The Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva (review)

In 1998, Julia Kristeva was invited to curate an exhibit at the Louvre Museum in Paris as part of Parti Pris (“Taking Sides” or “Biased Views”), a series in which intellectuals, writers, and artists organize exhibitions on themes of their choosing. Organized by Régis Michel, Parti Pris featured Jacques Derrida’s show on blindness (Mémoires d’aveugle, 1990), filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s meditation on flight (Les bruit des nuages, 1992), Jean Starobinski’s study of the gift (Largesse, 1994) and Julia Kristeva’s own exhibit on the severed head (Visions capitales, 1998). According to Kristeva, the severed head stirs questions about “taking sides” because it symbolizes the losses that condition and haunt the speaking subject. The ability to speak involves the subject’s separation from the other; in psychoanalytic terms, it requires the loss of the “maternal thing” with which early identity is so entangled. For Kristeva, the severed head is a symbol of this transition. Although sad and somewhat morbid, it is also a “good omen.” Speech allows subjects to make meaning, to traverse voids of separation and grieve formative losses. Through displays of decorated Neolithic skulls, Byzantine mandylions, representations of John the Baptist, portraits by Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, and others, visitors to Visions capitales are invited to question and reflect upon this condition of subjectivity—loss, gap, the cut. Kristeva’s selections playfully and hopefully ask: “Have we really fathomed how grief and melancholy line the underside of our languages, our so called mother tongues? . . . For the capital disappearance I substitute a capital vision: my hallucinations and my words. Imagination, language, beyond the depression: an incarnation?” (6).

The Severed Head: Capital Visions is a translation of the catalogue that accompanied the 1998 Visions capitales exhibition. It is a text that deserves to be read closely not only by Kristeva scholars but also by those working in aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and social theory more generally. If representations of severed heads symbolize the fraught process of identity formation, they might also provide clues for recovery and transformation when that process goes awry, when social ills threaten practices of meaning making and artistic production. Today, as real beheadings appear to be on the rise—from the mass decapitations of the Mexican drug war to the spectacular videotaped beheadings of journalists by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—Kristeva’s reflections are urgent even if her style of writing is not. A slim volume, The Severed Head reads as a slow commentary on the exhibition. Shifting from topic to topic, and moving from room to room, she riffs and meditates on a series of questions: What is the relationship between sacrifice and decapitation, sacred art and the icon? Are there more and less supportive, more and less violent ways to represent the cut? How do our changing imaginaries relate to changing views of capital punishment? While the artworks of Visions capitales frame these reflections, only eighteen are reproduced in The Severed Head: Capital Visions. These include Caravaggio’s David and Goliath, Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Jacques Dupin, Auguste Rodin’s Walking Man, Paul Cezanne’s Pyramid of Skulls, and Max Ernst’s The Moon in Beautiful. For a translation of an exhibition catalogue, the limited number of images is striking. There is no doubt that it will frustrate readers. However, it is possible that these frustrations offer lessons of their own. If the severed head pushes us to tarry in the transition between invisible and visible, The Severed Head: Capital Visions requires us the same. To experience its incarnating questioning, readers will have to exercise their imaginations and their capacity for representation.

The early chapters focus on the severed head’s relationship to women and the sacred. In “On Drawing: Or, The Speed of Thought,” Kristeva recalls one of her mother’s drawings from her childhood, a submission for a radio contest on “the quickest means of transportation in the world” (2). While the young Julia would like to...