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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.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
1989, translated by L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
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