Black Sun Quotes

“Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“The sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us, are also a shield—sometimes the last one—against madness”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“The depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing. Let me posit the "Thing" as the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated... the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time.”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic--it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun