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- Title
"אין־קץ לאין־שובך": מלנכוליה ושלילה כפולה תהומית.
- Authors
רקפת אפרת )לבקובי
- Abstract
My goal in this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of the structure of the melancholic psyche and the way it expresses itself through language. My central claim is that both melancholic subjectivity and melancholic language – what Julia Kristeva (1941- ) calls “depressed speech” – can be shown to be constituted by an unorthodox logico-syntactic structure of double negation that diverges from the orthodox ‘principle of double negation’ in that rather than producing affirmation, this negation of negation produces another, deeper negation that is, in effect, an infinite (self) negation. I refer to this structure as an “abysmal double negation” drawing on the French idiom “mise en abyme” which literally means “to place into the abyss.” In literature and other media, this expression refers to works of art that contain smaller reproductions of themselves in an infinite recursion, similar to the vertiginous abyss that is experienced when a subject looks at her own reflection while standing between two mirrors. My analysis of melancholic subjectivity draws primarily on Julia Kristeva’s work Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) but also on the works of André Green (1927-2012), Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), and contemporary Israel psychoanalyst Hayuta Gurevich. In Kristeva’s account, language plays a central role but the character of “depressed speech” is analyzed only in general terms, as unlinking the speaker from their own inner world, removing them from true symbolized experience. In order to take a deeper look on the nature of such speech, I undertake a close reading of the acclaimed, tragic Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s (1936-1972) poems and diaries.6 Upon this reading I argue, first, that Pizarnik’s language exemplifies a sophisticated version of “depressed speech,” the makeup of which is profoundly “negative,” and that this “negative language” might be found also in the analytic encounter and, second, that Pizarnik’s oeuvre is able to deepen our understanding of some specific psychic experiences of the melancholic subject, particularly, the experience of self-absence. The paper opens with an analysis of Kristeva’s conception of melancholy. Kristeva claims that a child’s healthy psychic development must consist in her readiness to separate from her mother first by acknowledging the latter’s absence or loss and then by negating this loss through a work of mourning. This mourning concludes in substituting her with a semiotic signifier. This negation of absence, that enables the child to re-find the mother within language, constitutes an intrapsychic mechanism in which the signifier is not only produced but also binds the affect that arises because of the loss. Thereby a live language is created. The melancholic psyche, on the other hand, is formed through abysmal double negation: it denies the negation of the loss of the primary object. This leads to the inability to mourn the loss, and therefore to the negation of language.7 By refusing to lose the lost mother and grasping on to her absence, the psyche becomes melancholic. An abyss is opened within the subject or, between her and language; the referential relation breaks, and a gap is created between the signifier and the semiotic registrations within, and the world without. Consequently, the subject’s speech becomes “depressive,” that is: artificial, detached and void. Packed with denied absence, depressive language is experienced by the subject as meaningless and barren, and incapable of generating change and renewal in the ego. The melancholic subject, Kristeva claims, becomes an exile within language but also, at times, due to her untiring efforts to decipher the mother’s mysteries and secrets, “an intellectual capable of creating brilliant […] and abstract structures” (Kristeva [1987 (2006)], p. 60). Pizarnik’s poetry exemplifies a sophisticated and creative version of “depressive speech” saturated with negativity. Themes and words such as ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ ‘death,’ ‘shadow,’ ‘night,’ ‘nothingness,’ ‘silence’ and ‘no’ recur abundantly in her poems, while the syntax cleverly creates multiple negations including, at several points, double or more negations in a single sentence. Such syntax can be seen to express a tragic version of what Bollas calls “the syntax of our being,” that in the best of circumstances is positively determined by the “mother’s language of care” (Bollas [1987 (2000)], p. 54). Evidently, there is a reverse version of this – a thin, even if superficially sophisticated language absent of care. In this light, Pizarnik’s poetry laments the lack in the poet’s soul and in her language; its gaze is turned directly onto the abyss that brings it forth even as its verses grieve language’s powerlessness to bridge over the abyss. The recurrence of poems that speak, among other things, of “someone [that] didn’t show up” and of the image of the mirror can be seen to imply preliminary, pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal experiences of “maternal failure,” in Winnicott’s terms, which “test the child’s capacity to wait for the mother’s longed-for response” (Green, [1993 (1999)], p. 5), or the occurrence of what Green has famously called the “dead mother.” Indeed, I claim that Pizarnik’s poetry can be read as presenting what Green more generally calls “negativism” – a psychic “solution” to the dread the child experiences when facing a traumatic external absence. Green describes this phenomenon as “[t] he negative of the negative, i.e., the lack in the absence, duplicated by the lack…” (Green [1993 (1999)], pp. 6-7, italics added). Similarly, in “The language of absence” (2008), Hayuta Gurevich identifies the duplication of the negative in a way that yields an abysmal form of negativity: “If the other does not recognize this absence and its repercussions, the self cannot experience it as such. At this stage, the self still lacks a reflective function and the ability to mentalize, and if these are not supplied by the parents, the absence will become absent. Dissociation, therefore, refers to a situation of absence within absence” (Gurevich [2008], p. 563; italics added). The individual may actually cling to language, seeking all manner of iterations, word plays and linguistic precision, but this cannot provide the richness of object relationship. The absence of the object that was never present enough to become internalized and representable is seen to generate a nothingness that is only filled with sadness. Sadness thus becomes the only ‘object’ at hand. Thus, when Pizarnik writes, for example, of “Your endless unreturn,” she seems to express what Green refers to as the ‘negative model’ of object relations: an infinite disappointment of the object that has become autonomous of the object’s actual presence or absence, an everlasting solitude that no one can break – experiences that yield poetic lines such as “the one who comes does not find me / the one I expect does not exist,” leading to the dark conclusion: “I want to go / nowhere if not / down into the depths,” “Help me not to ask for help,” “I only came to see the garden in which someone is dying in the guilt of someone who did not happen or someone who did not come.” These ever-present, multiple negations in Pizarnik’s language can be seen as a hallmark of melancholic speech. I further demonstrate this claim by offering my own analysis of a clinical vignette offered by Gurevich. I then show that the poems in which Pizarnik refers to the image of the mirror can be interpreted in terms of identification with the oppressor and dissociation. My main argument in this context, however, is that through descriptions of occurrences in which she faces the mirror, Pizarnik concretizes the painful experience of self-absence. I especially see this kind of experience as created by self-“negative hallucination” where in her own self presence she feels absent to herself: “My silhouette? / A concealed zero.” “No one can save me. I’m invisible even to myself.” I dwell on this experience by appealing to the ideas Winnicott develops in his “Mirror-role of mother and family in child development” essay (1967). I claim that such absence resonates in Winnicott’s example of his patient who “brought in a reference to ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, etc.’ and then […] said: ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if the child looked into the mirror and saw nothing!’” (p. 5; italics added). These experiences would be explained by Green as resulting from a desperate “mirror identification” with the lost object, creating an “internal representation of the negative, ‘a representation of the absence of representation’” (Green [1997], p. 1074).
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p71
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article