"Still Seeking for Something": The Unspeakable (Loss) in "Passing" (2008)

I am saturnine - bereft - disconsolate, The Prince of Aquitaine whose tower has crumbled; My lone star is dead - and my bespangled lute Bears Black Sun of Melancholia. Gerard de Nerval, El Desdichado1 The Melancholic Souls his famous essay Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Sigmund Freud writes that loss of object normally provokes reaction known as mourning. The mourner knows whom or what he/she lost and is aware that suffering is part of normal process at end of which new life begins. Yet, Freud adds that in some people same event produces melancholia instead of mourning. many cases one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost. This situtation is common in psychoanalysis, even when patient is aware of loss which has given rise to his/her melancholia, but only in sense that he/she knows whom he/she has lost, but not what he/she has lost in him/her. Freud suggests therefore that melancholia is in some way related to object lost which is withdrawn from consciousness. The most striking characteristic of melancholic personality is extreme diminution in self-regard: somehow loss of object has triggered impoverishment of self. As Freud puts it: In mourning it is world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is ego itself (Freud, 1989: 585). other words, while it would seem as though loss suffered is that of object, what melancholic has actually experienced is loss of self. According to Julia Kristeva, author of Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia, melancholic suffers not from Object but Thing (French Chose) lost, which is an unnamable, supreme good, something unrepresentable, that [...] no word could signify. [...] The Thing is inscribed within us without memory, buried accomplice of our unspeakable anguishes (1989: 13-14). Kristeva identifies Thing with Mother, by which she understands pre-Oedipal Mother - one strongly bonded to child and then prohibited in Name of Father. The mother is child's first love which has to be abandoned in order to enable him or her to become subject, which in Lacanian terms means to enter language. Kristeva emphasizes that even though process of losing maternal (semantic) in order to become part of paternal (symbolic) is common to both male and female child, it is girl who suffers more from matricide. While boy, entering paternal sphere, identifies with father and replaces mother with another object of opposite sex, girl has to return to abandoned mother to identify with her in order to make object of opposite-sex desire. According to Kristeva, this is an unbelievable symbolic effort, as for girl act of killing mother is, in fact, act of killing herself. This thesis explains why, and sociology seconds observation, depression (Kristeva uses this term interchangeably with that of melancholia) is more frequently called a feminine disease: In midst of its lethal ocean, melancholy woman is dead one that has always been abandoned within and can never kill outside herself (30). For Kristeva, as well as for Luce Irigaray, only possible way to solve problem of melancholic and to halt his/her self-destructive drive is to reveal sexual (homosexual) secret of depressive course of action that causes melancholy person to live with death [...]. Thanks to this melancholic is able to integrate loss as signifiable as well as erogenetic. The separation henceforth appears no longer as threat of disintegration but as stepping stone toward some other - conflictive, bearing Eros and Thanatos, open to both meaning and nonmeaning (Kristeva, 83). Though recovery of lost object (the maternal Thing) as erotic object (the Object of desire) insures continuity in metonymy of pleasure, for women, it means necessity of being faced with the dilemma of homosexual drive. …