-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Kristeva (b. 1941) is known for mixing psychoanalysis, literary criticism and philosophy. In this essay, she explores depression, melancholy and mourning, starting from one of its most exaggerated manifestation. Seeing pain as "the hidden side of [her] philosophy", she investigates it through language and aesthetics. In doing so, Kristeva uncover its meaning by relying heavily on the symbolic dimensions, demonstrating how depression destabilizes language itself. With a particular focus on the feminine experience of sadness, she discusses romantic relationships and maternity, using Freud, Klein and Lacan alongside empirical observations from her psychoanalytic practice. The main thesis locates the origin of true depression in the separation from the mother, where she finds the "lost Thing" which causes melancholy without a precise loss, leading to a ruin of identity itself through an impossible mourning. Engaging with Holbein, Nerval, Dostoevsky and Duras, a large part of Kristeva's book is dedicated to a quest for the sublimation of such emotions into works of art. Deliberately fragmented and linked with poststructuralism, Black Sun is a a personal account of how subjective emotions are tied with signs and the possibility of meaning. Part of a psychoanalytic, feminist reading of feminism, Kristeva has been accused of essentialism.
Comment: Black Sun is especially useful to expose the links between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Kristeva's most well-known work, it serves as an introduction to both the author herself and to the philosophical and literary currents she is part of. Her distinct, lyrical style makes it a challenging books which remains engaging.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Lizzy VenthamAbstract: This paper defends a desire-based understanding of pleasurable and unpleasant experiences. More specifically, the thesis is that what makes an experience pleasant/unpleasant is the subject having a certain kind of desire about that experience. I begin by introducing the 'Desire Account' in more detail, and then go on to explain and refute a prominent set of contemporary counter-examples, based on subjects who might have 'Reflective Blindness', looking particularly at the example of subjects with depression. I aim to make the Desire Account more persuasive, but also to clear up more widespread misunderstandings about depression in metaethics. For example, mistakes that are made by conflating two of depression's most prominent symptoms: depressed mood and anhedonia.Comment: Argues in favour of a 'desire account' of pleasurable and unpleasant experiences. Looks in particular at cases of depression and aims to clear up wider misunderstandings about depression in metaethics.
-
Expand entry
-
Abstract:
According to the desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied, and your life goes badly to the extent that your desires are frustrated. Some have objected to this theory by arguing that there are some cases of depression in which the person is negative in well-being even though they altogether lack desires. In this paper, I give a solution to this problem. I first argue that the problem arises only in cases of affectless depression in which the person has no affective experiences, and that once we realize this, the force of the objection is weakened. I then argue that, even in cases of affectless depression, depressed people plausibly have dispositional desires—ones defined by dispositions to act or feel in certain ways—that are masked by their depression, and that the frustration of these masked desires is bad for them.Comment: This paper distinguishes paradigmatic case of depression from other cases and discusses its implications for understanding desires of depressed individuals. It also discusses the different conceptions of desire, which can be used to analyse the wellbeing of depressed individuals devoid of all affective states.