Love and death by any other name (on love and melancholia) John Lehte p. 63 ch. 3
Kristeva's position onl ove unique - she compares with depression: depressed person cannot love for he/she has a reduced emotional investment in most of the symbolic forms - including language - which are so much a part of an everyday coception of love. but then it could be wondered whthr pssbl to say "what love is" - isn't it just which - almost by def., escapes the analytical gaze? not even mystical or myst or unknowable - but not easily represented. Love is the enactment of love chez Kristeva - has no position exterior to it - no a p
riori relation - no pre-existing model or set of conditions to which reality does or does not measure up - a web with no position exterior (inseparable from its enactment). Such an existential approach differs radically from how it was perceived in the 18th century with its subsequent emergence as being closely linked to individuality and identity - Rousseau - love is "in the heart" - already a relati for hte lovers before they express themselves on the subject - before hte neact it, and certainly ebfore they "make love (Rousseau 1964) - Krist., folloiwing in Pascal who said to doubter "kneel down, move your lips, and you will believe" emphasizes the fact that love is its enactment.
thus attributes great importance to the notion of the enonciation and to the formation of subjectivity connected to this.
in analyzing "shifter" (an element of language which only has meaning in its enactment, or in context), Emile Benviste points out (1971: 217-22 that indices of time and place, together with pronouns, take on meaning only in the act of being stated. "I", "you" this that now here there yesterday, today, etc. can't be understood in themselves or abstractly, but only in the context in which they are used. The shifter is, in effect, a fundmanetlaly existential phenomenon. Implied indeed in idea of "enactment" - which entails several components.
3 aspects of love
1. the love story: the myth, tale, fantasy and narrative structure the couple's interaction and give the tone to their relationship. (e.g. often about obstacles endured, then overcome, as it is also about ideas of beauty and desirability. Or about unrequited love and the misery that one experiences until it dawns on the other that, in reality, love can, after all be reciprocated.
2. Separation acts as a stimulant to the sentiments of romantic love (e.g. Rousseau or Goet). Here the obstacle seems to be unconsciously willed (e.g. heritage of Courtly love) so the void created can be filled by symbolic forms (poetry, song).
3. singularity (individulaity) of the modern love relationship is now seen as a mechanism forcing society's social relations to adjust and thus to become more complex. This also entails, for Kristeva, an enriching of symbolic and imaginary cpaacities. Niklas Luhmann's point (86: 18-33; 48-57) is echoed in the writer's view (Maurice Blanchot) who says that lovers constitute their own, singular community (Blanchot 1988). They thereby exclude the third element (the father?).
The last point is particularly important for understanding some of Krist's approach, and so worth looking briefly at Niklas Luhmann's argument on the modernist practice of love.
Luhman:
hist. approach
1st focuses on 18th century, where love the embodiment of an "open system" ie.e faced with the indivudalty and difference of hte lovers who are out to create their own rules, society is forced to develop new, more subtle codes of love, and human relations generally (Krist. refers in teh beginning of Tales of Love 1987) to love as an open system, where each individual goes through a transformation of th pscyhe in light of hte contact with another person (= difference). L suggests a complexifcation of the code of love - which even this suggests L is something that presupposes the separation of the lovers. And this the big dif. betw. the contemporary expereience of love nad love in the past - for today, love, intimacy and familiarty go together. There is no need for an expression of love when love is instead acted out.
L argues "passion" becomes a synonym for complx cmmnctn during enlightenment, and that love, initially, is a deviatio nfrom social convention (certainly one from aristocrt. family's explicit effort to ensure propriety of marraige alliances) - so when lovers (rousseau era) are driven outside social norm in their passion (a pasion which brooks no rule or convention) paradoxcially perhaps a codification of amour passion does eventually emerge. In effect, what cannot, initially be dealt with by existing social practices and the rules, eventually becomes codified in its turn thus rednering hte social domain more complex and subtle.
GREAT THIS IS A SUBTLE ANALYSIS OF HTE WAY POWER IS STRUCTURED - INTERESTING - POWER AND PLEASURE - rethinking this pleausre giving power - too broad but I know what I mean
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For her part, K. takes up this point in relation to the indivdual psyche, and points to the enrichment brough tby a restructuring of psychic space. complexity - both hist. and individual - gives rise to a strengthened and enriched human experience. Another outcome of this evidently odernist process, which has been taken up in a post modern context, is self-refereentiality: each lover takes account of how his/her own speech will appear to the other. This is the reflexive moment of love.
For Luhmann (whose approach, we sugest has relevance for undersatnding K) love is open to failure becuase of the complexity of hte communication required. There is a movement from a stratified (tradition of aristocracy) to a functional mode of differentiation
(now p. 66) (modern democracy). Idealization gives way to temporalization.
L then, sees love as self-referential. To the extent that lovers are changed - having their psches rendered more complex - love, for K, is also self-referential.
Now the issue, as L says (1986:48) centres on teh way that individual uniqueness and difference become part of the social fabric, whereas, previously, it was thought that individual difference might be a threat to the social fabric. Love enters the picture precisely here, and love and friendship become languages of individuation and even of singularity.
Julia Kristeva's love story.
The "love story" is love as the expression of love and as symbol based on separation. This conforms to K's psychoanalytic approach. But, for her, this is not the only kind of love there is. There is also love as identiifcaito nand fusion. K's work alerts us to this (1987b: 23-49). Such an identiifcation can take place through the exchange of words themselves: "in fact, the object of psychanalysis is nothing other than an EXCHANGE OF WORDS (K 1987a:1, trans. modified). This gives rise to both psychic and physical modification. Here, in th analytic session, we are talking about "words becoing flesh" that is, words having a drive, or bodily aspect. Or to use K's temrinology, words are semiotic (drive based) as much as symbolic (see above, ch. 1)
We see then that love in Christianity is agift (something that is non-reciprocal, a disequuilibrilium). IN this, and in other religious contexts, love becomes an identiification and a fusing with the other. This is the "semiotic" aspect of love, it may be compared to the symbolic aspect, which presupposes separation.
Love inspired by religous fervour retain sthe element of fusion (=identification). A public example of fusion - as opposed to separation - in love might be in teh outpouring of emotion oafte rhte death of Princess Di. ALthough there can be identificaiton in symbolic love (the love in the love story) it takes second place to the "narrative" or expressive side of love. In the love story, the expression of love becomes almost equivalent to love itself.
p. 67
With the semiotic version of love, the expression gives way to identiifcation. Identiifcation is particularly strong in certain, non-Western cultures. THese are often cultures fo the mask (British Columbia, Alaska, New Guinea) where assuming the mask of the god turns one into the god. In sohrt, there is fusion. In the same sense, we can speak abotu the psychoanalytic notion of transferential love, where the analysand identifies with the analyst. The situation is one where at least one of the parties involved is anything but indifferent to the reality of the other.
K., like L., speaks, as we have seen, about love as an "open system" when one person encounters another in love, that person will be affected by the encoutner. This leads to a restabilization of the psyche at a "higher" level. The experience can be one of renewal, or rebirth (K 1987b: 15). This restructring does not take place entirely under the auspices of the ego, or of consciousness; for the ego and consciousness are both part of the process of psychic transformation that love entails. There is no overarching entity managing th ewhole process, only a "subject-in-process/on trial," as this apt phrase, already discussed, from K's early work puts it.
As K also says, love is a "flight of metaphors - it is literature" (1987b:1). Love is a series of rebirths, of separations. K, like Barthes (1984) and Eco (1984( takes up the issue of how love can be expressed in today's sceptical world, where the old moral code shave either disappeared, or been transformed.
Love is seen as essentially imaginary, and is at play in teh psychoanlytic session. Therefore, if imaginary capacities falter, so will the capacity to love. Today (in postmodernity) our author says, we ar ein crisis b/c love discourse has become so imporverished. We are "drwoning in a cascade of false images (K 1987b: 375) in what for K will become the society of the spectacle (see below ch. 5). Such "drwoning" however can lead to a "resurrection" - to a kind of renewal of faith in the power of language.
More than this, when prompoted to speak about spychanalyiss and faith, K says quite categorically that the main principle of therapy is to enable the anlysand to love again (K1987a:5) to have the capacity to be in love, a capacity stifled by a wounded narcissism. (p. 68)Language, as the vehicle through which contact is made with the other (with the mother, in teh first place) is always ambivalent: it is amark of distance and separation just as it is also the only means left for the human - riven by an original melancholy - to find solace once more, but this time in words. For an analyst such as Kristeva, the word is also the vehicle of affect, not just a vehicle of linguistic signification (the arbitrary reltaion of signifier to signified in Saussure's theory of the sign).
In placing the accent on love as an enactment - as an enonciation - rather than on love as having already emerged in a prior feeling, the subject and object of love can become confused. MEtaphor here becomes a "transporation of meaning" - or an enactment of meaning. Such is K's argument in key passages on metaphor in Tales of Love. The enactment of love entails what K calls the "de-ontologisation" of love. FOr, unlike being in ontology, love, to repeat, doesn't exist prior to its enactment. This notion of love, we can say in passing, also evokes the Surrealist experience of "made love (Breton 1978)
In K's disc. of Aristotle, the issue of resemblance arises in Greek philosophy and this evokes the question of metaphor. If resemblance is the image of the thing compared to its model, an ontology is presupposed
LEFT OFF P. 68
metaphor signifies the enactment of things (open def. of aristotel which can be exploited)
K endeavors to develop in her commentary...
Really did leave off - there's Lacan and Hegel - and there's music p. 73 - which is the language of love, and so the language of immediacy - but not in the linguistic sense - unanalysable quality an index of the immedicacy of its effect - we are always "in" music - part of our very being - semiotic field par excellence - has no object nor can easily be turned into an object. instead one is already in a musical field
p. 74
through rhtyhm (cf. the baby in its cradle) or song. And as the ultimate poetic gesture, music comes together w love is inseparable from love, specifically, from love as the core of being (MISSED STUFF ON BEING TOO)
w/ baudelaire's notion fo love as fusion, perfume, synaethesia, and finally as analogy
(WHY DOES THIS REMIND ME OF HTE PRESOCRATICS???)
p. 74 - Collete (K's 2002 study of Collete) Study of Arendt's life and oeuvre (K 2001) looks at notion of love in particular in Arendt's study of St. Augustine who is seen to open the way to love as action, a theme followed up by Duns Scotus in his theory of hecceity (singularity) which Arendt takes up in the context of the "who"-subject of action (as opposed to the "what" of the oject). Arendt's notion of love also features the love of the other as an outsider (singularite quelconque) of the community. The study of Melanie Klein (K 2002b) i nits turn, looks at love as the mediating force between parent (particularly the mother) and child, most of all in teh context of childhood depresison. In effect, love as seen in both Arendt and Melanie Klein, ahs a largely mediating, if not instrumental status.
75 - Collete - writing "to write is to reinvent love" (K 2002c: 325) implies no fixed model of loved that cannot be changed -r ather emreges as it is written - ie. articulated in the field of signification (...) modes of sexualit as inscribed in love are not libertarian, even less pornographic - despite Colette's reputation to he ocntrary but constitute an "amoras wandering" (vagabondage amoureux) On the whole even though women historically have largely ivented the woreds of love, not til the 20th century that women came to express their eroticism (very dif. from the pornographic) despite the hard edge the media currently gives to sex. (..)
The cristallisation of love is inspearable from a rhetorical revelation.
Even though there's mourning for the love object, this doesn't plunge Colette or her heroines into melancholia. Indeed, the possibility of infusing pasison into words depends on avoiding hte fall into melancholia. Colette dif. from many women here - who are often susceptible to depression - the point of androgeny (2002c: 357)
John Lechte
REACHED VIEWING LIMIT SO WENT EARLIER -
on p. 49 - interesting - "narcissitic, drive-animated pre-object-orientation" (1987b). That a drive can be pre-object - and this is narcissitic..... interesting....
MORE ON KRISTEVA
Julia Kristeva
Ch. 4 - on melancholy
Lost object mentioned here too - p. 60 speaks of "prevailing model of depression devleoped by pioneering psychoanalysit, Melanie Klein (188201960) the lost object is not an actual person but an 'internal object". The subject feels both love nad hate toward this object, love b/c he cannot do without it and hate b/c he has been undermined by its loss. The sbjct reproaches himself - may consider suicide as a way of killing the hated object within (if to go into psychan., might learn the true target of his hostility - internalized loss of something outside hismelf. In classical account, depression is a mourning for a lost internal object, moruning characterized by amb. and host.)
But would htis fit the young young woman in the story (lost mother before separation between subject and object?) Not for K. Calssical story accounts for AFTER The break - not for those who have lost their primary love while still in teh chora (stage)
narcissitic wound
in this case suicide not a disguised act of war but merging with sadness - pormises of nothingness, death
as opposed to "objectal depression" K calls this "narcissistic" - instead of hostile, feels flawed, incomplete, wounded, etc.
p. 62 - In Soleil noir K uses "now obsolete term" mealncholia to refer to narc. depres. which she sugests is closer to psychosis than neurosis. (But to the extent that the melancholic has any hold on the symbolic - and most melancholics do, even if they refuse to use it - he or she is not psychotic. See K. 1989a: 47).
This would mean that a melancholic is not the best candidate for psychoanalayis (OKAY INTERESTING - see definitions for psychosis and neurosis at the beignning of this chapter). Objectal depression could be understood as a neurosis, b/c the loss occurs, in Klein's view, after the child has weaned and, thus, probably post-Oedipally, after the hcild has learned language and of course the subject-object distinction (such would be a better candidate for psychoanalysis). Still the standard treatment for all forms of depression today is medical, wehther by antidepresant medicaitn or minerals such as lithium. K asks whether literary production might be an alternative "treatment" for depresison, depression of both forms. B/c both forms of depr. impair the subject's willingness and ability to speak, and b/c K is focusing on a signifying practcie as a counter-depressant," K doesn't worry too much about hte technical differenes betwe. dif. forms of depression - uses terms melancholia nad depression almost interchangeably.)
Drawing on lacanian notion of the real (p. 62 appears to be different)
"real is impossible described, but also the ineliminable residue that resists articulation. IT is there, but it is ineffable. The depressede narcissist feels this real, this Thing, bearing down upon her. Of this Nerval (the poet Gerard de Nerval 1808-1855) provides a dazzling metaphor that sugests an insistence without presence, a light without representation: the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at hte smae time. "It is a well known fact htat one never sees the sun in a dream, although one is often aware of some far brighter light" ibid (K citing N)
p. 65
Sadness gives the depressive a unity, but not enought to protect against hte death drive already at work in the narcisstic structure. To the extent that she has repudieated the realm of signs, the melancholic also repudiates the sign she wears around her neck, her affect of sadness. No sign has any meaning for her and so she has little defense against hte death drive.
K calls sadness "the fundamental mood of depression" (ibid 210 a kind of sign or representation - not a verbal one, but one inscribed by one's whole demeanor (VERY VERY VERY INTERESTING) As is the case with all moods or affects (incl. anguish, fear and joy) sadness signals to any observer that some kind of energy displacement, stimulation, conflict or transfer has occurred within the subject. Mood is a 'generalized transference' that stamps the ENTIRE behaivor and all the sign systems (from motor functions to speech production and idealization) without either identifying with them or disorganizing them.
Someone's oeverall affect indicates a mood, which itself indicates semiotic processes at work within the subject: left off taking notes p. 65-66
66 - mood archaic form of significance
react to traumas w/ a variety of moods
"On the frontier between animality and symbol formation, moods, and particulary sadness - are the ultimate reactions to our traumas, they are our basic homeostatic recourses"
Some ppl show their frailty in the extent to which they are always drwoned in their sorrows.
Other show their creativity and indomitableness in a "diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorrow or mourning." These creative melancholics ar eth eones who take part in "that adventure of the body and signs that bears withness to the affect TO SADNESS AS IMPRINT OF SEPARATION AND BEGINNING OF THE SYMBOL'S SWAY" IBID - THESE ARE THE NOVELISTS, POETS AND ARTISTS, WHO HAVE BEEN MOVED TO CREATE BY THE =BLACK SUN OF MELANCHOLIA.
Journeying into the Realm of Signs.
Why would a melancholic, no matter how creative, take part in an adventure of signs when, acc to K, being mealncholic means REPUDIATING the realm of signs? Isn't hte melancholic (depressed narcis.) so wrapped up in her own sadness that she does not find any point in using signs? Is not the problem of melancholia the unwilingness to substitute signsf or the lost Thing? K needs a way to explain how the depressed artist would reach teh realm of signs
she does this by using more of Frued's theory. She says that someone might be able to reconcile the loss of the Thing through "primary identification" with the "father in individual prehistory" (K 1989)
As Lechte explains: The father in individ. prehist. emerges prior to the formation of an object which will accompany the emergence ofhte subject in language: thus prior to any ideal, but nonetheless the basis of all idealization, esp. in love. The father of individual prehist. which K also clals the Imargianry Father is the basis for the formation of a successfull narcis. structure - one that enables the symbolizatin of loss, and the formation of desire (1990)
Recall (this author's) def. of narc. in ch. 2 - for K, the narc. structure allows the child - presymbolically, to start incorporating and mimicking what is other to itself, thus paving the way for the infant to become a subj. in a signifying order. iN the imaginary realm, while the child is beginning to lose o "engate" its mother, it also begins to incorporate or identify with an imaginary father, a phantasm of the logic of iddentifying one thing with another. IF the sturcture works successfully, the child will complete its separation from its mother while at the same time learning to use words to name what he has lost - which will allow him to ccall out to her when he needs her. If this process is not successful, the child will be caught in limbo betw. loss and identification. "Ovid's Narc. before his pool is precisely not example of the narc. psych. structure" that Lechte and K are describing, "for the youth beside the pool is forzen" before he can desire an object outside himself and confirm his subjectivity (WHY DOES THIS REMIND ME OF HEGEL???) "narc' death is the sign of the failure of psychic space to form due to the failure of a snese of loss to form" (ibid).
Thus can see more clearly waht melancholic needs to do in order to tirumph over sadness - complete separation from enigmatic Thing and begin to identify w the image of the logic of identification, the Imaginary Father . "Prima. indent. initiates a comphesnation fo the Thing and at the same time secures the subj. to another dimension - that of imaginary adherence, reminding on eof th ebond of faith, which is just what disintegrates in the depressed person (K) - (...) give sthe subject some FAITH That one thing could opossibly stand in for aonther, tha tthe sound-=image mother could connect in any fashion with the signified meaning of mother. It gives the subj. reason to believ that there will be any comfort in teh realm of signs.
NERVAL (devoted a whole chapter of Black Sun - his life - melancholic.
Poor Nerval.
p. 73.
Solid quote "Even the soundest among us know just hte same that a firm identity remains a fiction." To the extent that anyone is a subject in process and on trial, literary creation, the sublimation of death-dealing desire into art, is a life-enhancing experience.
Summary: Mel. and depres. are conditions in which the speaking being loses or turns away from the realm of signs. By being brought back to a narc. realm of images and lost Things rather than a realm of objects and signs, the depressed person has s oduble challenge: to compolete the process of losing object sthat it might desire, so that it can begin the process of substitution and identification. LIterary creation offers a way for the melancholic to proceed, to try to turn his or her sadness and sorrow into a symbolic object, to hsare again in thecommunity of other speaking beings.
p. 75 - Herethia - for somone commolny known as one of hte major three "French feminisits" K has surprisingly little to say about feminism - sometimes quite derogatoory - calling some kinds "the last of the power-seeking ideologies" - Oliver explains discrepancy - different meaning of "fem" in America (more diverse) and French (political group)
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murder in byzantium
murder in byzantium
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GENDER TROUBLE by J Butler
p. 102 of Gender trouble: fem and subv of identity - j. butler. p. 102 "despite her critique of lacan, k's strategy of subversion proves doubtful (appears to depend on stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal law that she seeks to displace). Although effectively exposes the limits of Lacan's efforts to universalize the paternal law in language, she nevertheless concedes that the semiotic is invariably subordinate to the Symbolic, that it assumes its specificity within the terms of a hierarchy immune to challenge. If the semiotic promotes the possibility of hte subversion, displacement, or disruption of the paternal law, what meanings can those terms have if the Symbolic always reasserts its hegemony?
Criticsm of K:
a) 1st unclear whether primary relationship to the maternal body which both K and Lacan appear to accept is a viable construct and whether it is even a knowable experience acc. to either of their linguistic theories. The multiple drives that characterize the semiotic constitue a prediscursive libidinal economy which occaisonally makes itself known in lanuage, but which maintains an ontological status prior to language itself. manifest in language, in poetic language in particular, this prediscursive libindal economy becomes a locus of cultural subversion. A second problem emerges when K argues that this libidinal source of subversion cannot be maintaine diwthin the terms fo culture, that its sustained presence within culture leads to psychosis and to the breakdown of cultural life itself. K thus alternately posits and denies the semiotic as an emancipatory ideal. Though she tells us that it is a dimension of language regularly represed, she also concedes that i t is a kind of language which never can be consistently maintained.
(INTERESTING PARALLELS FOR SORROW HERE - BUT I AM TRYING TO MAKE IT THE POSSIBILITY OF A VIRTUE - ALWYAS THE PASSION THERE - BUT PASSION NOT ONLY AS THE SUBJECT MATTER OF VIRTUE BUT AS ITS DEPLOYMENT AND UNITY WITH IT)
In order to assess her seemingly self-defating theory, we need to ask how this libidinal multiplicity becomes manifest in language, and what conditions its temporray lifesapn there? Moreover, K desccribes the maternal body as bearing a set o fmeaings that are prior to culture itself. She thereby safeguards the notion of culture as a paternal structure and delimits maternity as an essentiallly precultural reality. Her naturalistic descriptionsof the maternal body effectively reify motherhood and preclude an analysis of its cultural construction and variability. In asking whether a prediscursive libidinal multiplicity is possible, we will also consider whether what K claims to discover in the prediscursive maternal body is itself a production of a given historical discourse, an EFFECT of culture rather than its secret and primary cause.
Even if we accept K's theory of primary drives, it is unclear that hte subversive effects of such drives can serve, via the semiotic, as anything more than a temporary and futile disruption fo the hegemony of the paternal law. I will try to show how the failure of her political strategy follows in part from her largely uncritical appropriation of drive theory. Moreover, upon careful scrutiny of her descriptions of the semiotic function within language, it appears that K reinstates the paternal law at hte level of the semiotic itself. IN the end, it seems that K offers us a strategy of subversion that can never become a sustained political practice. In the final part of this section, I will suggest a way to reconceptulaize the relation between drives, langauge and patriarchal prerogative which might serve a more effective strategy of subversion.
K''s description fo the semiotic proceeds through a # of problematic steps. She assume sthat drives have aims prior to their emergence into language, that language invariably represses or sublimsates these drives,a dn that such drives are manifest only in those linguistic experssions which disoeby, as it were, the univcoal requirements of signification within the Symbolic domain. Claims further that the emergence of multiplicitous drives into language is evident in the semiotic, that domain of linguistic meaning distinct fro teh Symbolic, whic is the maternal body manifest in poetic speech. (...) K argues for a necessar cuasal relation between the heterogenity of drives and the plurivocal possibilities of poetic language. Differing from Lacan, she maintains that poetic language is not predicated upon a repression of primary direvs. On teh contrary, poetic language, she claims, is the linguistic occasion on which drives break apart the usual, univcoal terms of language and reveal an irrepressible hetereogeneity of multiple sounds and meanings. K thereby contests Sacan's equation of the SYmbolic with all linguistic meaning by asserting that poetic language has its own modality of meaning which does not conform to the requirements of univocal designation. (...) K accepts the assumption that culture is equivalent ot he Symbolic, that hte Symbolic is fully subsumed unde rthe "Law of hte Father" and that the only modes of nonpsychotic activity are those which aprticipate in the Symbolic to some extent. Her strategic task, then, is neither to replace the SYmbolic with the semiotic nor to estbalish the semiotic as a rival cultural possibility, but rather to validate those experiences iwthin the Symbolic that permit a manifestation
(109 now)
of the borders which divide the Symbolic from the semiotic.
(..) poetic production coneived as the site in which the split betw. instinct and representation exists in culturally communicable form: the speaker reaches this limit, this requisiste of sociality, only by virtue of a particular, discursive practcie called "art". A woman also attains it (and in our society, especially) through the strange form of split symbolization (threshold of language and instinctual drive, of the "symbolic" and the "semiotic") of which the act of giving birth consists."
hence for K poetry and maternity represent privileged practices within paternally sanctioned culture which permit a nonpsychotic experience of that heterogeneity and dependency characteristic of the maternal terrain.
1 comment:
This would read so much better if you checked it (or got someone else to check it) for spelling mistakes.
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