From "Black Sun" Kristeva

"Thought: Crisis: Melancholia" p. 6

"for the speaking being life is a meaningful life, life is even the apogee of meaning. hence if the meaning

of life is lost, life can easily be lost; when meaning shatters, life no longer matters. in his doubtful moments the melancholic is a philosopher, and we owe to Heraclitus, Socrates, and most recently Kierkegaard for disturbing pages on meaning or lack of meaning.

the Problemata - (pseudo) Aristotle - the melancholic is the exceptional person

froth - Aphrodite and Dionysius - melancholic's person disease is instead his nature, or ethos.

With aristotle, melancholia, counterbalanced by genius, is coextensive with man's anxiety in Being. could be seen as the forerunner of Heideggers Stimmung of thought.

Schelling - essence of human being - affinity with nature - mealncholy from a "surfeit of humanity"

perception of melancholy as exceptionality that reveals the true nature of being undergoes transformation in Middle Ages.

(seems paradoxcial to me)

middle ages Christian theology considered sadness a sin (dante - wrteched - lost good of intellect - despairing

nonetheless monks promoted sadness as mystical ascesis (acedia) became essential as a means towards paradoxcial knowledge of divine truth and constituted the major touchstone of faith.

Changing in accordance wtih teh religious climate, melancholy asserted itself - periods that witness downfall of political and religious idols are particularly favorable to black moods.

melancohly "does assert itself in times of crisis - spoken of, establishes its archeology, generates its representations and knowledge.

"A written melancholia surely has little in common with the institutionalized stuipor that bears its name."

Beyond the confusion in terminology which I have kept alive til now (what is melancholia? what is depression?)

Melancholia/Depression
"I shall call melancholia the institutional symptomatology of inhibition and asymbolia that becomes established now and then or chronically in a person, alternating more often than not with the so-called manic phase of exaltation. When the two phenomena, despondency and exhiliration, are of lesser intensity and frequency, it is then possible to speak of neurotic depression.

(impossible mourning for the maternal object).

p. 11. Acc. to classic psychoanalytic theory (abraham, Freud and melanie klein) depression, like mourning, conceals an aggressiveness towards the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning.

"I love that object" (seems to say) "but even more so I hate it; because I love it; and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in myself ; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad, I am non-existent, I shall kill myself."

Complaint against oneself would therefore be a complaint against another, and putting oneself to death would be a tragic disguise for massacring the other.

Such logic presupposes, as one can imagine, a stern superego and a whole complex dialectic of idealization and valorization of self and other, the aggregate of these activities being based on the mechanism of identification.

For my identi

For my idneitification with the loved-hated other, through incoroporation- introjection-projection, leads me to imbed in myself its sublime component, which becomes my necessary, tyrannical judge, as well as its subject component, which demeans me and of which I desire to rid myself. Consequently, the analysis of depression involves bringing to the fore the realizatio nthat hte complaint against oneself is a hatred for the other, which is without doubt the substratum of an unsuspected sexual desire. Clearly such an advent of hatred within transference entails risks for the analysand as well as the analyst, adn the therapy of depression (even the one called neurotic) verges on schizoid fragmentation.

Melancohly cannibalism, which was emphasized by Freud and Abraham and appears in many dreams and fantasies of depressed persons (see ch. 3) accouts for this passion for holding within the mouth (but vagina and anus also lend themselves to this control) the intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as to better possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested.. than lost. The mealncoly cannibalsitic imagination is a repudiation of th eloss's reality and of death as well. It manifests the anguish of losing the other through the survival of self, surely a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it and becomes transformed into the self - which also resuscitates - through such a devouring.

Nevertheless, the treatment of narcissistic individuals has led modern analysts to understand a nother form of depression. Far from being a hidden attack on an other who is thought to be hostile because he is frustrating, sadness would point to a primitive self - wouded, incomplete, empty. Persons thus affected do not consider themselves wronged but afflicted with a fundamental flaw, a congenital deficiency. Their sorrow doesn't conceal the guilt or the sin felt because of having secretly plotted revenge on the ambivalent object. Their sadness wold be rather the most archaic expression of an ynsymbolizable, unnameable narcissistic wound, so precocious that no outside agent (subject or agent) can be used as referent. For such narcissistic depressed persons, sadness is reall y the sole object: more precisely it is a substitute object they become attached to, an object they tame nad cheirsh for lack of another. In such a case, suicide is not a disguised act of war but a merging with sadness and, beyond it, with that impossible love, never reached, always elsewhere, such a st he promises of nothingness, of death.

Thing and Object

Depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing. Let me posit the "Thing" as the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and reuplsion, seat of hte sexuality from which te object of desire will become separated.

Just read to p. 14 - but very interesting...