International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Todd Kesselman (New School for Social Research, New York, USA)
The Psychoanalytic Concept of Sublimation in Julia Kristeva's Work

Undoubtedly, the concept of sublimation plays a central role in the work of Julia Kristeva, indeed, in the work of psychoanalysis in general. This paper will outline and examine the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation, as it operates within Kristeva's work, in an attempt to highlight its specifically Kantian heritage. The analogy between sublimation and the Kantian sublime provides an opportunity to explore the philosophical import of sublimation in the domains of ethics and aesthetics. In tarrying with those excessive traumatic encounters (which characterize the sublime) through the practice of
representation--through the binding, containment, and investment of this excess in symbols--our limitations are revealed to us as a moment of creative freedom. Such a description can be seen as a reference to the work of analytic treatment, but moreover, it can be seen as a way to conceptualize the unfolding of philosophical meaning, as the ongoing attempt to represent or translate the unspeakable constellations of meaning that underlie our sense of the world. This situates the movement of philosophical thinking in Kristevan terms, in that the attempt to represent the excess or ecstasy that is Being,
comes to be seen in terms of the simultaneous return and symbolic murder of the Maternal Thing. This Thing, I argue, is an emphatically Kantian Thing.