Bad Company: On the Theory of Literary Modernity and Melancholy in Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva Author(s): Marcus

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Bad Company: On the Theory of Literary Modernity and Melancholy in Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva

Marcus Bullock

John Lechte's lucid and enlightening recent book on Julia Kristeva draws what has already become a long and richrecordin her workas a continuum of development. He describes a succession of books and essays, and a succession of ideas and polemical positions to show her as an exemplum of history in which he can turn back layer on layer in the sequence of changes. But while the metaphor of movement through successive stages, of additions to a record of territorycrossed and explored, is a convenient device in composing a scholarly work, the idea of progress and success implicitin that figure runs counter to the material he actually presents. The image of succeeding metamorphoses does, indeed, create a vivid impression of an individualhistory,but it is part of the rhetoricwe use to describe the heroic labors of writersfrom some other age, not our own. The material suggests that the value of Kristeva'sachievement lies at least as much in the hesitation, retrenchment,and unmakingof her positions. Perhaps more than any of the other members of the Tel Quel group, she invites the reader to give up the pleasures of contemplatingthe upward and outwardsweep of an unfoldingpersona. She is less inclinedthan anyboundary222:3,1995. Copyright? 1995 by Duke UniversityPress. CCC 0190-3659/95/$1.50.

2 / Fall1995 58 boundary one to mistake the "success" of her distinctive public profilefor an answer to the problem with which she began and which has only slowly come into clear focus through its repeated reformulation.Referringto Kristeva's repudiationof any single affirmativeposition in the relations between the semiotic and the symbolic, Lechte does agree that, "ofcourse, to win, in a situation where psychic equilibrium is needed, is to lose."' Yet, her concern outlines something that goes beyond the intellectual understanding of an opposition in which it is absurd to pursue privilegeof one side over another. In 1987, Kristeva published Black Sun, continuing the movement towardsimpler language in her more recent work.And there she writes of "a belief in stylistic performance"that betrays the essential desires of human life to the public powers of language. Such a belief abandons the living chance that lies beyond what the discourse can "convey," counting that life "less importantthan the success of the text itself."2Real importance in a publiclytransmitteddiscourse, one that might deserve to be called "grandiose" language, is restricted only to "the royalway through which humanity transcends the grief of being apart, the way of speech given to suffering, includingscreams, music, silence, and laughter"(Black Sun, 100). Outside the reality of desire, the reality of one person desiring another, she finds only language that settles for something that is really nothing, its place among the powers of artifice.There, grandeuris merely the prize of its success, which means only its establishment at the central point of a world that has "dissolved"a livingcore "inthe thousand and one ways of naming it" (Black Sun, 68). This is a murderous or a suicidal diversion. "Outside the depressive space," she asks, "is the grandiose anything but a game?" (Black Sun, 100). The game that Kristevaherself now names suicidal is played out on a court of grand oppositions: freedom and fate, body and soul, the raw and the cooked. These are clearly situated outside the unique desire for love that animates every tremor of her voice in Black Sun, but what she succeeds in enunciating above all is how the extraordinarily complex route in and out of these alien kingdoms still distracts her from the "royalway" of humanity. Perhaps the nature of that distraction is already explicit in the rhetoricof grandeur and royaltyused to express the value of what is lost.
1. John Lechte,JuliaKristeva (New York: Routledge,1990), 209. trans. Leon S. Roudiez(New 2. JuliaKristeva, BlackSun: Depressionand Melancholia, in this workis cited parenthetically York: Columbia Press, 1989),68. Hereafter, University the text as BlackSun.

/ BadCompany 59 Bullock These oppositions are the fulcra in machinery about which her own history of citizenships turns, as well as that line or fold at the heart of a culturethat requires the appearance of the hero. But the hero is the enemy of desire, sacrificingthe innerdomain of human happiness forthe outer structurethat holds a culture together. The magnetic pull of such sacrifice cannot be resisted if the choice to be made identifies two kingships, for the greater kingship always overrules and subsumes the lesser. To succeed, to triumphheroically,means to be visible and acknowledged in a public sphere, to achieve a distinction of citizenship in the service of a reigning authority.Therefore, to look for the joy of desire along a royal road means always to go astray, for signs of regal distinctiontrace a way to the forum,the central stage of authority,and to the drama in which the game of powers is played out. If one can look on Kristeva'sthought as the adventure of an exploration, then she does acquire the look of the hero pressing onward. Yet she herself clearly feels the deceptive ambiguityin her own powers and the dubious distinctionwith which they rewardher, even if she does not see another way forward. Kristeva'sparticipationin the Tel Quel group gives the frame in which to contemplate the stages of a heroic passion. What seems much truer in her experience, however, is the coming to consciousness of her mistrust in her own role among that company. The role falls away from her, but only piecemeal, as the repeated jolt of events undoes the dream of change that had animated French intellectual life at the moment of her first entrance. It is Walter Benjamin who gives the most succinct formulafor a process of thought in which affect can come grindingto a halt, a process Kristevatries to restrictunder the name "depression." The clinicalforce of the term limits it to a mere quality or coloration of experience from which one recovers, that is, returnsto the correctly balanced light. But for Benjamin,to fall away from a publiclysanctioned order into pain and melancholy was a first step in liberatingoneself from the false majesty of things in the clarity of their continued progress: "Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinkingsuddenly stops in a configurationpregnant with tensions, it gives that configurationa shock."3Black Sun names forhis workon allegory as the functionliterature Benjaminquite prominently assumes under the condition of melancholy. Kristevaalludes to his workon the baroque play of mourning,and yet he also seems to hauntthe text as an
3. WalterBenjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn,ed. HannahArendt(New York: Schocken,1969), 262.

2 / Fall1995 60 boundary unassimilated presence for the way he applied the concepts of melancholy and allegory to the literatureof modernityin the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.The extensive discussion in her book seems to place Gerardde Nerval at the initialevolutionary moment of literarymodernity that Benjamin reserves for Baudelaire,whose name is completely excluded from Black Sun. This place for Nerval is consistent with Kristeva'sview of literarymodernity and that established by the Tel Quel group in general. Raymond Jean, for example, observes in his Poetique du desir of Nerval's writing:"One can say of it quite legitimatelywhat Philippe Sollers said of some other writers, such as Sade, Mallarme,Artaud, or Bataille: 'In all the texts in question, the theory of writingis there, immanent, ready to be demonstrated: but it is generally perceived in the form of delirium,fantasm, poetry, hermeticism, personal deviation, etc.' "4 The contrasting perspectives between Benjamin and Kristeva, and the differentplace ascribed to Baudelaire by one and to Nerval by the other, help us understand the view of modernity Kristevaassimilated early in her workand the continuingtensions that emerge in the laterworkas the major contradictions with which she struggles. In the simplest and most general formulation,Benjamin regards the hard allure of Baudelaire's verse as a hollowed-out form designed to convey the arrest of time and the penetration of an illusory continuityof development in the human sphere. This experience of time at a standstill leaves the future open to a completely heterogeneous order of change. Kristevatakes the breaking up of the surfaces in representation, the fragmentationof the image and the dissolution of the coherent voice, to be indicativeof a change and renewal already contained in the literaryprocess. The revolutionaryextension of that change requires only that the work of criticaland philosophicalmediation be undertaken to expand the liberationachieved by writingso that it may enter and determine a larger domain of experience. Yet Kristeva, for whom this liberationof experience has an added dimension of urgency not present among the men, can never free the promise of change, and the enticements of success as the bond of that promise, from an underlyingdoubt. This doubt begins with the potential of our own modernity,with its contemporaneity,or its adequacy to a unique experience of the present in which the separation from another person, the "griefof being apart,"can be repaired. It begins with the anxieties of finding a lanEluard 4. Raymond Jean, La Poetiquedu desir:Nerval,Lautreamont, (Paris: Apollinaire, et Seuil, 1974), 31; my translation.The quoted comment by Sollers is from "Ecriture in Theoried'ensemble,ed. PhilippeSollers (Paris:ed. du Seuil, 1968), 72. revolution,"

Bullock / BadCompany 61 guage whose fullness is of the present and whose flow carries one person toward another. But the present is only ours and only promises the joining of life, if it contains the future. It is theirs, propertyof the dead, if it is only the recurrence of the past or the continuationof a game. The entire nature of activity and identity at which the present grasps is thus open to doubt and loss. Kristeva wrote in 1971 that "only one language grows more contemporary:the equivalent, beyond a span of thirtyyears, of the language of Finnegan's Wake." The reason she gives is that such language, or its equivalent, stands separate and free of "didacticism,rhetoric,dogmatism of any kind."It also stands in contrast to others that, "in any field whatsoever, no longer command attention,"although they "have survived and perhaps willcontinue to survive, in modifiedform, throughoutAcademia."5 Much has changed in the meantime, includingwhat survives in, and some mightsay, of, academia, but not the central place of that particularlanguage in Kristeva'sconcerns. In Black Sun, the medusa-like abilityof literatureand art to fix the crumblingand collapsing meanings of the world in a "nameable melancholia"is a means to withstandcatastrophe, not to turnthat catastrophe about intoa chance fora lifefilledwithits own recovered significance. "Sublimation alone withstands death,"she writes, but it does so only as a displacement of despair, not a way to the real: The beautiful object that can bewitch us into its world seems to us more worthyof adoption than any loved or hated cause for wound or sorrow. Depression recognizes this and agrees to live withinand for that object, but such an adoption of the sublime is no longer libidinal. It is already detached, dissociated, it has already integratedthe traces of death, which is signified as lack of concern, absentmindedness, carelessness. Beauty is an artifice; it is imaginary.(Black Sun, 100) It is at this point that Kristeva introduces Walter Benjamin's work on allegory in his book on the baroque drama of mourning, Ursprungdes deutschen Trauerspiels(Black Sun, 101). The chastened view of what lit5. JuliaKristeva, "How Does One Speakto Literature?" in Desirein Language,ed. LeonS. ColumRoudiez,trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine,and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: bia University this workis cited parenthetically as How.The Press, 1980), 92. Hereafter, in essay firstappearedin TelQuel47 (fall1971):27-49, and was subsequentlyreprinted Polylogue(Paris:Seuil, 1977), 23-24.

2 / Fall1995 62 boundary erature has to offer has come closer to Benjamin'sperception of a hollow rigidityin poetic forms but is still very far from findingan alternative emancipatory potential here, as he does. He finds a criticalforce in the shock of arrest that these cold structures direct against the rulingideology of organic change. A cessation of happening threatens a rulingorder that preserves itself by its renewal in progress. Kristeva had seen the unchained energy by which Joyce's writingdismissed the narrativeforms of the past as the implicitliteraryequivalent of revolutionitself. In "HowDoes One Speak to and the other essays she collected in Polylogue in 1977, she Literature?" or "musical"quality of language, its "semiotic" emphasizes the "rhythmic" where Joyce as opposed to "symbolic" quality,as a true presence of vitality, had, fromthe start, taken the libertinecontent of modern art in all its manifestations to be merely the mockery of the rigiditythat art had discovered and rejected in all the forms of illusion,especially the illusionthat it pursued in its own priortraditionof representation. Benjamin regards the incorporationof pure negativity as the fundamental achievement in Baudelaire's poetry: "The glory of an allegorical intention: destruction of the organic and the living-elimination of sem6 Benjaminargues that this marksthe essential breakof modernism blance." with the previous traditionof literaryaesthetics, which used an idealizing distance to hold the world of appearance at a point where representation could secure these appearances as beauty. Baudelaireuses "spleen"as an intellectual discipline withinthe composition of poetry to establish a quite new aesthetic position. His viewpoint remains firmlyfixed in the world of collapse and decay but chills the spectacle by giving up the naturaldesire to believe in a life the object no longer contains and can no longer promise. Spleen, this deeply sobered perspective on emptiness and banality, withholds itself; it is a reservation in one's position. Benjamin writes that spleen is a "barrageerected against pessimism,"because it refuses to give and that therefore sink itself over to hopes that can never liftus to fulfillment us down finallyto despair. "Baudelaireis no pessimist. He is not, because he sets a taboo on the future. This is what distinguishes his heroism most sharply from that of Nietzsche" (Zentralpark,657). This is the heroism of the dandy, who conquers the absence of love by a devotional atheism, celebratinghis equanimitywhile repeating forms of a life that he believes most likelynever was and certainly never will be.
in GesammelteSchriften,ed. HermannSchweppen6. WalterBenjamin,"Zentralpark," am Main: hauserand RolfTiedemann(Frankfurt 1974),669-70; mytranslation Suhrkamp, as Zentralpark. this workis cited parenthetically here and subsequently.Hereafter,

Bullock / BadCompany 63 Kristevaagrees, in Polylogue, that modernist texts do not give voice to the fantasy image of an ideal, the "sch6ner Schein," or "beautifulsemblance,"whose pleasures in classical aesthetics displace the real, but she argues for a quite differentkindof negativityreplete with hope. The modern text gives up the pleasure of closed forms, but instead finds jouissance in burstingthe bounds of explicit communicative expression. What she calls "semiotic functions"gain by the retreat of discredited ideals, and through their more materialqualities, poetic language is able to expose an absence registered in the desiring body: "inso doing, it refers neither to a literary convention . . . nor even to the body itself, but rather,to a signifying disposition, pre- or transsymbolic, which fashions any judging consciousness so that any ego recognizes its crisis withinit. It is a jubilantrecognitionthat, in 'modern'literature,replaces petty aesthetic pleasure."7 Kristevawrote very littleabout Baudelairefor a long time. In her Histoires d'amour(1983), she makes it quite clear that she did not include him in the canon of modernitybecause she considers him to be still stranded at the outer marginof the traditionalimage and traditionallanguage. The gaze of the flaneur remains fixated on the spectacle of hollow faces because only by transfixinghimself with the delight in his own coldness can he hold any ground under the shock of their emptiness. This is the substitute of a game, because such a sensibility "cannotbear being withoutsome form of symbolic existence in a fullyarticulatedform."8 Kristeva'ssection on Baudelaire in Histoires d'amourplaces critical emphasis on the role of perfumes for his sensibility,as well as on the distant shiver of sounds and the shimmer of lightplayingon jewels, because these convey the aesthetic Catholicism that binds him to the authorityof classical French prosody over his verse, as well as the unbrokenauthorityof the Church over his senses. In a similar vein, she draws heavily on Georges Blin's characterizationof Baudelaire as a sadist9 to support her argument that his verse subjects the human body, and the full rhythmicor musical substance of its desires, to a process of destruction and reductionso as to extract from it the refined delices of synaesthesia. Therefore, she can offer the example of writerswho destroy the integrityof closed literaryforms as committed to reversing that process and to giving figures who are implicitly the body its full due. Yet her comments in Black Sun throw the significance of the semi7. JuliaKristeva, "From One Identity to an Other," in Desire in Language,141. 8. Lechte,JuliaKristeva, 181. 9. Georges Blin,Le Sadisme de Baudelaire (Paris:Conti,1948).

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otic functions in modernism directly up against the demand they have not met and raise the questions Kristevacannot answer: Why should the texts she privileges be any nearer the realityof love than Baudelaire's;and Why are they not games of a more (or perhaps less) devious kind? Ifshe stands closer to Benjaminin her later work, it is still not possible to decide exactly how close, and if she has moved away from her more hopeful stand in the past, it is still not possible to decide where she stood then. It might be more accurate to say that her later worksimply begins to acknowledge her own uncertainty about where she stands in relation to hope and desire, because time has exposed the desperate crag of loneliness on which she was perched all along. IfKristevais now beginning to approach Benjamin'sposition on literary modernity,or if her currentposition is beginning to expose the difficulty of overcoming his view of the position modernistaesthetics defines for itself, then this reflects back to the politicaland historical understanding of literary activity that not only she, but Philippe Sollers and the Tel Quel group generally, asserted as a way of affirmingthat what they represented was not merely "a game." John Lechte writes of this beginning: "Throughthe opaque pathos of writing, the shadow of death and the oblique political gesture become one and the same. Withthis gesture, the writeris an intellectual-not by being the vehicle of a moral or political message, but by becoming a writerin the fullest sense possible: by becoming the opponent of all normalizationsand stereotypes, and the practitionerof his/her art."10 But the rhetoric of the Tel Quel group about themselves and their situation is very differentfromanythingone finds in James Joyce, insofaras they feel the need to undertake this theoretical project of self-justification in the context of politics and history,and they pursue this project by insisting that the writing needs no justification.The idea of a jubilant recognition of crisis quoted from "HowDoes One Speak to Literature?" suggests Kristeva'sfirst investment in literaturewas a straight bet on this direct meaffect. diation of a revolutionary Benjamin's view is much closer to the idea of an interruption.The explicit quickening of a promise Kristeva claims to feel in the stirring of crises runs counter to what he considers the chance of a change-namely, a shock delivered by bringingcontinuityto a standstill. That is the reason he worked so tenaciously to show a revolutionarypotential in Baudelaire. The moment of a crisis, understood as a sudden acceleration of possi21. 10. Lechte,JuliaKristeva,

Bullock / BadCompany 65 bilities, is, for Benjamin, likelyto prove a utopian idea caught up with the illusions of progress. As he illustrates through his much discussed image of the Angel of Historyin the ninthof the "Theses on the Philosophy of Histhis movement of progress defers change before the catastrophe of tory," things going on as before. Such a helpless pursuitof paradise in the future freezes and cracks under the gaze Baudelaire turns on the spectacle before him: "Rigiddisquiet is also the formulaconveying Baudelaire's image of life, which knows no chance of development"(Zentralpark, 668). Most specifically,this experience marksthe undone promise of love. "Womanfor Baudelaire:the most precious object of plunderin the 'Triumph of Allegory'-the life that signifies death" (Zentralpark, 667). This embrace of death and deception turns against the illusion of any fruitfulpassage of purposeful time. Therefore, it is imperviousto any promises that history,or what Benjamincalls historicism,can pointto in a futureof progress. Only at that point does Benjaminbegin to set up his very complex historicaldialectics and draw the negativity of literatureinto a politicalcritique. His radical notion of a materialisthistoricaloptic closes out the empty expansiveness and repetitions of what he calls the homogeneous past of historicism and cancels the meaningless continuityof progress that historicismprojects into the future, thereby rendering time open to a critical alternative in active politicalunderstanding. Kristevanot only looks to the recognitionof a common state of crisis as the mark of a singular language in modernist writing but also finds reason for "jubilation" in this disposition to exceed what she takes to be the limited symbolic function of discourse. She looks to Philippe Sollers, to the achievements of a modern canon that includes Mallarme,Lautreamont, and Artaud, for this precious surplus in poetic language. Though it is not yet knowledge, the site of that crisis gathers these authors withina single project, she argues, since the semiotic function presents a singular challenge to the traditionaldomination of symbolic functions. The task of reading and understandingbegins by acknowledgingthe failureof symbolic meanings to absorb all experience of the subject as a materialbeing and a desiring body. The determinate system that articulates symbolic language is inadequate to the materialityof life, and the texts of the resulting artifice are in that sense "empty." But she does, at this early stage, regard the semiotic side of the text, the side that gives full emphasis to the rhythmic or musical qualities, as "full." And the materialqualities that fill it in this way are capable, through the process of revaluation by theoretical work, of a direct expansion into active politicaland historicalsignificance.

2 / Fall1995 66 boundary The lesson Kristevahas drawn from Roland Barthes is to look to a concept of "writing" (ecriture)as a particularpractice of literaryproduction with new historical substance. Because it is not exhausted in the presentation of communicable meanings for the "pettyaesthetic pleasure" of its does not reproduce the structures of a determinate, readership, "writing" rule-bound subject within its language: "As infra- and ultra-language, as translanguage, writing is the ridge where the historical becoming of the subject is affirmed; that is, an a-psychological, a-subjective subject-an historical subject" (How, 97-98). But a ridge about which the crisscross winds of so many neologisms blow is not a place to trust anything very far. Everything in her claims depends on the promise of something new that has yet to appear, but only then, after that coming to appearance, can so many new terms be considered full speech and performthis new critical mediation of semiotic language, ratherthan simply repeat their negation of the symbolic. Untilthen, there is a fundamental difficultyin her invocation with all its rich reverberationsof redemption. of "history," Desire may well arise within,and as a response to, history.Of course: how could it possibly be otherwise? But history is the record of appearances, and Kristevahas already established that what is most characteristic of this contemporary language of literarymodernityis that it refuses to produce appearances as the material of petty aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, it steps back fromengagement in historyas "didacticism,rhetoric,dogmatism of any kind." This splits her argument quite dangerously, so that it seems to contradictthe very possibilityof change on which her revaluationof literary writingat that time insists. thus posits another On the one hand, Kristevaaffirms that "writing subject, for the first time a definitivelyantipsychological one, for what determines it ultimately isn't the problem of communication (relationship to an other) but that of an excess of 'ego' within an experience" (How, 98). On the other hand, if this "necessary practice,"as she calls it, is not to be produced as an appearance (and thereby brought into a relationshipto an other), then each work presents only the site of an internalseparation from, and within,history,and the practice of such writingonly marks the general locus to which such sites are restricted. That separation in no way implies a power of change in the domain of historical appearances. Recognizing this, she has to posit another complementary practice that will realize this otherwise immobilized negativity as a different, and truer, history: "Once this area has been determined, literarypractices can be considered as the object of a possible knowledge: the discursive possibility emerges out of a realityimpossible for it although localizable by it"(How, 98).

Bullock / BadCompany 67 This possibility,the always deferred promise of change and reality, is the justifying standard beneath which the long and intricate history of Kristeva'sown theoretical and polemical labors began and has been pursued to the scene of depression and melancholia. Her enterprise, looking forwardto an as yet unrepresentable potential, remains always beyond the reach of a definitivecritique.Ithas always not yet reached the pointat which its claims could be subjected to any definitivetest. Debate about Kristeva's larger enterprise has been strangely fraught with undecidable differences because it is ultimately about an object that has not made any ultimate But there should also be no doubt that what makes the enterappearance.11 prise preeminently importantis the clarity with which she acknowledges the afflicted state, the permanent crisis, of a consciousness imprisonedby desire for this "Thing" that is not even an object, that cannot even be raised to the substance of an absent object. Inthe workshe completed in 1980, Powers of Horror, Kristevaapplies the word abject or abjection to this non-object. She thereby loosens the earlier deceptive temporal orientationof a future toward which the present turns and from which the labors of the present derive their meaning. Ifthe possibility of change implies that the future holds another object toward which one can extend oneself to appropriate it, then the otherness of the object has already been transformedinto a promise, into a conviction. The object is the correlativeof a certain knowledge. The abject is not. She writes: "The abject has only one quality of the object-that of being opposed to ."12 In the case of an object, this relationof opposition also supports other qualities, qualities of connection and the force of knowing:"Ifthe object ... settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitelyhomologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary,the jettisoned object, is radicallyexcluded and draws me towardthe place where meaning collapses.13 The antinomy here is simple and obvious. Kristeva's ecriture is indeed drawn toward the point where meaning collapses, but her meaning does not collapse. Her meaning is the gesture of approach, her own labor
11.There is an intriguing example of this in the entirelyincommensurable readingsput forward and Poetryas ShatteredSignification," InCritical by CalvinBedientin "Kristeva A Response to quiry16, no. 4: 807-29; TorilMoi'sresponse to him, "ReadingKristeva: CalvinBedient," Critical 17, no. 3: 639-43; and his response to her response in Inquiry that same issue, "HowI Slugged ItOutwithToril Moiand Stayed Awake," 644-49. 12. JuliaKristeva, An Essay on Abjection, Powersof Horror: trans.LeonS. Roudiez(New York: Columbia Press, 1982), 1. University 13. Kristeva, 1-2. Powersof Horror,

2 / Fall1995 68 boundary of making and doing; the production of a text in which she inscribes the track of this approach is an invitationto the reader to reenact the gesture, to participatein it, to reenact a homologous I that participates in the same coherence as Kristeva'sproduction. The text creates a space and directionof movement that substitutes for the motion in time towarda graspable transformationin the future.Writing exerts an attractingforce here that is not the appeal of a petty aesthetics but is able to replace the enfeebled answer such aesthetics offers in the face of a crisis, because, in its own gesture, it transfiguresthe unimaginabletime Kristeva'swriting of the futureintoa present figure,the trope of this "toward." has accomplished an approach withinthe language of criticismequivalent to that cited for poetic language in "HowDoes One Speak to Literature?" and capable, like it, of promotinga "jubilant" recognition. And the critical Horror does reflect how to Powers of response completely horrorhas been sublated in the elegance of her textual gesture. Guy Scarpetta noted that with "an effecwith this book, Kristevahad enriched her "theoreticalrigor" This kind of appeal is enormously successful tive measure of seduction."14 in expanding the sphere in which she is heard, and yet it also postpones the change that lies at the basis of the enterprise itself: the emancipation of a silenced world.Jubilationin a moment of crisis does not arise fromthe recognitionof the savage and uncertainturna course towardemancipation has to take; itcomes either fromthe reliefat the end of a numbingemptiness or from the promise of what lies beyond the transformationto come. Butthe essential conditionof a real change, as opposed to a restoration or a pursuitof fantasies drawnfroman idealizationof past appearances, differs in that one cannot see past the place where a real turn comes into view. Therefore, the first part or possibility of jubilation,which draws away from the past at the approach of a future that differs from what is and has been, also stands with a sharp reserve from the second, which imagines the future. Inthe first,a historicalconsciousness may sustain a preponderin the process of sobering up fromthe debilitating ance of "theoreticalrigor" fascinations of the past. This process is what Walter Benjamin refers to The imporin his essay on surrealism as the "dialectics of intoxication." consciousness force a in critical lies the tance of the process, for him, equal schooled in the nature of intoxicationmay direct against the powers of fascination exercised by images of the future. Seduction preponderates over because the dangers to critical rigor if the future is dissolved into irreality,
An Essay in note to Powersof Horror: 14. Quotedby Leon S. Roudiezin his translator's vii,cited in Le NouvelObservateur (19 May1980). Abjection,

Bullock / BadCompany 69 be negotiated are transfigured into objects of delight for a renewed state of intoxication.That is precisely the fault Walter Benjamin suspects in the surrealists, where they "subordinatethe methodical and disciplinarypreparationfor revolution... to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and The equivalent fault in Kristeva may be located celebration in advance."15 with some precision: in her use of the word history. Just as the surrealists mix and confuse experiences of ecstasy and desires for emancipation ratherthan dialectical, to produce what Benjamin considers a "romantic," Kristeva confuses models of change in the past of so concept intoxication, and projects of change for the future. The path followed by history in the Renaissance is to be her map for a reversal of the past to make a rebirthin the future, as though time were as continuous and coherent as this implicit returnto the treasures of recollection. The objectifyingfunction of literaryrepresentation in bourgeois history from the Renaissance on is carefullyexplored in Kristeva'searly work. The beginnings of the novel are, for example, analyzed throughthe case of Antoine de la Sale's Jehan de la Saintre in the essay written in 1967, "Le Texte clos" (included in the collection Y7-E-W7TLX7, 1968). The qualities of a she more musical or rhythmicmedieval writinghad, argues, left it still open to valorizingwomen, but by the fifto a heterogeneity, and thereby implicitly teenth century,this was givingway to literaturethat represented the speech of the new man, the assertive language of a self-sufficientauthoranxious to establish himself as a voice of authority.The valorizationof this power and devalorizationof writingis "a paradoxical phenomenon that dominates, in differentforms, the entire history of the novel."16 The historicalweight given her confident dualism of speech and writingdistinguishes the eager sense of imminentchange in these early essays most clearly from the dark tone of Black Sun. There is certainly a venerable traditionthat opposes speech as true and immediate language and writingas mediated, indirect, and arbitrary. Nonetheless, the emphasis on this opposition as the ultimate determinant of a metaphysics of authoritylooks ratherexaggerated and even dated now. We can show no natural or actual identity between that which has been suppressed by the division of labor in the bourgeois era and the fate of "writing." Consequently, there is no reason why a political polemic revalorizing writingshould create a strategy that could reverse the triumphof
15. WalterBenjamin,"Surrealism," in Reflections:Essays, Aphorisms,Autobiographical trans. Edmund Schocken,1986), 189. Writings, Jephcott,ed. Peter Demetz (New York: in Desire in Language,58. 16. JuliaKristeva, "TheBoundedText,"

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bourgeois history. Kristevawrites that "forthe phonetic consciousnessfrom the Renaissance to our time-writing is an artificiallimit,an arbitrary but the pathos of struggle is misleading if it sets law, a subjective finitude,"17 these two ideas up as combatants fightingout change to and fro between them in the actualities of history. The rhetoricof "HowDoes One Speak to Literature?" presents the language of Finnegan's Wake as the modern redemption of writingfrom phonetic consciousness. By alienating his work from communicativeforms of speech, the essay claims, Joyce not only ends the history of the novel but starts the work of ending that history at all levels and recovering all that was (supposedly) lost with this passing of the medieval world: "Itfollows that the literaryavant-garde experience, by virtue of its very characteristics, is slated to become the laboratoryof a new discourse (and of a new subject), thus bringingabout a mutation, 'perhaps as important,and involving the same problem, as the one markingthe passage from the MiddleAges to the Renaissance'" (How, 92).18 To speak about the future is, for Benjamin, always endangered by seduction and delusion. Speech and writingin any form can displace the movement of time by the substitutionof mythology,or false knowledge, that gives assurance where there is no knowledge. Despite the special discithat refuses to participate in the beautifulsemblances of pline of "writing" of its own powers implicitin a jubilantreading rethe celebration pleasure, in the mains, phrase Benjaminapplies to the surrealists, "tooimpetuous."19 with an approvBenjamincloses his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" ing reference to the biblicalban on divination:"Weknowthat the Jews were prohibitedfrom investigatingthe future.The Torahand the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment."20 An understandingof time and the laborof producingchange does not come from a mythological reach beyond the horizon of the present but from the active application of a consciousness of the present to the appearances of the past. He notes that the historian is "a prophet turned backward."21
58. 17. Kristeva, "TheBoundedText," et Verite 18. The quoted line she includes here is fromRolandBarthes'sCritique (Paris: Seuil, 1966),48. 185. 19. Benjamin, "Surrealism," 264. 20. Benjamin, "Theses," 21. Benjamin,Gesammelte Schriften1/3, 1235. This idea is borrowedfrom Friedrich Schlegel.

Bullock I BadCompany 71 But in Black Sun, Kristeva evidently also acknowledges the effect of her earlier desire to penetrate the future. The demonic gloom of melancholy follows inevitably in the train of an enraptured or jubilant prophetic consciousness. Thus, she later turns, like him, away from the deceptions of magical projectioninto the future. Today,the span of time since Finnegan's Waketo which Kristevareferred in "HowDoes One Speak to Literature?" is almost sixty years. The continued contemporaneous presence of its language attests to a change in the meaning of its contemporaneity. In 1971, that language had been directlytied to the active prospect of an end to the past in the general condition of history: "As capitalist society is being economically and politically choked to death, discourse is wearing thin and heading for collapse at a more rapid rate than ever before" (How, 92). But now that capitalism has emerged in full planetary possession of history,the aesthetic extricationof poetic language from the communicative forms of public discourse reveals itself as a cessation in the process of literaryhistory,while outside that special aesthetic domain, the arena of political,economic, and moraldiscourse continues its self-assertion and sustains itself by providingits own imagery and narrativerepresentations through the consciousness industry. For this reason, Kristevahas to give up a concept of "history" that arises in the MiddleAges and arches over the ridge marked by ecritureto pass from an old form of the subject to a new one that is to come. What now becomes crucial about the language of Finnegan's Wakeis where the journey that falters on that high ridge does actually come to an end. The forms of narrative that, in Benjamin'simage fromthe "Theses,"so powerfully do so still in the politiorganize strings of facts "likebeads on a rosary"22 cal arena. Though contemporarypoetic prose has refused those forms and constructs an artfultangle in the literarysphere, its criticalforce does not extend far. Its primaryresonance reaches, now, into "academia," albeit into those spaces in the institutionthat are themselves politicallyisolated. This tangle appears where once an earlier academic historicism had drawn a clear crossroads pointingonward to the futurethrough homogeneous time. The forms of argument then still inhabitingthat older "academia"now live on in the consciousness industry. The popularpersuasiveness of enchained facts rests on supposedly scientific necessities in the human domain, though the unique realities of human desire lie outside the sphere of causality. The split between the
22. Benjamin, 263. "Theses,"

2 / Fall1995 72 boundary domain of poetic language and the "popular" domain of general dis"high" course leaves a core of human life and desire powerless to speak. Writing articulates that powerlessness, but only in the form of its own impotent exclusion. In Powers of Horror,Kristeva notes "how dazzling, unending, eternal-and so weak, so insignificant,so sickly-is the rhetoricof Joycean language."23 Where progress continues to rulethe language of social transactions, and projects itself into the same future, literarylanguage can only abstract itself from such abstraction. Yet this language becomes "morecontempoKristeva insists in Polylogue, because it presses toward a change. rary," The direction, or substance, of this change lies in an element beyond the linguistic processes of "sense" that constitute the symbolic system of language. This translinguisticexcess is present as rhythm.Thus, she writes in Polylogue that poetic language is "an undecidable process between sense and nonsense, between language and rhythm(in the sense of linkage that had for Aeschylus' Prometheus according to Heidegger's the word 'rhythm' Rhythmis a presence reading), between the symbolic and the semiotic."24 of time set in the materialityand corporeality of experience. It contrasts with discursive ideas of temporality.The power and authorityof ideas derive from a different form of permanence or duration, which is precisely what establishes the domain of sense. Yet Kristevacannot show how the restricted extension of rhythmthrough time can challenge the authorityof represented ideas in their own domain. In rhythm,a future is possessed in the body. As such, it may be jubilant. It may be experienced as the ecstatic power of bodily reality,but even though there may be a lesser experience of reality in the realm of ideas, this is outweighed by the differentand greater power in the extension of authoritythrough the vastly greater duration available to "sense." Moreover,the largerthe sphere to be occupied by the economy of social or cultural life, the more overwhelming the advantage of power that accrues to the representation of ideas and to relations construed by their exchange. The abstraction that takes hold in the modernityof fullyextended industrial economies cannot be resisted as long as there is nothing else that can unfoldand expand to the limitof their ravenous horizons. This presents Benjaminwith the same problemthat confronts Kristeva, which is, of course, also the problem that runs through every critical
22. Powersof Horror, 23. Kristeva, to an Other," 135. "From One Identity 24. Kristeva,

Bullock / BadCompany 73 analysis of modernity.How can writingthat withdrawsfrom the domain of an empty and mechanical process of history be brought into criticalopposition to its counterpart in the sphere of public and explicit relations? Both Benjamin and Kristevaresort to an element that is "too impetuous"to remain true to either the condition of modernist literatureor anything observable in history.Though Benjaminvalues the taboo that will not relieve emptiness by opening the present up as a transitionto the future,he inserts the esoteric idea of a revolutionarymessianism in the space left by that taboo. Though Kristevavalues the sharply enclosed and uncompromising language of Joyce that refuses to participate in institutionalized,authoritative, communicative discourse, she nonetheless attempts to extend an experience so specific and restricted in time as the semiotic to establish an equivalent universal dimension in that same space. It is the imperative of redemptionthat reconciles these alienated domains with an idea of history.The element that is so impetuous in a desire for redemption sees the present condition of the world as a rule of evil. Redemption requires turningthe world upside down and inside out, so that the unrepresentable is the real and the marginal is the source from which all meanings flow. But Baudelaire has identifiedthe world of evil as a banality having neither margins nor center and finds the possibility of poetic language only in the creation of an artificialmargin, like the artificialfastidiousness of the dandy that he insinuates between himself and the crowd. Where Kristevaspeaks of realityand Benjaminof truth,they ascribe a value to the repressed that is only accorded its rights when it is restored to a central position. Thus, the process of negation that they pursue as the politicaldimension of modernist language actually reverses the form of negation accomplished in modernist aesthetics. Joyce's language is "dazzling, unending, eternal" in halting the stream of everyday discourse and breaking it up, just as the cubist painting of eighty years ago broke up the optical representation of visual continuities in the world, but this does not imply any form of restoration. The freedom and strength of the work of art vanish at once from any attempt to recuperate the work as public discourse, as didacticism.The productiveendowment of modernistworksfinds its source in the negation of active worldlypower and derives a powerless strength by identifyingwith the contraries of worldlylife. This corresponds exactly to what Benjamin observes in Baudelaire: "Tointerruptthe earth in its course-that was Baudelaire's deepest wish. Joshua's wish. Not so much the propheticpart of it, because he had no thought of turningit back. Out of this wish came his violence, his impatience, and his anger; fromthat

74 boundary 2 / Fall1995 same source too came his constant efforts to stab the worldto the heart, or to sing it into a sleep. By reason of this wish he also offers an encouraging companionship to death in the pursuitof its works"(Zentralpark, 667). The secular promise of salvation through progress is intimatelyconnected with the history of art and literaturefrom the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity.That history extends an ever more explicitrepresentation of the individual,or human possessions, artifacts, and settings, in portraits and narratives that give substance to the assertive exercise of an identity.In the last stages of that extension, the mechanical processes of reproduction,especially photography,propelthe workof art to the logical conclusion of an explorationthat had its tentative beginnings in the secularization of beauty in the Renaissance. The logic of representation pursued in this historyis to let the meaning of a physiognomyspeak through its appearance withoutviolating the optical characteristics of its presence. The image of a person in a portraitfrom that traditionsubordinates the rhythmof a painterlyfreedom of action to a discipline of appearances. That discipline will render the mask and gesture, through which the portrayed figure might speak as an individualsubject in life, and lets the visible form of a face convey and enframe the nature of the speech and the acts with which the individualis identical. The connection between the presence of the image, a surface of appearances, and the origin of a more permanent in the psychological subject, is what Benjamin value, a depth of interiority called "aura." His definitionsof aura are well known. He calls it "the experience of a distance, however close it may be," and writes that "to perceive the aura The of an object means to invest it with the abilityto look at us in return."25 with Kristeva's conaura has a direct connection of certainly disappearance cept of writing,if this is taken as a general metaphor of a surface, a mask, that has lost the connection to a singular true voice speaking through it. Benjaminbuildsthis idea up in the unstable persona of Baudelaire himself. He quotes Gustave Courbet'sobservation that "Baudelairelooked different every day" and describes "Baudelaire'sphysiognomy as that of a mime" (Zentralpark,676, 672). The loss of the artist's traditionalposition as the man who mediates auraticconnections between surface and psychological depth (as expressed in Baudelaire's "Perte d'aureole")can be accounted for, in Benjamin'sview, by the overwhelming presence of mass-produced
in Illuminations, "TheArtin the Age of MechanicalReproduction," 25. WalterBenjamin, in Illuminations, 188. 222; and "OnSome Motifsin Baudelaire,"

Bullock / BadCompany 75 characteristics.The shock of this empticommodities that have no individual ness in appearances turns the artist away from modes of meaning that look for the life in the masks and leaves him the task of contemplating them as death. function of modernism in art, incapable of This is the "allegorical" to reflectthe ideal life of its society. Its material,instead, holding up a mirror becomes a mute world of ruins. Benjamin writes, "The man sunk deep in contemplationwho is shocked withfrightwhen his eye falls on the fragment in his hand becomes an allegoricist"(Zentralpark, 676). This art suddenly begins to speak of its own shock, for it has discovered that it cannot any longer give its voice to the mask of appearances. Therefore, it can no longer close the split between the distinctive author of the work and the banal authorityof the worldlyobject bid for in the market. The significance of the characteristic artisticactivitythat now supervenes under conditions of modernity and redefines the work of art as the classical forms of beauty break up and are abandoned also divides Benjamin and Kristeva. Where the traditionaldiscipline of representation falls away, the freedom that falls to the artist to portraythe arbitrarinessof formalproductioncan bespeak that condition in two ways. For Benjamin,it turns backwardin a disenchanted look of shock at the futilityof the beauty that went before. It exposes the game that had once masqueraded as the true voice of human life by portrayingthe abstractness of all artifacts. In his essay "TheAuthoras Producer," Benjamintakes the example of a dada "still life,"in which discarded objects of everyday use are included with painted elements: "Andthereby the public was shown: look, your picture frame ruptures time; the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than it can look forwardas the site of a firstfreedom of painting."26 Alternatively, human essence and a premonitionof a revolution that enables that freedom itself to rupturethe frame and flood out into a historicallytransformedworld filled by that essence. Though Kristeva inclines initiallytoward the second position, the of frailty that power locked up within the frame puts it in question from the start. To Benjamin's eye, only the quite separate theological concept of a messianic force can compensate for that frailty.In the black light of of atheism. But depression, Kristevacontemplates the counterillumination this, too, passes on the function of mediating between art and the social world to criticism, which arrives to throw light on the text as soon as the
26. WalterBenjamin, "TheAuthor as Producer," in Reflections,229.

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author's aureole drops away into the street. Whereas once the effect of framingestablished a privilegedtie of aesthetics that might speak in larger, mythicterms for the audience, now the work of art stands coldly shadowed by a wall refusing the audience its seductive desires to possess the poet as their own more exalted reflection. Baudelaire's fraternal reader shares in the poet's reduced aspirationthat only knows an exalted role in the form of hypocrisy. Kristevadislikes what Baudelaire's place in literaryhistory suggests about the importance of framingeffects that he achieved by strict form, but her own productiveactivities highlightthe dependency of modern literature on the institutions of criticism that also establish the special place of an artistic text or artifactthat cannot operate through the luxurious means of high formal order. This recognition of her own place brings her closer to Benjamin'sview, as her practice of critical reading fails to bring the vitality of writingany closer to real presence. Criticismvoices the truththat arises out of the insignificance of art, acknowledging that "beauty is an artifice;it is imaginary." Though Benjamin may be correct to reprove the surrealists for confusing the jubilation of aesthetic experience with the triumph yet to be reached in a historical redemption, both he and Kristevarisk precisely the same mistake fromthe other side, as critics.The role of activatingart in politics and history by a theoretical mediation requires the work of transvaluation only, "thusopening the way for philosophers or semioticians"(How,98). Yet philosophical or semiotic reading can only demonstrate that under conditions of modernity,the position of poetic language outside communicative discourse is its sole constitutive meaning. What turned literarymodernity away from the model of authorityin aura was not only the evident failureof one distinction,the artistic achievement of an image that trulycaptured the deep autonomy of the subject, but also its replacement by another, the image that now refuses to let distance maintainthe illusion of depth. And to this corresponds the shift in the idea of what is "heroic"in the artist. Benjaminwrites of the "markof heroism in Baudelaire:to live in the heart of the unreality(of appearances)" (Zentralpark,673). The creative giant of the Renaissance, whose stature empowers him to reach into the distant origins of the autonomous spirit,gives way to the figurewho endures the impoverishmentof the spirit,inflictedwhen truth goes out of the world and leaves a ruin behind or a mere fragment in the artist's hand. This is what connects the differentsituations of Baudelaire and Nietzsche, in Benjamin'sperspective: "Baudelaire'sheroic composure

Bullock / BadCompany 77 could be closely related to that of Nietzsche. Even though he held on to his Catholicism, his experience of the world remains precisely in step with that experience which Nietzsche captured in the formula:God is dead" (Zentralpark, 676). The failureof the distinctionthat raises up one class of images as the appearance through which truthspeaks leaves another measure of artistic success in its stead, the truthfulnessof an eye that can look on the worldwithoutdrawingdistinctions in a universe of untruthful appearances. This does lift a boundary to let the discredited margins jostle and mock the dignified center, but only in the aesthetic realm and not in the space of discourse. Thus, Kristeva exaggerates the case when she says established forms of communicative power in the institutionsof the public domain "no longer command attention"(How, 92). There, the truthof facts and the truth of ruling influences continue to sustain both a political and social mythology.This appears in the "low" domains of images marketedto sustain that sphere, from which the "high" art of heroic modernism would withdrawcompletely were it not also disseminated in the marketplace. In Black Sun, Kristeva has recognized that even when narrativeor pictorialillusion is gone from the work of art, the semiotic functions do not fillit up with livingreality.Forus, the experience mediated by the workof art remains, as before, tied to the condition of the artifact.The active energy that produced it does not have the capacity to reach across the frame and lift either the maker or the contemplating person from isolation. It is, in Kristeva'swords from Black Sun, "nolonger libidinal.Itis already detached, dissociated," and, like the image of woman for Baudelaire, "ithas already integrated the traces of death." With the last measure of distance gone, approach to artistic representations no longer offers falsely whispered intimations of love and survival.But,as before, the sounds we mighthear when we let them "bewitchus" in the momentary thrallof longing do not speak from any heart but are part of "an artifice"in the composed surface. Here we come equally to the mature prose of Joyce and the verse of Baudelaire. How can one expect to transformthe text and its paragrams into a heartfeltcall of erotic connections? Baudelaire can only draw on the image of the harlot in order to cancel everything. Finnegan's Wake has collected everybody withinthe equality of a destructionwroughton the language of literarytradition.The whore becomes the representamen of all relations and appearances for Baudelaire because she stands allegorically for all that need never be listened to. Since she is simultaneously commodity and purveyor in one, what she says is not real speech but doubly lost. Benjamin points out that even though Baudelaire moves the figure of

2 / Fall1995 78 boundary the whore to the center of his stage, he does not interferewith the convention of her speechlessness: "Baudelairenever wrote a poem about a whore from the point of view of a whore" (Zentralpark, 672). But in this, he conthe of view of modern aesthetics point veys altogether. It is a point of view that knows identificationwith what it contemplates only as the collapse of identityand is inseparable from Baudelaire's heroic heartlessness, livingat the heartless heart of unreality. The fear of pleasure that ties Benjaminto the messianic idea appears in a secular formas Kristeva'sattachment to an idiomof general command, appearing most recently in the abstractions of clinicaldiscourse. As her language becomes simpler, less writerly,its tremors do grow more seductive, and also more likespeech, but it returnsto an older voice that stillargues or pleads for that most terriblelonging-for the assent of others-that draws us out into the marketplace. Her language still trembles with horrorat the unrulynakedness of a private hearing and the heterogeneous response in a tongue that escapes the discursive frame of public solidarityto open up a differentlife far from that heroic solitude of publicagreement we mistake for ourselves. And what distinguishes our time as a hundredyears frozen in a solitude of unchanging modernity is that it cannot arrive at a renewal out of itself and become the mother of its own redemption, though it "seems to have, for a century now, gone into unending labor pains."The dream of a Renaissance continues to be swept away into the future, like Benjamin's Angel of History,and persists as longing and fascination:"Theenchantment will have to wait for some other time, always and forever."27 In Black Sun, however, the backwardgaze of the historian takes in the spectacle of Benjamin and Kristeva'sown earlier writingas well: "To posit the existence of a primalobject, or even of a Thing, which is to be conveyed through and beyond a completed mourning-isn't that the fantasy of a melancholy theoretician?"(Black Sun, 66). The labor of writing, that has no power of redemption, is discovered now to have a productivity the absent maternal meaning. Desire has proved once again to displaced have transferred its libidinalenergy to its own image: "The Western subject, as potential melancholy being, having become a relentless conveyor, ends up a confirmed gambler or potential atheist."The game, the contest, is played compulsively,or withouthope. "Theinitialbelief"in a renewal that
27. Kristeva, Powersof Horror, 23.

/ BadCompany 79 Bullock writingwas to have prophesied and broughtto birthgives out. The text turns "stylisticperformance"into the vehicle of its other side, what the game itself and constructs as a substitute. The chance is lost because what is "primal" in the text is accounted "less importantthan the success of the text "other" itself"(Black Sun, 68). And thus, she leaves no doubt that, here, to win is to lose-even to lose the remembrance of what might have been ours to win.