“Can the beautiful be sad?”

Really, Kristeva? I have trouble convincing myself it can be anything but sad.

*Edit–Her next question: “Can disenchantment be beautiful?” A better question.

Poisonous

This year I’m doing a better job of reporting to authorities the more serious forms of sexual harassment I get from male students. (Last year I just tried to deal with it all myself, which backfired spectacularly.) But that means there is now more than one kid who has been (a) been suspended for an incident related to me and (b) been ordered by the administration never to talk to me, come near me, or look at me again if he wants to avoid expulsion.

Ours is a very small school, and this is awkward. I used to walk the halls wary of words and hands; now I’m all shifty-eyed because I’m afraid of bumping into silence or fear or anger.

Kristeva’s Linguistics of Depression

“Listen again for a few moments to depressive speech, repetitive, monotonous, or empty of meaning, inaudible even for the speaker before he or she sinks into mutism. You will note that, with melancholy persons, meaning appears to be arbitrary, or else it is elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but seems secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking. Or else it is from the very beginning evasive, uncertain, deficient, quasi mutistic: ‘one’ speaks to you already convinced that the words are wrong and therefore ‘one’ speaks carelessly, ‘one’ speaks without believing in it.

“Meaning, however, is arbitrary; linguistics asserts it for all verbal signs and for all discourse . . . Now every ‘normal’ speaker learns to take that artifice seriously, to cathex it or forget it.

“Signs are arbitrary because language starts with a negation (Verneinung) of loss . . . ‘I have lost an essential object . . . but no, I have found [it] again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose [it] I have not lost [it] (that is the negation), I can recover [it] in language.

“Depressed persons, on the contrary, disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted. The denial (Verleugnung) of negation would thus be the exercise of an impossible mourning, the setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier and that intonation alone, intermittently, succeeds in inflecting.”

“Persons in despair become hyperlucid by nullifying negation. A signifying sequence, necessarily an arbitrary one, will appear to them as heavily, violently arbitrary; they will think it absurd, it will have no meaning . . . The arbitrary sequence perceived by depressive persons as absurd is coextensive with a loss of reference. The depressed speak of nothing, they have nothing to speak of: glued to the Thing (Res) they are without objects.”

This reminds me of the time I kept staring at a chair wondering why it was ever made, named, used–anything. I was so confused–and even more confused when I tried to explain the episode to my friend afterward.

[All excerpts are from Black Sun.]

Reading Kristeva

It’s maddening. She’ll be rolling along with a brilliant argument, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she’ll attribute everything she just said to the fact that women want penises, that melancholia involves the absorption of one’s mother through one’s anus, that we all want to kill our fathers–whatever. I don’t get it.

Field Trips

School excursions for my students inevitably involve their being surrounded by a sea of very, very wide-eyed white people. They are used to this, and we are all used to my whiteness being seized upon with relief by fearful tour guides and ushers. We can joke about it now. But there’s always something new that pisses me off. Today it was a cashier. We owed $214 for a tour. I paid with my credit card. After she recovered from the shock of my not having a check from the school, she said she would get me a receipt so I could get reimbursed. I said that it was okay, that I wasn’t going to be reimbursed, that the other teacher and I would just split the amount. She said “Oh, of course you’ll be reimbursed!” as if I were crazy and got me the receipt anyway. Well no, actually I won’t. We fought hard just to get the transportation covered by the school, then made students pay more than they should have (and we paid for the ones who couldn’t afford the $10), and we still needed to chip in to make the balance. Teachers do this all the time. We’re not unusual. I wanted to tell her this. Of course I didn’t. But really. How clueless can you get? No wonder people don’t rally around education reform. They don’t even know it’s needed.

Descriptions of Depression, Part Two

When I wrote this post I had not yet read what should have been its centerpiece:

“For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic–it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.” – Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

I have struggling for years to express what Kristeva does so perfectly with those last two sentences.

Everything Is Illuminated

I just found out that the head custodian at the school where I teach is the brother of the guy who coordinates custodial work and contracts for the entire city.

Tone

Today I was trying to help my students understand the concept of tone. I gave them a list of adjectives, made sure they understood the words, and asked each to write five short narratives about a single event, each with a different tone. Then some asked if they could share what they had written and see if their classmates could guess what tone they had been going for, so I said sure. This ended up being rather amusing, especially since one kid wrote about pissing himself (calmly, excitedly, angrily, formally, and curiously). But the best moment was when someone raised his hand to share the following:

“I whacked the dog with a bat, cut off his skin, ripped him limb from limb, pulled out his organs, and threw him in a hot fiery pot; I was hungry. After I devoured his meat, I buried his bones and pissed on his grave.”