Healing religion: aesthetics and analysis in the work of Kristeva and Clement.

"The Psychoanalyst is called upon to heal: the social command that
justifies his existence is expressed in this way." (1)

Two of the most influential continental thinkers of recent years are Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement. They have provided important and controversial articulations of the significance of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as intensive engagement with both contemporary French philosophy as well as the continental tradition. Both are perhaps most notable for their atopic writing, as neither is easily placed within a specific discipline or school. Given the similarly displaced nature of their thought--what Kristeva calls their "nomadism," (2) as well as their common intellectual heritage and their complex relation to feminism, it is not surprising that Kristeva and Clement see an affinity in one another's work. Recently, in The Feminine and the Sacred, they have corresponded in a shared study that brings their analytical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives to bear on the practice and reflection of religion. Writing on "what is to come," through debate and disagreement, they open a future in their correspondence that is "perhaps the essential thing in friendship." (3) While both see the passage through religion as a central component of the cultural and psychic repair requisite in postmodernity, their different proposals for healing illuminate their respective interpretations of psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and aesthetics. This paper will explore the central aesthetic components of their analytical approaches, and how their valuation of different aesthetic modalities leads them to diverge in their interpretations of religion. In particular, Clement's attention to the syncopative, fissuring effects of music, and the centrality of such fissuring to the possibility of analytic healing, lead her to question the adequacy of a philosophical or theological approach that valorizes language. By contrast, Kristeva's work emphasizes the relational, semiotically infused language of religious discourse, as a language that can lead beyond the constraints of the symbolic towards a poetic, creative subjectivity. In the interstices of their conversation, the narrow path of an analytic healing that leads language to dwell peacefully in the flesh emerges into view.

I. Kristeva: Aesthetics, Language, and Forgiveness

While much of Kristeva's recent work has been devoted to the analysis of the modalities of psychic life cultivated within Christianity, (4) the transformative potential of religious aesthetics is clearest in her reflections on Dostoevsky and depression in Black Sun. Depression is marked by passivity and despondency--an utter loss of speech and signification; it is a living death of the subject. Under the "noncommunicable grief" of depression's black sun, one loses one's being. As Kristeva describes melancholy's origins:

       The wound I have just suffered, some setback or other in my love
       life or profession, some sorrow or bereavement affecting my
       relationship with close relatives--such are often the easily
       spotted triggers of my despair ... All this suddenly gives me
       another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows,
       tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times,
       then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that
       although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it,
       is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. (5)

In wounding, there is a loss of the loved object, and with that loss goes the signifying relation that maintained one's bond to the object. Speech fails. In the face of such loss, the avenues from despair are suicide, terrorism (or murder), or an artistic sublimation of the abyss. All three are found in Dostoevsky's work, which proceeds in light of Christ's embodiment of the passage from suffering to forgiveness, through the act of donation. Dostoevsky's writing, as a writing of forgiveness, is a "continuous struggle to compose a work edge to edge with the unnameable sensuous delights of destructive chaos ... works of art thus lead us to establish relations with ourselves and others that are less destructive, more soothing." (6)

The melancholic, in the face of absolute loss, can maintain a signifying stance through suffering. While suffering, as a "checking of hatred," (7) places a hold on violence, the one suffering remains within the purview of loss. Without an opening to the future, the reversion to violence and aggressivity always remains possible. Dostoevsky's work illustrates a "third way" of responding to melancholy that Kristeva terms "aesthetic forgiveness": the literary representation of the affect, and thus of the loss. Such literary representation is a form of semiotic speech, drawing upon the affects and energy of the suffering body to inform language. It draws on the rhythms and tones of the body, but translates these into verbal speech. Through writing, the passivity of the affect becomes causally effective, restoring signifying agency. It creates a temporality in which a new life of the subject can unfold; writing is forgiveness as a form of remembrance that opens a future. Such forgiveness, when found in the analytic setting, Kristeva terms such forgiveness tact, as one listens for the voice hidden within the representation of suffering, so that one can begin again beyond the representation. Writing, as a separation from the object and renewal of love through symbolization, becomes a renewal and resuscitation of the subject. It remembers the loss of the beloved that gave rise to melancholy, the crime and violence that grew from the loss of signification, yet manages to assert meaning, thereby giving new possibilities to the subject through an act of forgiveness. Through a new identification with the ideal, "it allows him [the subject] to live a second life, a life of forms and meaning, somewhat exalted or artificial in the eyes of outsiders." (8) Such forgiveness may appear immoral, since in moving toward a future it refuses to directly or punitively address injury; yet, for the depressive subject to have a future, such forgiveness, in its amorality, may be necessary. The representation, and appropriation, of being-forgiven is thus at the heart of Kristeva's understanding of how analysis repairs psychic life.

In Kristeva's view, the Trinitarian theology of Eastern Orthodox Christianity underlies Dostoevsky's poetics, in its emphasis on the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity. In particular, Kristeva locates Raskolnikov's aesthetic, symbolic identification with Sonia within the Orthodox understanding of the Holy Spirit's procession--from the Father through the Son (per filium), as opposed to the filioque (with the Son) of Western Christianity. Kristeva locates the importance of the "through" (per) in its "pneumatological belonging"--the persons of the Trinity are identified precisely by their interpenetration and relation, merging with one another. Doestoevsky's aesthetic forgiveness, then, becomes a way to extend this indwelling life, opening a space in which the reader may also participate:

       Writing causes the affect to slip into the effect--actus purus,
       as Aquinas might say. It conveys affects and does not repress
       them, it suggests for them a sublimatory outcome, it transposes
       them for an other in a threefold, imaginary, and symbolic bond.
       Because it is forgiveness, writing is transformation,
       transposition, translation. (9)

As Kristeva describes in The Feminine and the Sacred, the sacred is the "sustained connection between life and meaning." (10) It is, as in Dostoevsky, a symbolic re-ordering, or a re-binding that establishes relations in the face of loss or absence. There is, on her view, a necessary passage through language, and, as exemplified above, in particular through the symbolic discourse of Christianity, which establishes a way toward nonviolent relations, and a welcoming of alterity within oneself. It is only in literary representation, through language, that such hospitable subjectivity emerges. However, to truly be hospitable, the discourse cannot remain objective--in her early terminology, it cannot be reduced to the symbolic level--for purely thetic discourse does violence to others and becomes dissociated from embodiment. Thus, the relation established by religious discourse must itself be analyzed, in order to avoid repeating the very violence it seeks to avoid. As Kristeva describes, Christianity must be traversed--"that is, by knowing and analyzing: not by becoming imprisoned within it." (11) It is through the artistic and analytic appropriation of symbolic language that Kristeva articulates the salvific (salus, healthy) potential that resides within Christian literary and symbolic aesthetics.

II. Offbeat: Music, Philosophy, and Rapture

While Kristeva listens for the transformative dimensions of literature, the undecidability of music catches Clement's ear. Music carries one to the heavens, while in dance one moves in a particular, earthly place. Melodious and harmonious, is music diachronic progression or synchronic difference? Is music reflectively ethereal, or rhythmically corporeal? As Clement cites Levi-Strauss, "since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once both intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creation is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself is the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress." (12) As a supreme mystery, like the sacred which "passes in a boundlessness without rule or reservation," (13) music dissolves the borders and oppositions that structure thought and communities, eliding any easy categorization.

In light of Levi-Strauss's description of music as the "supreme mystery," Clement interrogates the philosophical categorization of music. Clement accentuates the syncopative, elusive dimension of music that has so often been suppressed--as, perhaps, in Kristeva's privileging of verbal aesthetics. By bringing the listener into a trance, music introduces a delay into the rhythm of culture--what Clement terms a syncope, which can become depression, darkness, or rupture, throwing time out of joint, unsettling anticipation or expectation. The strange new world of syncope shines a dark light on our world, such that "when one returns from syncope it is the real world that suddenly looks strange." (14)

In Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, Clement analyzes the harnessing and suppression of syncope within western culture and philosophy. This harnessing has been effected, in part, by the weakening of ritual practice. As ritual life has diminished, syncope's place within culture has diminished as well; the productive time of daylight, the time of the subject, pervades and determines our lives. "Today's world watches with jealous care in order to limit these crossings over into nothingness ... The work ethic and the energy invested in it take over benevolent night's territory; retirement, where the senses once sheltered from thought, now resounds like a bell with productive activity." (15) In place of syncopative rites, regression now occurs solely through depression, rupturing the social bond as an "echo of those lost initiations." The focus on energy, productivity and social being forecloses the relation to delay, weakness, and solitude that would enable a different way of being in the world.

In its desire for light and clarity, the philosophical classification of music contributes to this harnessing. In an intriguing, brief commentary on Kant, Clement illustrates the modern philosophical containment of syncope in Kant's determination of the sublime. The sublime is the transcending of feeling, for example in the recognition of fear; there is a feeling of being sensibly over-whelmed, and yet one recuperates subjectivity through reason's grasp of the feeling of being overwhelmed. However, Kant must classify music because of its potentially subversive nature, being both spiritual and sensible. He associates music entirely with physicality, as a "play of tones," (16) as an activity that excites the intestines yet has no share in reason. He thereby denies music's syncopative power in human life: "It is already enough if he will allow to pass, by detouring through a scrupulous and honorable analysis of the feelings and the arts, a little syncope in the sublime and a lot in laughter ... But great care is taken not to let it spill over." (17)

The exceptions to this systematic keeping of the beat are, not surprisingly, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, whose poetic grasp of syncope unsettles the graceful waltz of the "Hegelian three-step." Kierkegaard opens the thought of syncope through his reflections on the abyssal separation and irreducible temporality of the leap. "This immoderate leap that suspends man's weight has the very lightness of fainting away: the magical grace of human time as it passes, of thought as it stops." (18) Abraham's leap as the knight of faith carries Kierkegaard beyond the calm world of systematic thought. Abraham is the knight who goes beyond the border of thought, (19) entering into darkness: the teleological suspension of the ethical, his silence before Sarah, or the paradox of faith, are all figures for the atemporal darkness and separation that constitute syncope. (20) Faith passes into a moment of despair, sickness, or weakness which cannot be readily synthesized, and which remains even if Abraham does simultaneously believe that Isaac will be given back to him.

Through Abraham, Kierkegaard's work leads to Lacan, as the "knight of faith" introduces a fissure into the subject. Lacan's insight into hysterical discourse was to hear it as its own language. This listening enabled what Clement describes as Lacan's true psychoanalytic discovery, the mirror stage. The mirror stage is syncopative, because it results from the delayed development of the child, who lacks motor coordination, and the anticipated resolution of this delay, as the reflection in the mirror presages what the infant wants to become. The work of the analyst then becomes introducing this gap into the subject, where identification with the Ideal-I would always attempt to cover over this gap. To do so, the analyst must listen to the rhythm of the patient's speech, and syncopate it. "The best way to put it would be to say that the psychoanalyst's job is to look for an effect of syncope during every session." (21) It is precisely by hearing the fissuring of the subject that Clement sees Lacan as resisting "American" psychoanalysis, with its utilitarian overtones of "ego-strengthening." (22) To recognize and seek the mirror stage is to open oneself to the rhythm that precedes the subject, and thereby points to its dissolution. To hear language as music, in its distinctive rhythm, is to go beyond what the language signifies, to its signifying as itself.

However, while Kierkegaard's knight of faith opens a path toward Lacan, fissuring philosophy in the turn towards syncope, his work also represents the most subtle form of syncope's confinement. This becomes most apparent in The Seducer's Diary, where the seducer's desire for syncope epitomizes the operatic economy of syncope. Clement explores this trajectory in her well-known work, Opera, or the Undoing of Women. In The Seducer's Diary, once a young girl makes the leap, she is destroyed. In a sense, this is a spectacle of syncope, in which the girl leaps and dies for the seducer, who will then seek a new seduction. He, then, does not leap; the seducing subject who watches the leap remains intact. In the seducer's complacency, Clement detects the appropriation and silencing of women that constitutes the operatic spectacle:

      Oh, I have read you over and over again, Soren, I understand
      perfectly well what you write so complacently. No, seduction is
      not only the act of making oneself be loved when one does not
      love; it is, above all, making the one who loves you know that you
      do not love--breaking her flight, clipping her wings, making her
      bend her neck. (23)

For Clement, opera is a spectacle in which women and marginal figures, undergo suffering and death, displaying syncope for the sake of heroism and the audience. As Clement writes in Opera, or the Undoing of Women, operatic music conceals the narratives, while playing them out, such that the music actually develops the narratives, subconsciously implanting the ideology that "maintains the harsh laws of family and politics." (24) Thus, the reverse side of Kierkegaard's work is the possible subordination of syncope to the narrative and ideological constraints of language. For Clement, this trajectory can be avoided only by entering into syncope through music, regressing via ritual and renunciation of the subject.

In light of this dual trajectory of Kierkegaard's work, we can now situate Clement's reflections on music in relation to Kristeva. Throughout her work, Clement reflects on the concern that the appropriation of syncope, and its sub-ordination to narrative or thematic language, closes off the activity of subjectivity and leads to an unbalanced, unhealthy life for humanity. Whether it is Kant's reduction of music to intestinal gyrations, Kierkegaard's appropriation of feminine youth, or an analyst "only hearing a novel" in a patient's discourse, the privilege of verbal forms of aesthetic and religious practice fragments human life in ways that preclude any real salvation. This forms the background for Clement's dispute with Kristeva, and particularly Clement's refusal to accord any privilege to the symbolic discourse of Christianity. Instead, she focuses on the rites of self-dissolution of Indian philosophy as the truth of analysis, and adopts a syncretistic approach to religion. In light of the above, one could say that Clement objects to Kristeva's formulation of aesthetic forgiveness, in large part because it fails to consider the need for regression as a way to syncopate life, opening a creative future in the fissuring of the subject, breaking with any specific teleology. (25) As figured by the religious shaman, whose ceremonial "bisexual transvestism" (26) opens a way to pure being, Clement argues such rhythmic ecstasis must resist appropriation. Indeed, might not the aesthetic forgiveness of Dostoevsky operate as an appropriation of syncopative energies that always already submits to the symbolic order? Clement, then, doubts that the very symbolic system of Trinitarian monotheism which Kristeva privileges could truly enable the requisite regression as an opening to the sacred. (27) A more profound embodiment, as found in rites, music, dance, and syncope, may be a reparative way of healing that elides the passage through depression.

While Kristeva admits the necessity of regression, as a way of bringing the drives to light, she remains wary of valorizing regression per se. As figured by the dissolution of identity between mother and child in the maternal bond, such fissuring may also consume the identity of the subject, or lead the subject to consume others. (28) A passage into symbolic identification is therefore necessary, in order to demarcate identity so that others can be welcomed to dinner, without being welcomed as dinner. As Kristeva describes in her more recent political writings, regression can be a strengthening of "maternal" bonds to homeland or nation, thereby underwriting a nationalism or xenophobia, or an assimilation of the other; for her, there is no hospitality or cosmopolitanism without a passage into symbolic language. (29) Where Clement is cautious with respect to the possible appropriations of syncope, Kristeva's attention to forms of transformation within the symbolic order cautions against a too-ready rejection of religious and literary discourse.

What we see in their exchange, then, is that both Kristeva and Clement seek to cultivate a subjectivity attentive to and hospitable towards otherness, and welcoming of the particularity of the other, and yet their paths to such subjectivity appear to be irreconcilable--either, to hear language as music, or to poetically, semiotically verbalize musical and rhythmic expression. Each is concerned with the problem of appropriation; Clement fears the appropriation of syncope by symbolic and industrial institutions, while Kristeva seeks to avoid the appropriation and consumption of others via narcissism.

Perhaps, ultimately, it is in thinking the conjunction of their positions, such that they hear one another, that the hospitality of their thought really emerges. Through their disagreement, the concept of the sacred itself becomes fissured. Here language becomes truly attentive to the rhythm and meter of music, and music opens singer and hearer toward one another in speech. In Clement and Kristeva's exchanges in The Feminine and the Sacred, we see that the irreducible difference of their positions serves as a reminder that semiotics and aesthetics must remain mindful of the deficiencies of either approach. Clement's work, then, may serve as a necessary dislocation for Kristeva's attempt to analytically traverse religion, and specifically her emphasis on the "cosmopolitanism" of Christianity, questioning the depth of her analysis and syncopating its progression. The passage into language, analyzing and acknowledging one's affects, creates a necessary space for relation to others. However, it is by entering into the temporality of music, which joins heaven and earth, we first learn to listen so that we can hear the other speak, and that words can dwell peacefully in the flesh.

Notes

1. Catherine Clement, The Weary Sons of Freud, trans. N. Ball (New York: Verso, 1987), pp. 85-6.

2. Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Todd (New York; Columbia U. Press, 2001), p. 1.

3. Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 17.

4. In addition to The Feminine and the Sacred, this thematic runs from Tales of Love and Powers of Horror through New Maladies of the Soul, as well as her recent writings on Arendt.

5. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 3-4.

6. Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 187-8. For more on Kristeva on forgiveness, in particular in comparison with Hegel's account, see Kelly Oliver, "Forgiveness and Community," Southern Journal of Philosophy (Spring 2004): 1-16.

7. Ibid., p. 182.

8. Ibid., 208.

9. Ibid., 217.

10. Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 14.

11. The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 165.

12. Catherine Clement, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 209.

13. Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 30.

14. Clement, Syncope, p. 1.

15. Ibid., p. 25. Next quote, same page.

16. Ibid., p. 54. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 170-77.

17. Syncope, p. 49.

18. Ibid., p. 89.

19. As Kierkegaard writes, "Thinking about Abraham is another matter, however: there I am shattered ... I am constantly repelled, and, despite all its passion, my thought cannot penetrate it, cannot get ahead by a hairsbreadth," Fear and Trembling, trans. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 33.

20. Clement, Syncope, pp. 95-97.

21. Ibid., p. 125.

22. This is, of course, one of her central concerns in her writings on analysis, The Weary Sons of Freud (New York: Verso, 1987), pp. 80-84, and The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan.

23. Clement, Opera: the Undoing of Women, trans. Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 82.

24. Clement, Opera, p. 178.

25. While this is not my primary concern here, it does seem that Clement's work provides another way of articulating, and perhaps also responding to, the problems with Kristeva's work highlighted by Judith Butler. As in Gender Trouble, Butler argues that Kristeva's conception of the semiotic, and likewise of the maternal, actually conceals the productive function that the symbolic law can serve. Her conception of the maternal, while ostensibly opening access to alterity, can be read as itself a culturally-produced form of subjectivity, which reinscribes the very law of the symbolic that she wants to reject. See Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 89-93, and Kelly Oliver, "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions," Hypatia (1989): 95-114.

Briefly, I think Clement's work could be seen as helpful here on a couple of counts. First, For Clement, regression into the syncope of drives always occurs in and through cultural forms, such as rites and dance. Thus, the naturalness of the semiotic is called into question. Second, where Kristeva relegates certain forms of speech to psychosis--namely, those of homosexuality--Clement's work suggests that the task of analysis is to hear such speech as language, to achieve a balance, or perhaps a harmony, between diverse modes of expression. Religiously, this finds its expression in syncretism, as embodied by Gandhi. See Syncope, pp. 242-8, and Gandhi: The Power of Pacifism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).

26. Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 52. The figure of the shaman is central to several of her writings; see The Lives and Legend of Jacques Lacan, p. 203, where she describes Lacan as a shaman; and The Weary Sons of Freud, pp. 52-3.

27. "... on the side of Christian monotheism. I do not see how a male saint could identify with any female figure whatsoever, especially not the virgin" (Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 54). For Kristeva's response, which focuses on the ambivalence of Bernard of Clairvaux, see pp. 62-4, and Tales of Love, trans. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 151-70.

28. The need for symbolic identification, as placing "a hold on affects" that would consume others, is notably connected with the language of Christianity in "From Signs to the Subject," in New Maladies of the Soul (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 127-34.

29. See, especially, Strangers to Ourselves and Nations Without Nationalism.