42725573 Kristeva s Soleil Noir and Post Modernity

Kristeva's "Soleil noir" and Postmodernity Author(s): John Lechte Source: Cultural Critique, No. 18 (Spring, 1991), pp. 97-121 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354096 Accessed: 15/11/2010 13:40Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity

John Lechte

Henceforth, the difficulty in naming no longer leads to "music in letters" . . but to illogicality and silence.

-Julia Kristeva,Soleilnoir

T

he Kristevan critique of postmodernity sees literature as

the level of style-a minimal, colorless having become-at where death is the same as life and opposites generally writing, slide into one another with complete indifference. The Durassian oeuvre is the prototype of such writing where madness emerges completely rationally, and meaning and feelings coalesce in trivia and profundity "without tragedy or enthusiasm" "in the frigid insignificance of a psychic torpor-the minimal, but also the ultimate sign of grief and ravishment" (Kristeva, Soleil noir 236).1 Here, the "eros" of poetic language-the "music in letters," as our epigraph says-has evaporated and given way to "a whiteness of meaning" (264). Does this Kristevan assessment truly capture something fundamental in the West's postmodern fin de siecle? This question serves as the focus of the reflection in the following pages. But rather than giving an answer to it, I intend to begin sketching out the dynamics of the issues surrounding it.? 1991 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Spring 1991). All rights reserved.

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As well as Kristeva's Soleil noir, I shall refer in particular to Lyotard's Le Differend, since Lyotard has made a point of saying that this book contains the "philosophical" basis of The Postmodern Condition.2To be briefly considered, too, is Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum, largely analyzed in his book Simulacreset simulation. By selecting a text from Lyotard and Baudrillard respectively, I intend to illustrate, in a fairly detailed way, precisely those aspects which might constitute a threat to the subject's capacity for idealization. To illustrate with subtlety is my aim; thus I do not claim to have plumbed all the depths of either Lyotard's or Baudrillard's oeuvre. The works I discuss are indicative to my mind of a certain tendency in the Western cultural experience. They do not entirely capture that experience, but point to a problematic within which it may be studied and analyzed. This experience I shall call "postmodern." In light of it, I suggest that Kristeva's recent work signals an impending crisis of the symbolic due to the continuing disappearance of all forms of transcendence from Western cultural life and from art in particular. Loss of transcendence, we shall see, entails the evacuation of affect from language and signs. It is this affective dimension which Kristeva equates with the belief that there is something beyond signs-beyond the symbolic. Strangely, perhaps, this belief in the beyond turns out to be the poetic, material aspect of languagethat aspect so well analyzed by Kristeva under the term "semiotic" (Revolution 21-106). This gradual disappearance of affect from signs is what the writing of Marguerite Duras would signal in Kristeva's hands. With the total diminishment of affect, the very possibility of language (and therefore writing) is put into question. Minimal as it might be, then, the fact of this writing is a sign that a sense of loss and sadness may still be put into signs and that depression may be overcome. Loss of transcendence means, however, that it is impossible to reinvent faith and the grand ideal; our innocence is gone, and we must come to terms with this. Absolute nihilism, on the other hand, is not desirable or feasible either. New symbolic forms are required which may actually derive from our general melancholia. But this is to leap ahead. First of all, we need to be clear about Kristeva's point of departure: the psychoanalytic conception of melancholy.


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MelancholyIn Kristeva's Soleil noir, melancholia is a living death. Eros has become detached from words, from language-from life. Melancholia is cold, on the side of the death drive and tending toward complete passivity, mourning, and loss. For the individual so afflicted, melancholia (or its milder form, depression) is a way of barely clinging to the symbolic and confronting the unnameable before the onset of complete psychosis. The loss of words, of taste, of motivation functions to form an intense despair-the basis of the mourning already mentioned. This is the other face of narcissism where despair is meaning. Love as a union with an external object in the symbolic has no place in the melancholic's universe. Rather, the melancholic has entirely internalized one who is barely an identifiable other: the mother. If love is a mark of separation and an antidote to despair, melancholia is the failure of a loving self to emerge-the failure of separation. Hence, Kristeva relates how one of her analysands, Helene, bars the symbolization of separation, so that her mother remains always "inside" her (Soleil noir 88). The language of melancholia is monotonous and repetitive in both its meaning and its rhythm and melody. It is, Kristeva indicates, a "frugal musicality" "sinking into the whiteness of asymbolia" (45). What of the past? The melancholic does not symbolize it, but "lives" it nostalgically as a failed symbolization or representation. The melancholic is thus caught in a kind of time warp. He/she wants time as such back again and not-as in Proust-the place, or more specifically, the objects, which represent and signify it. Once again, the object only appears here-if at all-in absentia. Nevertheless, with emotions separated from symbolic constructions in the melancholic universe, with all "chagrin" and emotion secretly always "inside," "brilliant abstract constructions" also characterize the melancholic's intellectual capabilities. The intellectual associates, sees connections-thinks laterally, for the in part, left to one side. "obstacle" of emotion is, Most of all, then, melancholy is a denial of the separation denial of the "matricide" which, says from the mother-a "is our vital necessity" (Soleil noir 38). It amounts to a Kristeva, failure of the inscription of affect in the symbolic. This denial is

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crucial because it contains another: the denial of the denegationof language. Language makes it possible for me to represent an object outside myself; it enables me to symbolize the loss of my mother, that is, my separation from her. She, for me, is my first (potentially erotic) object. Immobilized in the condition of suffering without being able to speak it, the melancholic only encounters an ersatz of an object-what Kristeva calls the melancholic Thing (Soleil noir 22-25). The Thing is equivalent to the unnameable and as such is unrepresentable. For those who "successfully" realize this separation, language arises to enable them to symbolize the sense of loss and suffering which ensues. Thus language, becoming more than a pure transparency, paradoxically brings each subject back to the mother once again, putting each individual in "touch" with the world. This is to say that: I know words are only words, but at the same time I believe that these same words are a true link with objects-this is the denegation. Kristeva describes it as follows: Signs are arbitrarybecause language begins with a denegation of (Verneinung) loss, at the same time as a depression occasioned by mourning. "I have lost an indispensable object which happens to be, in the last instance, my mother," the speaking being seems to say. "Butno, I have found her again in signs, or rather because I accept to lose her, I have not lost her (here is the denegation), can get her back in language." I(Soleil noir 55)3

To the extent that the loss of the mother as the original object is confirmed by the very existence of the symbolic function of language, speaking the loss only confirms the real impossibility of ever overcoming it. At a cultural level, the West endlessly translates the original object into signs. For language is only language. On the other hand, symbolizing it compensates for loss in that it is the basis of a separate identity and thus the recognition of the reality of separation. Language, then, is not simply language. To be a subject in the fullest sense is the intended outcome of this denegation, and this means, psychologically, to be able to come to terms with it rather than to deny it. Melancholia in its fullest sense is, for Kristeva, then, a denial of this denegation at the heart of Western subjectivity. Put more provocatively, melancholia is the


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failure to have faith in language and is an absence of the signs of transcendence. And it may well be that the critique of Western metaphysics has unwittingly contributed to the emergence of a melancholic disposition in Western society-a disposition generated in part by a spectacular oscillation between belief in the origin and language and the notion of language as nothing but simulation-the essence of simulacra, or the semblant,as described by Baudrillard.4 There, the simulacrum is its own truth independent of the real. And we shall return to this. Within the context of denegation, Kristeva introduces her discussion of melancholy and art. Beauty, as the basis of sublimation, comes to take the place of the lost object. Sublimation produces an idealization which is in touch with the primary process, the seat of drive activity. The ideal is beauty as consubstantial with ephemeral significations and signifiers. Only death lasts forever. As a predominantly symbolic substitute for the lost object, ephemeral beauty resists death. But it does so by enabling a kind of experience of death. This is why beauty is so often associated with the sadness provoked by the sense of beauty's transient nature. And, fundamentally, Kristeva shows that beauty is-as ephemeral-a joy in signs. Signs bring the object back-but of course, only fleetingly-as an intense, ephemeral flash. In this sense, Kristeva's analysis evokes the idea that life as such is a temporary overcoming of death: this can be its meaning, the source of its beauty and its potential for overcoming melancholy. Allegory, too, comes to assume an important place in this economy of denegation. For it is the tension between the "depression/depreciation" of significations and "their exultation (Venus becomes the allegory of Christian love)" (Soleil noir 114). Even more: allegory is the working of the imagination as it produces figurative language from white, banal words. The imagination as allegory is a victory over melancholia, and in this sense it is potentially a means to a resurrection in signs. In other words, to reach heaven, we must travel hell, as Joyce would say.5 Hans Holbein's The Corpseof Christin the Tomb (1521) is, in Kristeva's hands, illustrative of artistic work founded on a suffering (melancholy) overcome, a melancholy which constitutes a symbolic resurrection: that is, a resurrection of the subject in the symbolic.6 However we understand these things, one point deriving from Kristeva's work here is worthy of empha-

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sis: to allow imaginary capacities to atrophy, and thus to evacuate beauty from art, to become entirely indifferent to the ideal and to lose faith in signs-to allow this, is to encourage the withering of social bonds and the impoverishment of language. Is this what characterizes postmodern experience? It is in this light that I now come to examine the structure of Lyotard's argument in Le Differend.

Le DifferendThe issue I raise at the outset is whether Le Differend ultimately contributes to a certain postmodern nihilism because it of denies the dene'gation language. For Lyotard argues that there is a regime of phrases, "there is no nonphrase." Or rather, only perhaps the question is whether there is a denial of the denegation illustrated in Le Differend, which would lead to the breakdown of language. Of course, even if this were the case, it is also true that Lyotard forces us to confront issues concerning politics and language which can no longer be avoided if undesirable aspects of postmodernity are to be avoided: an increase, for example, in violence and hate, and a general atrophying of symbolic and imaginary capacities. Art and love, on the other hand, Kristeva has shown, expand imaginary and symbolic capacities, thereby making the "self" a "work in progress."7 What then is the differend?Rather than define it, let us first refer to some of Lyotard's illustrations of its consequences. Consider the famous case of Faurisson's denial-for want of evidence, he claimed-of the existence of Nazi gas chambers.8 Briefly, he argues that: (1) he can find no one who has actually seen a gas chamber with his/her own eyes, and (2) that no one exists who has actually seen the gas chamber kill with his/her own eyes. As Lyotard writes: "The only admissible proof that it killed is that one is dead" (16). Because only a victim can be a witness, the conditions of Faurisson's proof cannot be met-a victim cannot also be a witness. For Lyotard, the victim here is deprived of the means of argument, and we thus have a differend:"I would like to call differendthe case where the litigant is deprived of the means to argue and because of this becomes a victim" (24). For Lyotard, it is


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not so much that the existence of the gas chambers is denied in such an argument, but that an adversary (victim) cannot prove her/his existence within an existing set of rules governing the form of argument and the production of proof. To lack this proof, or to be deprived of the means of proof, is equivalent, in Lyotard's argument, to the meeting between two potentially heterogeneous regimes of phrases. Or, to put it another way: the differend emerges when no phrases exist for expressing an injury in a current idiom. This inability is what reduces the victim to silence and makes him/her the subject of an injustice. "Feeling" is the only possible "response" to this silence-the truly unique feeling that does not arise from experience, but exists in relation to the sign which suggests that something cannot be put into phrases. This feeling is what accompanies the profound silence that is the sign of an injustice, of a differend. When the historian, dominated by the descriptive, quantitative-i.e., for Lyotard, of phrases, says that a vast amount of testi"cognitive"-mode mony does exist to "prove" the scale of the extermination of Jews and the existence of the gas chambers, Lyotard replies that such a researcher masks the true enormity of the crimes because he/she fails to recognize the enormity of the amount of testimony which, like the victims of the gas chambers themselves, has been destroyed. In effect, the purely "cognitive" historian cannot duly acknowledge the possibility of a plethora of unknown meanings equivalent to the silence at the heart of the differend. As Lyotard forcefully writes: All reality includes this exigency to the extent that it includes unknown possible meanings. Auschwitz is the most real of realities in this regard. Its name marks the border where historical knowledge sees its competence challenged. It does not follow that one enters into nonmeaning. The alternativeis not: either the signification establishedby science, or absurdity, mysticism included.... (92) Here, the "facts" established by (descriptive) science should serve to remind us that we have barely revealed the tip of the iceberg, that the victims as yet have no public voice and that therefore we are dealing with a differend.

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"To have seen the gas chamber operating with their own eyes," so that only a dead witness is a credible one-such is the "double-bind" structure of Faurisson's argument. In another illustration, Lyotard speaks of the editor who asks for an example of a title of a work of major importance which would have remained unknown if it had been rejected by all publishers. If it were unknown, we would not have heard of it; if, however, we have heard of such a title, how do we know that it is a work of major importance, since it has not been made public? It is thus a matter of opinion as to whether it is a work of major importance, and we lose the argument due to the impossibility of producing persuasive evidence. As is known,9 the point of Lyotard's illustrations is to demonstrate that empirical evidence that seems to be immediately convincing (of the type: "I saw it with my own eyes") is founded on a set of procedures: its shape is not automatically determined by (a given) reality. When the latter is assumed, however, the procedures of empirical evidence can be subverted so that they produce perverted (cf. Faurisson) conclusions. The perversion derives from accepting the notion that evidence is transparent-a mirror onto an absolute reality. Within this framework, it is assumed that evidence exists because reality exists-as in the correspondence theory of truth. And as reality-an eventcannot both be and not be, no evidence could produce such a result. By following the very notion of empirical evidence as the bearer of reality as such, a double bind is produced. Consequently, empirical rigor is shown to be founded on the following structure of argument: either p or not-p, if p, then not-p (Differend 19). The perversion is thus implicit in the structure of the empirical method itself. It is not simply a question of someone of bad faith invoking this method in a distorted or incorrect way. This is, perhaps, Lyotard's most telling thesis, the one some might see as the nihilist and distinguishing feature of postmodern thought. No formal strictures exist, Lyotard says, for establishing the reality of a general idea. Even in physics, no protocol can be found "for establishing the reality of the universe, because the universe is the object of an idea" (18). That is, a general ideafreedom, society, proletariat, reason, law, humanity, reality, etc.cannot, within this framework, be the object of empirical, descriptive, "cognitive" knowledge. The effort to try to make it so is the


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mark of totalitarian thought. Most importantly, then, reality in general (as totality) cannot be the object of knowledge. On the contrary, cognitive phrases have the function of establishing the reality of their referent within the limits of the rules constituting the establishment of proof. As regards the gas chambers, for example, "The proof of the reality of the gas chambers cannot be produced if the rules for producing proof are not respected. These rules determine the universe of cognitive phrases, that is, they assign a certain function to the agencies: referent, addresser, addressee and meaning" (34). Descriptive,cognitive,prescriptive,evaluative, interrogative-such are the designations of different regimes of phrases, to the extent that it is possible to glean any explanation of what a phrase regime is from Lyotard's text. Indeed, Lyotard views the philosopher's task as being one of specifying, differentiating, classifying, categorizing, etc.; he seems to lose the relevance of this when he attempts to grasp the force of the key terms of his own text. The irony is, perhaps, that some terms have a tendency to flow into one another-for example, cognition, description, knowledge, all relate to quantitative knowledge and the empirical-which proof of the existence of the referent (object) of a cognitive phrase. Whatever a phrase regime is, though, "no phrase can be validated inside its own regime" (52). Validation as such is a genre of discourse. And every genre of discourse (which, as well as the genres of the cognitive and validation, also includes those of pedagogy, dialogue, tragedy, technique, etc.-in fact all the genres of classical rhetoric) can inspire a way of linking phrases from different regimes. The differend can arise between phrase regimes and between genres of discourse. That the differend exists between phrase regimes signals two fundamental elements in Lyotard's Le Differend (and thus in the discourse of postmodernity) that require analysis and discussion in order to determine whether, as Julia Kristeva's work on melancholia implies, aspects of our postmodern times may have some dangerous consequences.

PostmodernityWith regard to postmodern experience, two aspects are of particular concern: (1) the status of language (the phrase), and (2)

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the status of the notion of totality (general idea). In its simplest terms, Lyotard's work develops a philosophy of the phrase in order, as we have seen, to counteract the totalitarian aspect of thought based on the notion that a totality-an absolute of some kind-can be given an empirical form. The phrase would be the particularity which would counteract the repressive nature of the totality. (The perception that totality is essentially totalitarian and repressive is what leads Lyotard to be very suspicious of Hegel.) The norm, identity, ideal, etc., when forced into an empirical, thus risk becoming the basis of podescriptive-objective-form, and psychological oppression. The phrase which litical, social, evokes the differendand the totality which suppresses it go a long way toward capturing the two sides of the postmodern equation in Lyotard's work. Phrase regimes counteract totalization, because they are the basis of the differend: they are irreducible one to the other; no category, concept, or framework exists which would subsume them all-perhaps not even the category of "difference." In effect, no common principle of judgment exists (at least not one that has retained credibility) across the boundaries of the various phrase regimes. And this has provoked the criticism stating that, for instance, every cultural artifact is of equal worth: "a pair of boots is worth all of Shakespeare," as Finkielkraut writes (135 et seq., esp. 138). As a result, Finkielkraut fears that a de facto, implicit, general category of eclecticism will come into operation in the absence of any explicit general principle ofjudgment. Although Lyotard might reply that the differend is precisely what counters the eclecticism stemming from a perverted form of the postmodern in art as in other domains, the "color" of the times seems to be against him.10 At some point, I suggest, he must acknowledge that there is a kind of whole, but not the empirical, quantitative whole of totalitarian thought; rather, it might be the "whole" pertaining to the theory of the infinite in mathematics-a whole in actu-where the part is equivalent to the whole within which it is included. 1I Lyotard's various explicit and implicit references to Russell's paradox12-for example, in the notion that "the totality cannot be shown"-make reference to the infinite perfectly appropriate in reading Le Differend (93). For Lyotard, the philosopher's task is to show the consequence of the problematic nature of the relation between the part and the whole-


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illustrated, for instance, in the notion that a statement about language is also part of language: there is no element of language (e.g., the sign) which can be designated as the embodiment of language as such. But even if we accept the validity of this argument for the moment, there remains the question of Lyotard's notion of a phrase. What precisely is a phrase in Lyotard's philosophy of the differend?

The PhraseTwo observations regarding the phrase can serve to ground our analysis here. First, we should note that the scope of what counts as a phrase is extremely broad. Thus, silence is a phrase; so too is the interjection aie! (and other interjections like "whoops"); a shrug of the shoulders is a phrase, as well as a statement like "it is hot." Second, the linking of phrases has no beginning (there is no original phrase) and no end (one is always obliged to phraser); the linking (enchainement)of phrases is continuous. Such a broad framing of what constitutes a phrase seems to raise the question as to whether there is anything that falls outside the phrase or phrases. Phrases and phrase regimes are often heterogeneous; this is what engenders the differend. But however heterogeneous they are-whatever the intensity of the encounter between differcommon element is the phrase. The ent phrase regimes-the takes place between regimes of phrases within the differend only realm of the phrase-which, to be sure, is a heterogeneous and not a unified realm in the obvious sense of this term. Lyotard, however, gives his philosophy of phrase regimes a certain homogeneity (and unity?) by equating silence and interjection with a phrase. Clearly, there now seems to be a case of a differendbetween the phrase and its "other." And to the extent that Lyotard claims that there is no "other" of the phrase, he confirms, in his own terms, the existence of a differend: the reduction of this other to silence. While it is true that the criterion for the existence of a phrase is the reality of linking phrases and not "meaning," any equivalent of what Kristeva calls the poetic dimension of language (the sounds and rhythms) is clearly never in view in Lyotard's philosophy of the phrase. In effect, there is never any doubt about

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the phrase, for there is no such thing as a malformed, failed phrase, or an aborted, insane, or impossible phrase. Rather, where there is a phrase (e.g., silence), there is a linking of phrases; where there is a linking, there is a phrase: "it is necessary to link.... there is no possibility of not linking" (Differend51). Thus, even if only negatively, a more or less surreptitious totality becomes visible just where Lyotard claims to have avoided it. The regime of the phrase begins to turn into the imperialism of the always-already well-formed phrase. Or rather, as there is only a well-formed phrase, the notion of it becomes a tautology. For Kristeva, by contrast, a phrase-or as she would say, be seen to include the threat to its own realizalanguage-should tion within its very structure. Thus Kristeva writes of the depressed person: "Recall the speech of the depressive. ... In the impossibility of linking (d'enchainer),the phrase breaks off, dries up, stops" (Soleil noir 45). Because it does not take the breakdown of language into account, Lyotard's phrase regime is thus comparatively homogeneous. It is also potentially empty and foreign, bereft of much of the drive affect constitutive of the very life of the nonmelancholic subject in language. Lyotard's well-formed phrase is thus entirely located within the symbolic (this is what the phrase's never being under threat implies), but it does not, from a Kristevan perspective, betray for a moment the sense of loss which, psychoanalytically, is language's precondition. To put it another way, Lyotard's theory of the phrase does not exemplify the denegation of language: namely, that while language is only language (and thus foreign), at the same time, it brings the object (the mother) back again and thus becomes maternal (a mother tongue). Drive affect, the basis of the poetic "musical" dimension of language and the basis, too, of Kristeva's theory of the "semiotic" as the sounds and rhythms of language,13 is what places the symbolic under threat if it is not taken in hand by the words and rules (symbolic) of language. But if the words and rules are all there is, language (the phrase) has no real affective dimension. Without affect, words become devitalized, and in the extreme situation of melancholia lack even the most "frugal musicality." Lyotard's philosophy of the phrase thus ushers in the possibility of the devitalized phrase-a devitalization reinforced by the philosopher's own very formal presentation of his thesis in numbered


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paragraphs which often contain numerous trivial details about uninspiring examples. The discussion of "deictics" ("designators of reality")is a case in point (Differend 57 et seq.). As such, Lyotard's text lacks the poetry-the style-that signals the entry of drive affect into the symbolic order. Of course, this is quite appropriate in the context of rigorous intellectual and academic work-the latter tending in any case toward the melancholic pole. Brilliant intellectual productions will often lack style, so to speak, as it is their "dryness" which gives them their intellectual power. Nevertheless, a phrase without poetry in the interest of intellectual rigor is one thing. When this phrase is then turned into the exemplar of all phrases, this is quite another. The devitalized phrase is in fact philosophy's model of the phrase and thus of language. By contrast, the phrase of poetic language, as Kristeva has shown, is musical and a challenge to the symbolic (Revolution20963 and passim). Le Differend, then, effectively exemplifies the form of the phrase (always well formed, always facilitating a linking) it argues is the basis of regimes of phrases. Even in his discussion of the Kantian inspired sublime (defined as the indication that the unpresentable cannot be presented in words or images of any kind), or of postmodernity in art (that is, even when the discussion is explicitly about aesthetic issues), Lyotard still prefers to talk about the way rules are made and remade. Thus in the case of Joyce, it is less a question of style as the music of poetic language and more one of "stylistic operators" being put into play, with the result that "the grammar and vocabulary [the rules] of literary language are no longer accepted as given ..." ("Answering" 80).14 Maybe because of this striking concern for the operation of rules in language and phrases, we find that the latter are disenchanted, even atheistic phrases, and that they are characteristic of language in postmodern times. Jean Baudrillard's work provides a further insight into this process of disenchantment with his analysis of simulation and simulacra.

A Faith in Fakes?With brush strokes possibly broad enough to qualify as "totalitarian" in Lyotard's eyes (because based on a general idea),

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Baudrillard argues that now "it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), it is a question of hiding the fact that the real is no longer real, and therefore of saving the principle of reality" (26). Quite simply, the representing apparatus has become entirely detached from the real and exists in its own right. The cold image is indeed "hyperreal." Simulation, for Baudrillard, produces the simulacrum which is at the same time the death of every reference. In this sense, "postmodern" literally means living in another world-a world based on simulation which has become its own simulacrum. Thus, ethnology finds and "saves" (read: "destroys") the original "primitive" people. Once found, these people become their own simulacrum. Similarly, the museum is no longer circumscribed by geometrical space but becomes equivalent to "life itself": whole townships and urban spaces are preserved in their "original" state. We believe that this preservation process puts us into direct contact with the absolute real in some way. This, according to Baudrillard's argument, is a recent, postmodern development. It produces the following paradoxes: saving = destruction; authenticity = falsity; life = death (18-24). Simulation and simulacrum are consequently at their most effective in seducing us when we act as though they are bearers of the absolute real. In psychoanalytic terms, the simulacrum would the symbolic (but without any bring about a refinding-through indication that it is the symbolic which is in play)-of the eternally lost maternal object-truly, a cause for jubilation and delight rather than melancholy and depression. Absolute reality now becomes equivalent to the absolute transparency of the symbolic. This is arguably Baudrillard's most telling point in his reflection on the role of the simulacrum in modern-or rather, with the coalescence of the museum Along postmodern-culture. and life, the cinema, television, and radio, as well as techniques such as the hologram, all produce a veritable rhapsody of perfect simulation. In Baudrillard's words: "More real than the real, this is the way we abolish the real" (124). Seen in this light, Baudrillard's work suggests that, far from there being an "unpresentable" domain in art and society-as Lyotard would have it-or any kind of crisis of faith in the symbolic, capitalist society is witnessing an unquestioning faith in the


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capacity of the symbolic, through simulation, to reproduce the real without equivocation. This is so even though the predominance of simulation-or the code-also implies the abolition of the real. Put simply, this means that, for Baudrillard, there is nothing today that cannot be absorbed by the code, nothing that cannot be revealed as a form of signification. Nothing really surprises people anymore, because only the true real (and not the hyperreal) would have the capacity to surprise and to shock, that is, to defy signification by recalling the difference between the (relatively abstract) model produced by the code and the real. For Baudrillard's scenario, it is as though the critique of representation in the sixties and early seventies had never taken place. For faith in representation (or the model)-the faith that never to have nothing will be resistant to representation-seems In this area at least, the society in question would been stronger. thus appear to be anything but nihilist. Rather, it would exemplify a "faith in (what amount to) fakes."'5 Baudrillard's work is set to deflate this over-inflated faith in fakes-just as Lyotard, in Le Differend, sets about deflating what he sees as an overinflated faith in knowledge. Psychoanalytically, both Lyotard and Baudrillard imply that, in a sense, the ideal is still dominant, that it is even highly probable that a kind of religious fervor is still the order of the day-a fervor which must be combated lest some version of totalitarian thought become entrenched in the modern psyche. In effect, we need to reexperience the sense of loss once again-of the mother as lost-and thereby come to acknowledge that words are only words: the real (mother) is inaccessible and we must come to terms with this. Or at least the mother only appears when language begins to break down, and images become indecipherable in the silences and the sounds which constitute the materiality of language. Externalizing the libidinal drive energy that is integral to this materiality can correspond to the appearance of poetic language as a musicalization-a musicalization which must be partially taken in hand by the symbolic. This, as we have seen, is one of Kristeva's most influential theses. What do we observe, however, in the diversity of images, representations, and the phrase regimes of postmodernity? Already, I have noted that Lyotard's philosophy of the phrase and its

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inevitable linking evacuates poetic language from the scene so that, for example, phrase regimes become quite separate and distinct from the "affective" dimension. Moreover, Lyotard quickly rules out of contention Bataille's theory of sacrifice and expenditure (depense)as putting the social (and thus the symbolic) realm under threat from the real as unbound drive energy-that is, as being under the threat from a pure excess which would give the social its character. Lyotard thus writes, with Bataille clearly in mind, "To name this remainder [what escapes any form of order] "the accursed share" (part maudite)16is unnecessarily emotional (pathetique).With regard to a politics centered on the emotion associated with sacrifice . . . under the pretext that it would, through suffering and jubilation, constitute an infallible sign that the differend exists, and that no litigation can neutralize it, this is human, all too human. .." (Differend 205-06). "Human, all too human" means, for Lyotard, "humanist, all too humanist"-that is, too much founded on the notion of an essential human emotionality distinct from the phrase, an emotionality that would potentially lead to excess and disorder. This, however, is but one reading of Bataille. Kristeva's work cannot be located in the humanist tradition, and yet she has never been so quick to dismiss the Bataille thesis of expenditure. Poetic language, for example, although the product of drive energy, has its own logic17 and mode of articulation: it is not simply produced by a subject, but is also constitutive of subjectivity. With regard to Lyotard's work, the absence of poetic drive energy in language, or the phrase, opens the way for it to be turned entirely inward, leaving words denuded of all affect (whether erotic or not) in a kind of death without mourning and without poetry. This is, in Kristeva's terms, the hallmark of the melancholic disposition-a disposition which, as we have seen, is tantamount to a denial of the denegationsignaling the separation from the mother (the real). What, then, of the simulacrum in Baudrillard's work? Would this not be, as the index of an implicit faith in the symbolic, the focus also of drive energy and emotionality? Here, one might rather think that the cool glow of the television screen is more emblematic: thousands of images passing indifferently across the screen hardly allowing for a libidinal attachment (despite the realism) to any one of them. Fascinating, spellbinding, pacifying,


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rather than energizing, television is thus equivalent to an evacuation of affect from the image. Indeed, there is no poetry in television-or in film-to a large extent, becauseit has become a medium of realism pure and simple. This is a realism, then, to which people respond with detachment:it reproduces reality, but not in the sense that this goes without saying (the viewer does not normally think that the images are real and thus likely to enter the room). But with simulation and the simulacrum, Baudrillard suggests that we are now no longer detached from realism. The difference here is presented as being the same as the one between dissimulation and simulation. Thus in dissimulating an illness, one might simply go to bed, while in simulating it, one actually produces symptoms. On this basis, a simulated illness could possibly produce the same emotional response as a "true" illness. Two remarks are called for here. The first is that where the symptoms are produced in the simulation of illness a significant difference between a "true" illness and the simulation is brought into question. Is conscious intent the key here? An attempt to analyze this situation further would take us too far afield. We simply note that this issue might well parallel Descartes's hypothesis of God as a great deceiver, with the difference between illusion and reality being impossible to determine. As it turns out, Baudrillard never refers to examples of simulation where the fact of simulation is in doubt: Disneyland, "Watergate," film, documentary television, the hologram, cloning, etc. In such cases, a libidinal relationship with simulacra is not possible. Such is acknowledged by Baudrillard himself in these words: "No longer energy in its specular and emotional form . . . but the cold energy of the simulacrum and its distillation in homeopathic doses in the cold systems of information" (85). And, in the end, Baudrillard also acknowledges the connection between the "coldness" of simulacra and a melancholic nihilism: "Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparence" (231). Too attached to reality (description), according to Lyotard, we suppress the differend. Too detached from the real, according to Baudrillard, we become fascinated melancholics. Kristeva's theory of melancholia is thus closer to Baudrillard's analysis than it is to Lyotard's. But unlike Baudrillard, who proclaims his nihilism

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(231), Kristeva sees melancholic despair-because it implies some form of expression-as a last-ditch effort to remain in the symbolic at all. The proliferation of simulacra is thus not equivalent to an overflowing of words and images (despite appearances), but is perhaps the most fragile form of the symbolic that can still remain constitutive of a certain subjectivity before the latter collapses altogether. By this I mean that even though Baudrillard may be right in saying that the predominance in Western culture of the simulacrum implies the abolition of the difference between the real and the symbolic, and even though this entails the impoverishment of poetry in the postmodern era-an impoverishment experienced as a dramatic evacuation of affect from the symbolic (cf. the television screen)-the proliferation of images, signs, and of all kinds (as opposed to their total collapse) is still a symbols ground for a certain optimism. For this proliferation means that the symbolic order is still functioning-language is still social life is still going on, albeit in a mode functioning-and which is perceptibly closer to the still silence of death. On the other hand, because it encourages a progressively more inwardturning disposition, one that is detached from the symbolic as bearer of reality, postmodern experience is an experience of the gradual impossibility of mourning the loss of the original object (the mother), a mourning equivalent to attempting to put the inexpressible, narcissistic wound thus incurred into symbolic form. The imperfection of the symbolic is precisely what gives language its pathos, energy, and passion. The subject has to be able to say, as we saw earlier: "I have lost my mother (and thus contact with the real), but no, I have partially found her again through signs" (the symbolic). Here, the denegation captures the ambivalence of human subjectivity as a product of neither (in Kristeva's terms) the symbolic nor the semiotic. The semiotic, or drive aspect, gives language its maternal complexion. For the melancholic, or depressive disposition, however, we have seen that language is always "foreign" and never "maternal" because, as we also saw, such a person has never really "lost" his/her mother. How, as a result, is it possible to render language "maternal" again? Kristeva's analysis of Holbein's painting The Corpseof Christ in the Tomb,18sketches out the basis of a possible answer to this question.


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By way of a brief illustration, we can refer, as Kristeva does, to Holbein's painting.19 She points out that the figure of Christ is singular because it has no sign of grief: it is grief, evoking our own death by way of a minimalist style, totally devoid of any transcendence. The spectator has no respite from the specter of death, no sense at all of an impending resurrection: "The unadorned representation without artifice of human death, the almost anatomical nudity of the body, communicates an unbearable anguish to the spectator before the death of God, here confounded with our own death, so much is absent the least suggestion of transcendence" (Soleil noir 122). Holbein's realism, accentuated by the complete isolation of the body in its tomb, is thus guaranteed to provoke a certain anguish in the spectator through the evacuation of affect from signs. This is a realism of hell, not of glory-a hell evoked by the complete banality (126) of signs which, as such, become bereft of drive affect. "Coldness" and banality thus go together here. There is no coded rhetoric in Holbein's painting to alleviate the anguish of the intimation of death. And this is where it differs markedly from Italian painting of the same period-the work of Mantegna, for example. There is no mourning mother, no calm aura about the body, no connection with an other in fact that would hint at glory and transcendence.

Art and StyleHolbein's work, nevertheless, does not attest at all to the failure of signs, as is the case with extreme melancholia, any more, dare I say, than do simulacra. Although confronting Holbein's dead Christ proves to be something of an ordeal, the painting is far from being without a certain dignity. It is, in effect, a dignified reminder of death which provokes the production of more signs as we try to imagine our own death. This production of signs is what Kristeva equates with a kind of resurrection, one that makes language and an identification with others once again possible. Without passion (eros), or even pathos, The Corpse of Christ exemplifies a minimalist styleof sadness evocative of the first separation of the child from its mother and the beginning of elementary

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linguistic operations. The confrontation with death in signs, the complete closure of the figure of Christ divorced from the rhetoric of transcendence, is the way Holbein forces us to face deaththat is, signify it, and thereby identify with it. Here, the psychoanalyst asks whether there is, at that point, the potential for a catharsis-whether, in signifying death, melancholia is overcome, a kind of resurrection achieved, and the way opened to the transcendence called life. This transcendence is achieved, I think it is fair to say, only when the artist-or the spectator who identifies with his/her art-actively, and thus explicitly, puts death into signs: that is, when a style is clearly present. Style is the transcendence of death and thus of all (banal) realism. Style means that the work of art is inseparable from its act of production. If Baudrillard is correct, however, postmodernity signals the emergence of an era having as its dominant characteristic a realism run rampant. In light of Kristeva's analysis of Holbein's dead Christ, we can now hypothesize that a realism without transcendence of any kind is tantamount to an impoverishment of our symbolic resources, both intra- and interpsychic. Most of all, perhaps, this impoverishment of the symbolic is concomitant with the almost complete denial of the fact that death is integral to hyperrealism. Thus, in Kristeva's view, to face death is to transcend all realisms which are without style-without art. Art as style emerges in a confrontation with a death it cannot adequately put into signs. Style, therefore, is also a mark of humility, a recognition that death and its synonyms-the void, the unnameable, the real-can never be put entirely into signs. Is it in this fin de siecle, with all its sophisticated technology, that we have forgotten this simple fact? Kristeva's Soleil noir implies that we have. And because we have, our capacity to represent horror and tragedy have become impoverished. Realism without style impoverishes symbolic capacities: If it is still possible to speak of "nothing"when attempting to chart the tiny meanderings of pain and psychicdeath, are we still facing nothing before the gas chambers,the atomicbomb, or the gulag? Neither the spectacularsight of the explosion of death in the universe during the Second WorldWar,nor the dissolutionof conscious identity and rationalbehavior . . . are

Kristeva's Soleilnoirand Postmodernity

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in question. What these monstrous and painful spectacles harm are our facultiesof perception and representation.As if flooded or destroyed by too-powerful a wave, our symbolic means find themselves hollowed out, almost annihilated, petrified. (230-31) Art before these unpresentable horrors is no longer cathartic, no longer based on an impossible nomination which produced "music in letters." Now, the whitenessof the emotionless Durassian text is the order of the day. This is a text emblematic of the postmodern subject-a subject who becomes mad quite rationally and for whom death merges with life. Duras's writing is effectively the literary counterpart of Lyotard's philosophy of the phrase which also finds itself denuded of poetry and emotion. Or maybe we should say that what is referred to here is a mode of writing and a mode of philosophizing constitutive of a specific configuration of subjectivity emerging at the end of the twentieth century. For, to confirm Lyotard's notion, there can be no "exterior" for philosophy and writing; both philosophy and writing (literature) are always to that extent "maternal." While postmodernity in philosophy and literature may well confirm nihilist tendencies-thereby inhibiting desire and reduclinks with others-the fact of these activities is still ing symbolic cause for a certain optimism. For if Kristeva's analysis is correct, Western society needs to be, and can be-through the individual's own secular aesthetic resurrections-a society of artists and philosophers. Most of all, it may well be that with the philosophy and the art of postmodernity the following questions raised by Kristeva will be addressed: "Is not a civilization which has abandoned the meaning of the Absolute of Meaning necessarily a civilization which must face up to depression? Or again: where is the optimistic immanence of an implicitly morose atheism? In the Form? In Art?" (Grisoni 17) Perhaps many people will simply see these questions as leadto a retreat into aesthetics in order to avoid the hard political ing realities that postmodern experience entails. What is needed, it might be said, is the invention of new political strategies in order to counter postmodern nihilism. Probably few people would disagree with the need for more inventiveness in politics. I suggest,

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however, that this inventiveness cannot ignore the critiques of the notion of the self-identical, unitary subject that would drive itself on through purely willful action-as it cannot ignore, either, the way that the notion of aesthetic activity has been broadened (especially by Kristeva) to refer to a practice and not simply to a static experience. In any event, surely the structuralist heritage which opened up the dynamics of a system founded on differences has taken us beyond the simplistic idea that art and politics are intrinsically different from each other. In any case, if the amnesia regarding history that the "retro" dimension of postmodernity often entails is to be avoided, it is crucial that the structuralist heritage not be forgotten. Moreover, if it is true that a different and more inventive politics is needed in the West precisely because, in light of postmodern experience, transcendence cannot be reinvented, this means, to my mind, that it is necessary to come to grips first of all with the nature of invention, which also means with the nature of aesthetic activity. Postmodern humanity in the West must, therefore, reinvent invention-that is, reinvent a new anything like a new political domain will poetic realm-before become possible. A major reason for this is that in countries like Britain, America-particularly America-as with many West European nations, together with Australia and New Zealand, the political realm has become the embodiment of a postmodern, pragmatic, "managerial" blandness, where style is little more than a set of cliches, little more than the political equivalent of the cool, blank neutrality of a thousand television images. Now, political differences no longer really exist because everything is permitted-at least in appearance. In effect, the "other" in politics no longer exists, probably for the same reason that, as Baudrillard explains, the simulacrum has abolished the difference between the real and the symbolic: politics has led to the diminution of the other. In this sense, Lyotard is right to call for a reconsideration of the other in the context of rethinking moral obligation in light of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy.20 No more than the bare rudiments of an answer to the problem surrounding political possibilities in an era of postmodernity can be given here. Indeed, it is not possible to provide more than a brief indication, by way of conclusion, of what line of thought might be pursued. I suggest that it may well be the analysis of


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practices-the field in relation to which every model is static and a new inventiveness in politics and culture inadequate-that well be found. This is precisely the field Julia Kristeva's might conception of the semiotic covers when it points to the link between the "music in letters" and difference. It is also the field that is the subject of Pierre Bourdieu's most important and stimulating work.21 Practice entails that we find a (symbolic) model that can capture its dynamism-that is, a model which would include time. What is interesting in this regard is that in order to grasp the dynamism of practice, something more than a conventional theory of practice is necessary. In Bourdieu's terms, it is necessary to transcend the intellectualist bias in conventional model building and develop a theory of the theory of practice. Transcending the intellectualist bias, I suggest, will lead to considering how theory can include the inventiveness, the strategies-the improvisationsof the game of day-to-day living within its interstices. I can only state here in a rather perfunctory fashion that the upshot of a theory of practice must lead to theory itself becoming more like a practice-that is, more inventive and, I suggest, more poetic. What I mean, finally, is that aesthetic endeavor as a new force in social life is on the horizon. For it is aesthetic endeavor which is inseparable from a theory of the theory of practice and thus from a new inventiveness in political life.

Notes1. All translations of this and other French texts are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2. See van Reijen and Veerman, 278. 3. For reasons I have explained elsewhere (Julia Kristeva 197-198, n. 100), I leave the term denegation untranslated. 4. Cf., in particular, Simulacreset simulation, 9-68. 5. Cited by Houdebine, "De Nouveau," 69. 6. Kristeva also begins to make this point in her essay "Nom de mort ou de vie." 7. Cf. Histoires d'amour, 354. In English in the text. 8. Cf. Le Differend, 16-17. Robert Faurisson, an associate professor of French literature at the University of Lyon-II, began writing, in 1978, articles alleging that the Holocaust was a Zionist fabrication, and that Hitler had no intention of wiping out the Jews or any other religious group. Faurisson was subsequently dismissed from his post for his writings. For his memoireof the Faurisson affair,

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see Claude Martin. And for information about the "revisionist" historians who deny the reality of the gas chambers, see Dawidowicz. 9. See, for example, Carroll. 10. Cf. here the following comment by Lyotard: I think that the presentations were possibly a little hasty with their concessions to what is positive in these forms of pop or mass culture. The question everybody raised was that of knowing how to introduce resistance into this culture industry. I believe that the only line to follow is to produce programmes for TV, or whatever, which produce in the viewer or the client in general an effect of uncertainty and trouble. ("Brief" 58) 11. For an excellent exposition of the infinite in Georg Cantor's work, see Houdebine, "L'Experience," esp. 98. 12. As is known, this paradox concerns the notion that the One (totality) can also be counted as Many and, more importantly, that the class of all classes (totality) can itself be a class. The Cretan liar paradox illustrates the latter point: If the Cretan says all Cretans are liars, is he lying or telling the truth?-Is the statement part of the universe it is describing, or it is separate from it? If it is part of the universe being described, then a paradox emerges: the statement that "All Cretans are liars" is untrue because it is true that all Cretans are liars. But if it is true that all Cretans are liars, then the statement is true-which means it must be untrue, etc. If one can be sure that the statement is quite separate and distinct from the universe it is describing, the paradox does not occur (see Russell, chs. 6 and 7). Lyotard argues that the paradox cannot be avoided and that it is the basis of the differend (cf. 20-21, 200). 13. See La Revolutiondu langage poetique, 17-100. 14. Of course this is not all that can be said on the issue of aesthetics in Lyotard's writing. However, the focus here must be limited to the foundation of language as this is presented in the "philosophy" of postmodernity. The point is that for Kristeva, the poetic dimension cannot be excluded from any theory of language, whereas, I suggest, for Lyotard it can be. 15. Cf. Eco, Faith in Fakes. 16. Cf. Bataille's book of the same name. 17. Cf. "Pour une semiologie des paragrammes." 18. See Soleil noir, 119-50. 19. I have elaborated at greater length on Kristeva's analysis of Holbein's painting in my "Kristeva and Holbein, Artist of Melancholy." 20. See Le Differend, 159-86. 21. See Bourdieu, An Outline of a Theoryof Practice and The Logic of Practice.

Works CitedBataille, Georges. La Part maudite. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1965. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacreset simulation. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press in Association with Basil Blackwell, 1990. An Outline of a Theoryof Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.


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Carroll, David. "Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgment," Diacritics (Fall 1984): 74-88. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. "Lies About the Holocaust," Commentary no. 6 (December 7, 1980): 31-37. Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes:Essays. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker and Warburg, 1986. Finkielkraut, Alain. La Defaite de la pensee. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Grisoni, Dominique A. "Les Abimes de l'ame, un entretien avec Julia Kristeva." Magazine litteraire 244 (July-August 1987): 17. Houdebine, Jean-Louis. "De Nouveau sur Joyce": 'Litterature' et 'religion."' Tel Quel 89 (Autumn 1981): 69. . "L'Experience de Cantor." L'Infini, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 87-110. Kristeva, Julia. Histoires d'amour. Paris: Editions Denoel, 1983. ."Nom de mort ou de vie." Retour a Lacan? Ed. Jacques Sedat. Paris: Fayard, 1981. 163-82. "Pour une semiologie des paragrammes." Semeiotik'. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969. 113-46. .Soleil noir: depressionet melancolie. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. La Revolution du langage poetique: I'avant-garde I la fin du XIXe siecle, Lautreamontet Mallarme. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974. . Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge, 1990. ."Kristeva and Holbein, Artist of Melancholy." BritishJournal of Aesthetics 30.4 (1990): 342-50. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" Trans. Regis Durand. The PostmodernCondition:A Reporton Knowledge.Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. . "Brief Reflections on Popular Culture." ICA Documents:Postmodernism. London: ICA, 1986. .Le Differend. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983. 75 Martin, Claude. "La Verite sur l'affaire Faurisson." Le Nouvel Observateur (26 March-1 April 1979): 104-28. Reijen, Willem van, and Dick Veerman. "An Interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard." Theory,Culture & Society 5, 2-3 (June 1988): 278. Russell, Bertrand. My Philosophical Development. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1985.

42725573 Kristeva s Soleil Noir and Post Modernity

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