Book
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie
Kristeva's study of depression and melancholia as the most archaic expression of a narcissistic wound that can be neither named nor symbolised. The melancholic remains bound to the lost maternal 'Thing' and cannot complete the separation, a symbolic matricide, through which loss becomes signs. Drawing on Freud, on Klein's depressive position and on her own clinical cases, she reads Holbein's Dead Christ, Nerval, Dostoevsky and Duras as ways in which art and language give form to sorrow. Leon S. Roudiez translated it into English as Black Sun (1989), and Keren Shemesh into Hebrew (Resling, 2006).
Main ideas
- Depression and melancholia express an archaic narcissistic wound that resists being named.
- The melancholic remains attached to the lost maternal 'Thing'.
- Symbolic matricide, the separation from the mother, is the condition for turning loss into signs and, for Kristeva, a necessary condition of subjectivity.
- Melancholia is read as a failure of Klein's depressive position.
- Art and literature, in Holbein, Nerval, Dostoevsky and Duras, give form to sorrow.
What it shows
- 1987
Julia Kristeva reworked Depressive position
In Soleil noir Kristeva reads melancholia as a failure of the depressive position: the subject cannot carry out the necessary matricide and symbolise the loss of the mother in signs.