nicholas wrote:
"are you simply saying that there is inconsistency between word and
deed with some postmodern practitioners? In other words, they seem to
know theoretically all about decentred self but their writing practice
still bears many of the trappings of an I-centred position."
In my struggles with kristeva - particularly in "The Black Sun" - I came
across the following passage describing the melancholy/depressive position
in respect to her experience of writing and the poet:
"If the melancholy person ceaselessly exerts an ascendency, as loving as it
is hateful over that Thing, (thing being, I think, the object - the 'secret
and unreachable horizon of our loves and desires')...the poet finds an
enigmatic way of being both subordinate to it and...elsewhere. Disinherited,
deprived of that lost paradise, he is wretched; writing, however, is the
strange way that allows him to overcome such wretchedness by setting up an
"I" that controls both aspects of deprivation - the darkness of
disconsolation and the "kiss of the queen". The "I" then asserts itself on
the field of artifice - there is a place for "I" only in play, in theatre,
behind the mask of possible identities, which are as extravagant,
prestigious, mythical, epic, historical and esoteric as they are incredible.
Triumphant, but also uncertain. This "I" that pins down and secures the
first line, "I am saturnine - bereft - disconsolate" points, with a
knowledge as certain as it is illuminated with a hallucinatory nescience, to
the necessary condition for the poetic act."
For me, it recalls the saturnine, prophetic "I am" tradition evident in
Clare and in some cases, the celtic tradition - regardless, it's still hard
to not feel the overwhelming "I" of Kristeva in her writing!!
maria
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