Writing the Melancholic: The Dynamics of Melancholia in Julia Kristeva’s ＂Black Sun＂

In this paper, rather than repeating the efforts of other scholars who explore more widely disseminated Kristevan concepts such as the semiotic, the chora, or the abject, I examine Kristeva's more recent theoretical formulations in ”Black Sun”. Reading her theory of melancholia in the larger context of her theory of signifying practice, I argue that Kristeva employs the prediscursive melancholy economy and the maternal Thing to arrive at a different understanding of what counts as art and literature in cultural practices. One of the main concerns of this paper is to explore the dynamic encounter between writing and melancholia in Kristeva's ”Black Sun”. The explicit relation between the two-Kristeva opposes the ”artistic” or ”writing cure” to melancholia-constitutes at once the most dynamic, therapeutic, and yet the most problematic aspect of Kristeva's theory. For here her theory runs the risk of a dangerous circularity, that of returning women to the patriarchal symbolic order that contributed to the production of female melancholia in the first place. Therefore this paper, ”The Writing of the Melancholic,” is a critique which aims to sharpen our awareness of the hidden assumptions or conceptual limits embedded in Kristeva's conceptualization of melancholia, a gender study which hopes to lay bare a certain gender bias that structures Kristeva's ”Black Sun”.