ASHES TO ASHES:KRISTEVA'S JUOISSANCE, ALTIZER'S APOCALYPSE, BYATT'S POSSESSION AND‘THE DREAM OF THE ROOD’

Abstract

In her discussion of Holbein's 'Dead Christ' Julia Kristeva interprets the confrontation of separation, emptiness and in the painting's presenta tion of the passion and death of Christ, understandably enough, as the depressive characterized by the sentiments, everything is dying, God is dying, I am dying.2 It is this moment, transformed by Christian tradition through its interpretation of crucifixion and resurrection, sacrifice and redemption, which becomes the vehicle with which the individual subject identifies with the (Christ) (132-34). However, the presentation of the crucified Christ in the manner utilized by Holbein, that is, as one without the promise of Resurrection (no), marks a site, for both artist and viewer, of an absolute loss of meaning, an instance of the deepest abyss of Hegelian severance, a site of the death of God (136). This same moment of severance, emphasized in the Christian concentration upon the rupture in the relationship between God the Father and the Son, consti tutes a Hegelian of the in the coming to consciousness of the individual which is chronicled in the crucifixion narrative's mythical representation of the Subject (132). It is as a result of her appropriation of the Hegelian work of the negative that Kristeva has developed the understanding of le sujet en proces, the 'subject in process/on trial', a subject suspended between the two extremes of, on the one hand, the symbolic ego in control, and on the other, the semiotic jubilatory fall into nature, into the full and pagan mother.3 This subject is of course a speaking subject, or at least a signifying subject;