The Severed Head: Capital Visions

By Julia Kristeva

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--the power of horror--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred.

Kristeva considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans’ early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these capital visions” through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231530385

Book preview

THE SEVERED HEAD

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

A SERIES IN SOCIAL THOUGHT AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor

European Perspectives presents outstanding books by leading European thinkers. With both classic and contemporary works, the series aims to shape the major intellectual controversies of our day and to facilitate the tasks of historical understanding. For a complete list of books in the series, see European Perspectives.

THE SEVERED HEAD

CAPITAL VISIONS

Julia Kristeva

Translated by Jody Gladding

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53038-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kristeva, Julia, 1941–

[Visions capitales. English]

The severed head: capital visions / Julia Kristeva; translated by Jody Gladding.

p. cm.— (European perspectives)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15720-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Head in art. 2. Beheading in art. 3. Art, European—Themes, motives. I. Title. II. Series.

N8217.H5K7413 2011

704.9′42—dc23

2011020717

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the book was prepared.

TO MY MOTHER

Are we inevitably slaves to the image? Not for certain, answer the philosophers, uncertain by profession. The image is potentially a space of freedom: it annihilates the constraint of the object-model and replaces it with the flight of thought, the wandering of the imagination. I would add, and this is my particular bias, that the image may be our only remaining link to the sacred: to the terror that death and sacrifice provoke, to the serenity that follows from the pact of identification between sacrificed and sacrificing, and to the joy of representation indissociable from sacrifice, its only possible course. The following pages will try to show that certain images and certain facial expressions can still offer an experience of the sacred to the humans that we are, ever more absorbed in technology. What images? What expressions? What sacred?

The stories behind the severed heads in question here are cruel. Through them, a humanity possessed by the urge for death and terrorized by murder acknowledges that it has, in fact, arrived at a fragile and overwhelming discovery: the only resurrection possible may be … representation. The decapitations on display are proof of it. I invite you to make your way from their violence to their refinement, so that at the end of the journey you can conclude for yourself that, with or without decapitation, all vision is nothing other than capital transubstantiation.

CONTENTS

Foreword Françoise Viatte

Alibi? Régis Michel

1. On Drawing; or, The Speed of Thought

2. The Skull: Cult and Art

3. Who Is Medusa?

4. The True Image: A Holy Face

5. A Digression: Economy, Figure, Face

6. The Ideal Figure; or, A Prophesy in Actuality: Saint John the Baptist

7. Beheadings

8. From the Guillotine to the Abolition of Capital Punishment

9. Powers of Horror

10. The Face and the Experience of Limits

Index

FOREWORD

FRANÇOISE VIATTE

Exhibitions let us see some portion of the work done in a museum. Nonetheless, they don’t represent the essence of it and in any case only show us the results, however provisional, of prior research. But these events seem to receive more attention that any other activity, no doubt because of their brevity—a few weeks, their selective nature—a small space with rare works, and especially because of the engagement they presuppose. An exhibition is meant to be captivating or at least convincing and arresting. An exhibition is valued for its critical quality and the depths of its interrogation. It prompts different reactions than visits to the permanent collections do. Also, public opinion is easier to gauge because it is solicited directly by the comparison offered. In short, any exhibition is a biased view. The following work, which the department commissioned ten years ago, deliberately poses this question of subjective discourse on art, mixing genres and periods but concentrating especially on drawing and engraving. Biased views are conceived, as Régis Michel reminds us, as spaces of interpretive freedom. They are not a rupture but an opening, and they claim the right of difference. The audience they attract is aware of their singularity and especially the nature of the view they offer. These exhibitions are not in opposition to the ones the department organizes side by side with them. They share the same rigor and the same excitement. By giving those we invite carte blanche, these exhibitions allow them to adapt their commentaries to the works they discover with us. A museum, especially a very large one, can allow for a treasure hunt. With its infinite possibilities, drawing lends itself to this better that any other genre.

Julia Kristeva’s work is so well known, in France as abroad, that there is no need to introduce it. Beyond the reflections it offers on language and literature, psychoanalysis and anthropology, this work centers largely on art and images, even Kristeva’s fiction. That is the case with her latest novel, Possessions. Julia Kristeva’s approach is not a matter of historical inquiry, but of profound meditation, and its nature is perfectly summarized by the title of the first work in which art analysis unfolds: Powers of Horror. This biased view, the fifth in this series of exhibitions, owes much to that experience of the image, which, for Kristeva, always falls into the category of the tragic. The theme she has chosen attests to this. It has drawn upon—thanks to an inquiry conducted over nearly two years, in which the Department of Graphic Arts was very much involved—a selection of works of all kinds treating a single theme: decapitation. As cruel as it is current, it perfectly crystallizes the interpreter’s investigations, and her persuasive argument, which leads to the question of representations—sacred, secular—of the human face, wins support through the breadth of its sources and the power of its ideas.

This is the first time a woman is involved in this series of exhibitions, and it is very much a woman’s voice that we hear in the following pages. The very reason for this series is to emphasize differences in discourse. So it will come as no surprise that this text is, precisely, a continual—and latent—interrogation of feminine identity, through biblical and mythological themes, as proposed to us by Western art. In the course of this analysis, in which Freud is the major reference, the feminine figure—and simply the human figure—are evoked in the infinite complexity associated with what we want to show and what we mean to hide.

ALIBI?

RÉGIS MICHEL

Aesthetic barbarism today is accomplishing what has threatened intellectual formations since they were brought together as culture and neutralized. To speak about culture always went against the grain of culture.

—MARX HORKHEIMER AND THEODOR W. ADORNO,

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

TOOTHPASTE SMILE

In a major text, which is hardly cited anymore (a sure sign of its importance), Horkheimer and Adorno define mass culture by its advertising function, by which works of art are reduced to political slogans, as accessible to everyone as public parks:¹ this is the ideal of Goebbels-style propaganda, the supreme form of art of art’s sake, or more accurately, art for … nothing.² Because, in this industrial production of media rubbish, the value of cultural goods ceases to be a use value and becomes an exchange value (128)—a social value—which no longer has any value in and of itself: any value at all. It is something between artifact, accessory, and fetish. Something probably far from meaning, pleasure, and experience. In this totalitarian aesthetic of reification (we can just as easily say cultural thing), the individual is no longer a subject, not even a consumer, hardly a surrogate (122): in his turn, he becomes a cultural product, entirely subject, in his social behavior, to the same norms as the works, which are abstract norms (canons, models, codes). Thus the triumph of the white teeth of the toothpaste smile. Any space of critical attitude is abolished in the dubious favor of this illusory world where art and entertainment blend into a continuous process of collective alienation (107). Being entertained does not mean only that one thinks of nothing (that one forgets one’s condition). But also that one acquiesces to the sales talk of the vendor, to the manipulation of the client—in short, one renounces one’s identity (115–16). The true character of the culture industry (the Kulturindustrie) is less the triumph of technology, which favors the reproduction of the work by depriving it of its aura (see Benjamin), than the madness of rationality, which exalts its abstraction by suppressing its difference. The logic of art is henceforth restricted to that of merchandise: standardization, schematization, repetition (124). Mass culture is finally only a fabric of stereotypes, which promotes the most servile imitation at the same time as it promises the most artificial innovation. It is the opposite of culture and the negative of style. The neutralization of consciousness and the management of art. Liberal violence and aesthetic barbarism (140).

LAW OF BRONZE

It has already been a long time since museums entered the mechanized age of the culture industry. And analysis has lost none of its relevance. In fact, it is more topical than ever. One is tempted to believe that the end of the century resolved to illustrate these theses with renewed care. Because mass culture had devastating effects on the institution. It seems as if renovating its walls was inversely proportionate to renovating its ideas. Under the polished molding and the pompous paneling, it’s the same scene repeated ad nauseam: it’s the same idiom that pervades throughout like a learned esperanto. This repressive language, in which the angular myths of bourgeois ideology thrive—nineteenth-century ideology: artist as subject (master), work as causality (linear), and history as origin (archeological)—accommodates no dissonance, no dissidence, no difference: it became the natural language (some would say the jargon) of the institution. By adopting the history of art as the universal vulgate—this universality understood of course by one class or caste—museums condemned themselves to authoritarian sermonizing on repetitive values. To the bronze law of the culture industry: the triumph of the identical. Thus they bear a manifest responsibility in this unforeseen process of the reduction of meaning (and the sterilization of works). One would expect them to be, above all else, places of freedom, diversity, and alterity. But, regrettably, that isn’t the case. The very discourse of history, which is a discourse of truth where, in its obsolete form, one ignores the linguistic turn, forbids them to be pluralist. And the hierarchical constraints of the government, which is not really made to manage intellectual products, impose on them the yoke of uniformity. Which brings us back to the ideological role (see Althusser) of the workings of the state. Here the culture industry takes up the regrettable task of training minds that Nietzsche mocked. Grand exhibitions, which are, for the most part, monographs, adhere to the intangible paradigm of mural biography, or the Vasariism of picture molding. And the economic stakes, which never cease to grow, promote the profitable development of an advertising ideal that changes the artists on display into human sandwiches. It is not at all a question of stimulating the eye of the spectator. Very much the opposite: taming his gaze. With the help of a monist credo meant to determine how the works are to be glossed. Museums are thus becoming a crucial mechanism in the standardization of prefixed knowledge: of a culture in pieces.

GENERAL LINE

Since their inception, almost ten years ago, the Louvre’s Parti pris (biased views) have had only one objective: to create in the museum itself—at the heart of the institution (which is the heart of the system)—a critical space. A zone of frankness. A place of rupture. From the uniform logic of the culture industry. From the regrettable monopoly of a reductive language, which art history is. But, for discourse to be other, it had to hypothetically come from without. Be outside the discipline. It also had to be a matter of a subversive epistemology, of an enterprise of (counter)conceptual to iconoclastic—some would say deconstructive—practices: the postmodern work of interpretation. Hence the choice of a line, or a bias, to echo the title of the series (a title less clichéd than it seems). With its Eisensteinian stench of Soviet October—électroscopic the modest Aragon was to have said in an understatement—and its militant illusions to the spring of ’68, the notion of line, which is always general, undoubtedly emits the nostalgic aroma of exquisite corpses (Rosi leanings, not Breton). But one would be wrong to stop at these subtle references to a bygone past. Because it’s all worth more than the space of nebulous patch-work—of enigmatic puzzle—which, under the pretext of eclecticism, dead-end exhibition programs so often amount to. Now, with the exception of Peter Greenaway, who is more creator than thinker, more filmmaker than exegete, more visual than literary, the line followed the sometimes winding course that in the United States is loosely called French thought, following from the (neo)structuralism of the sixties and its Copernicusian revolution. The common thread, if there was one, of these exhibitions, is to have conjured, in their assiduous effort toward critical consciousness, the most insidious of the specters, in Derrida’s sense of the term, in a treatise of exorcism with cathartic virtues (the specter is the corpus delicti—the body … of the spirit): the specter of subject.³ This strange creature from the old metaphysics continues to haunt the exhibition halls which are, more than most places, the privileged sites of their favorite rites, the cult of auteur, the religion of work, the prophesy of intention, the mysticism of (a single) meaning, and other pious exercises of macerating empathy in which sublimation and fetishism make a happy match.

CANNIBAL MARGIN

But is repudiating the ghost enough to domesticate the darkness? Hard to swear to it. The Parti pris sequence aimed at producing different exhibitions. But this difference is carefully confined to a restricted space that is marginal: in the margin of the institution. Must this be stressed? That margin is one of incarceration if not cannibalism. It’s marked by a quarantine line and impenetrable barrier. The panoptic control of the museum—its voracious appetency for easy ingestion—is effortlessly deployed there: the repetition of the enterprise turns to the reproduction of the model that tends toward the recuperation of discourse. What remains of the original ambition at the singular end of this phagocytic process? An anthology of seminal texts, which are, for the foreigner especially, a perdurable influence. That’s a lot. And it’s a little. Because one is entitled to wonder if these exhibitions achieve their ends (prompt debate, alter practices, open minds). The power of the system—its power of inertia—is such that there’s room for doubt. Their performative effectiveness (we are not speaking of their intellectual impact) is manifestly reduced. In the monolithic system of art discourse, they do not yet succeed in introducing a single rift: no debate, no opening. The media, which goes ecstatic over the most academic commemorations, has only bemused indulgence for these diversions they consider minor. The public only condescends to the mythical splendor of illustrious patronymics, tutelary figures in a beatific Pantheon where ritual reverence prevails over visual pleasure, if not existential experience. And scholars only react to this dissonant language in the panicked mode of a closet Freudian, which consists of refusing to see the difference in order to preserve the integrity of a world ruled exclusively by the law of the same. It could very well be that, far from furthering the (slightest) transformation of their environment, these exhibitions are only an alibi: the liberal surety of