from "Psychoanalysis- A Counterdepressant," Black Sun, Julia Kristeva

"My depression points to my not knowing how to lose- I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being, and of Being itself."

"...common experience of object loss and of a modification of signifying bonds. These bonds, language in particular, prove to be unable to insure..."

"At this logical extreme, desire no longer exists. Desire becomes dissolved in a disintegration of transmission and a disintegration of bonds...best described as a breakdown of biological and logical sequentiality."

"fear of losing oneself as object"


from "Life and Death of Speech"

"Finally, when that frugal musicality becomes exhausted in its turn, or simply does not succeed in becoming established on account of the pressure of silence, the melancholy person appears to stop cognizing as well as uttering, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos."

"If, on the contrary, the symbolic dimension proves to be insufficient, subjects find themselves back at the dead-end of a helplessness leading to inaction and death." ("language has an activating effect")

"Would the fate of the speaking being consist in ceaselessly transposing, always further beyond or more to the side, such a transposition of series or sentences testifying to our ability to work out a fundamental mourning and successive mournings? Our gift of speech, of situating ourselves in time for an other, could exist nowhere except beyond an abyss. Speaking beings, from their ability to endure in time up to their enthusiastic, learned, or simply amusing constructions, demand a break, a renunciation, an unease at their foundations."

"...Until the weight of the primal Thing prevails, and all translatability become impossible. Melancholia then ends up in asymbolia, in loss of meaning: if I am no longer capable of translating or metaphorizing, I become silent and I die."

"Signs are arbitrary because language starts with a negation (Verneinung) of loss, along with the depression occasioned by mourning. "I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother," is what the speaking being seems to be saying. "But no, I have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her (that is the negation), I can recover her 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." [Cixous: in the moment of loss, I am not there, I do not manage]