ABSTRACT
This presentation draws on Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein to propose that negativity – what Lacan calls “lack-in-being” and Klein calls “the depressive position” – is intrinsic to human ontology in ways that preclude the possibility of a definitive cure for constitutive (existential) sentiments of loss, lack, trauma, alienation, dislocation, disorientation, and disenchantment. However, the talk’s objective is not to present a hopeless portrait of the human condition but, quite the contrary, to argue that it is only when the subject understands that there is no cure for its constitutive negativity that it can begin to live to the fullest of its potential: far from being an impediment to a meaningful life, negativity not only serves as a prerequisite for a realistic assessment of the parameters of human life but also as a precondition for creativity, including imaginative self-fashioning. Among other things, the recognition that there is no cure for existential discomfort can become a platform for a productive working-through of such discomfort in clinical situations. More specifically, the presentation outlines a distinction, indebted to Julia Kristeva, between melancholia and mourning in order to suggest that creativity requires the subject’s ability to move from the paralysis of melancholia to the movement – however gradual or halting – that mourning represents. The presentation also distinguishes between constitutive and context-specific forms of lack (or trauma), emphasizing that the claim that there is no cure for the former does not mean that the latter – such as the effects of social injustice – cannot be concretely addressed.
