her beheading. Kristeva also refers to Beckett’s play when discussing the “Not I” of the metaphorical positing of the imaginary father in Tales of Love, 41.

19. Kristeva, “Louise Bourgeois,” 251–252.