Julia Kristeva is a practising psychoanalyst as well as a professor of linguistics. Black Sun, her series of meditations on depression and melancholia, argues that language can be, at one and the same time, a symptom of melancholy, a means of understanding it, and part of the process of withstanding it. Beginning with a series of case studies of her own patients, she moves on to more general reflections about the role of language, melancholy and representation in the work of Nerval, Dostoevsky, Marguerite Duras and Hans Holbein the Younger.

Columbia | paperback |ISBN: 9780231067072