On Melancholy and Allegory (Kristeva and Benjamin)

In this text I focus on the notion of melancholy in the work of Julia Kristeva, mainly in Black Sun (1987), in relation to Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory developed in his 1928 monograph Origin of the German Trauerspiel as well as in his later work, the Arcades Project (1927-40). This essay is an exploration of how Kristeva's theory of artistic practice as a way out of melancholy's abyss relates to Benjamin's idea of an allegorical mode of expression. Both artistic practice and the allegorical are situated in an intermediate realm between the absence of language and the never-ending accumulation of signs.