(10:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

UWC: Kristeva is not a theologian

I am slowly working my way through Black Sun. I have not yet made it to our essay, the penultimate chapter, but I have read enough to address some of Dallas Jones’s apparent worries about Kristeva’s use of Christian theology. If it appears that she is doing something radically different in the chapter on Dostoevsky, then I will certainly recant—but since the last four chapters are presented as illustrations of the more clinical and theoretical work in the first four, that seems unlikely. (If anyone has access to the full book, I especially recommend chapter three, which consists of case studies—I’ve always just found psychoanalytic case studies fascinating.)

Throughout the theoretical portion of the book, she is dealing exclusively with psychoanalytic ideas surrounding melancholia and depression: the possible origin of such a state, the question of whether a psychoanalyst should countenance the use of anti-depressant drugs (surprisingly, yes, but only as a supplement to get the patient to the point where analysis is possible), and some very interesting discussion of the relationship of the depressive subject to language and the role of art in expressing and overcoming the discourse of melancholia.

Christianity only enters the picture explicitly in her chapter on “Beauty: The Depressive’s Other Realm.” There, she says, “There is a specific economy of imaginary discourses as they have been produced within Western tradition (heir to Greek and Roman antiquity, Judaism, and Christianity); they are constituently very close to depression and at the same time show a necessary shift from depression to possible meaning” (100). She discusses the role of allegorical interpretation as a way of recovering meaning in those discourses that have lost meaning, such as the pagan mythologies that are no longer convincing after the advent of Christianity.

For Kristeva, Christian allegoresis has a deep affinity with the attempt to overcome melancholia, and so in her book on melancholia, she focuses on artistic products of Christian inspiration. It also leads to some statements that might sound like “Christian triumphalism”: “The imaginative capability of Western man, which is fulfilled within Christianity, is the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning” (103). The real meaning of this statement, however, is only made clear in her essay on Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. She situates the painting in the upheaval of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and she presents Holbein as an implicit example of one who is able to create meaning out of Christian symbolism regardless of his ambiguous “faith.”

Toward the end of the essay, she expands her view to a more general interpretation of the death of Christ:

A depressive moment: everything is dying, God is dying, I am dying.

But how is it possible for God to die? Let us briefly return to the evangelical meaning of Christ’s death. Theological, hermetic, and doctrinal accounts of the “mystery of redemption” are numerous, complex, and contradictory. While the analyst cannot accept them, he or she might try, by examining them, to discover the meaning of the text as it unfolds within his or her hearing. (130)

The break, brief as it might have been, in the bond linking Christ to his Father and to life introduces into the mythical representation of the Subject a fundamental and psychically necessary discontinuity. Such a caesura, which some have called a “hiatus” [the footnote credits von Balthasar for this term], provides an image, at the same time as a narrative, for many separations that build up the psychic life of individuals. It provides image and narrative for some psychic cataclysms that more or less frequently threaten the assumed balance of individuals....

...the death of Christ offers imaginary support to the nonrepresentable catastrophic anguish distinctive of melancholy persons.... A suspension of meaning, a darkness without hope, a recession of perspective including that of life... “Father, why have you deserted me?” ... serious depression or paroxysmal clinical melancholia represents a true hell for modern individuals, convinced as they are that they must and can realize all their desires of objects and values. The Christly dereliction presents that hell with an imaginary elaboration; it provides the subject with an echo of its unbearable moments when meaning was lost, when the meaning of life was lost. (132-133)

That, to me, doesn’t seem to be a way of sneaking in Christianity through the back door. In the American context, Christianity is still understandably scary, but in a European context, Christianity is pretty well discredited. Admittedly, Kristeva’s approach seems to be a far cry from Freud’s militant atheism, but to me Kristeva can be understood as a continuation of the Freudian approach to religion. There’s no danger that someone is going to read Kristeva and become a believer—the question is not one of joining the gospel mission, but of finding a way to recuperate the texts and concepts of Christianity in a situation in which they are no longer convincing, preserving our Christian heritage in the same way that Christians preserved their pagan heritage. (One might question here whether Jung’s reappropriation of religion happened too early, as evidenced by his great popularity in certain Christian circles.)

Kristeva’s analyses of Christian works of art can be seen as a kind of post-Christian allegoresis, finding in psychoanalysis “the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning” (103).

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