Kristeva's "Soleil noir" and Postmodernity Author(s): John
Lechte Source: Cultural Critique, No. 18 (Spring, 1991), pp. 97-121
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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.
97
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John Lechte
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.
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
99
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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John Lechte
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
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
101
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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John Lechte
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
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
103
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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John Lechte
"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
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
105
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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John Lechte
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-
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
107
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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John Lechte
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
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
109
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
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
111
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,
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
113
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.
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
115
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
117
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
Kristeva's Soleil noir and Postmodernity
119
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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John Lechte
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.
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de Minuit, 1965. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacreset simulation. Paris:
Editions Galilee, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice.
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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):
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"Brief Reflections on Popular Culture." ICA
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