Black Sun. Julia Kristeva. New York:  Columbia University Press, 1989,  vii + 300 pp.

Julia Kristeva's Black Sun is a collation of eight widely ranging essays linked by a common concern with melancholia and depression. The first four essays have a clinical/theoretical focus, while the rest belong to the genre of applied psychoanalysis, with Holbein, Nerval, Dostoyevsky, and Duras each given a chapter.

In this review, I will focus only on the book's clinical/theoretical portion. I do this in spite of the fact that the applied portion seems to me more forceful, its arguments more relaxed, Kristeva in more command. As is metiiodologically traditional, Kristeva's objects in the applied section are essentially presented as exemplary. They are chosen and represented so as to support a prior theoretical position.

I must begin, however, with an additional comment on the book's structure. Despite its two relatively clear-cut sections, and its apparent thematic unity, the book lacks a central organizing argument, a conceptual spine. Rather than a theorized argument, Kristeva presents a cluster of imagistic clinical/theoretical fragments. These fragments seem positioned to create the possibility that an overall conceptual picture might appear. This latent appearance seems to form the book's not-very-firm conceptual ground.

The clinical section's imagistic quality is quite intense. Each chapter is a nearly autonomous essay, conceptually isolated from the others. And Kristeva's sentences tend toward a kind of individual autonomy. They read like bold, and bald, independent declarations—the following is representative: “Imaginary constructions change the death drive into eroticized aggression against the father or terrified loathing of the mother's body” (p. 26). This sentence, like so many in Black Sun, seems to suddenly appear on center stage, stunning the reader with its suggestive possibilities. But just as suddenly, it vanishes from that stage. Not really a part of a larger narrative, and lacking explicit theoretical support, both sentence and idea leave only a f