Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives) (European Perspectives Series)

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After you expelled the spit, it became other; but a special kind of other, an other that has been abjected. The problems abjection causes are really the problems that are created whenever we only have two categories in which to sort things. In books like this, terms like "subject" and "other" take on meanings quite foreign to their day-to-day usage.

She closes her essay by noting that the usefulness of studying the abject can be found in its immense political and religious influence over the centuries.

The word "abject" comes from the Latin roots ab ("away") and jacere ("to throw"), and I'm not bringing that up just to change the subject, but introduction of the abject always changes the subject. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept.

Likewise, there are many more literary examples she could approach: it would not be hard to produce a 500+ page book from this topic at all. You had no trouble with it then and you would have no trouble drinking the water before you spit in it, even though the water was not a part of you, an other. They've got to load up the structure of signification with all this inherent gender stuff: sign, meaning, and discourse is the real of The Law of the Father, while all that indeterminate iffyness of the imaginary is all on Mom which nowadays makes us chuckle and shake our heads gently with an amused mutter: oh, those Freudians. The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, [1] in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory. The last third of this book has the most beautiful writing (in translation, anyway) but for that go to Kristeva on Proust, cuz here she just does it on Celine the Nazi.She later brings up ancient vampire stories as representative of the biblical version of the corpse, the body without a soul.

She concludes her essay by revealing the importance of the abject in its ties to politics and religion; the most powerful - yet inhumane and oppressive - institutions built on the notion that we must be protected from the abject. Until then we are an unboundaried everything everywhere, undifferentiated from all sounds, sights, smells, skins, sheets, and poop.Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. However, I was at least inquisitive, she got me thinking, even if some of her text did go about putting much strain on my grey matter. I had never seen an amputee before and I was horrified in the same way you might be if you slowed down to look at an accident.

It’s there, too, when, after a certain age, your mother wants to dress you in certain clothes, but you have your own stuff; when your father wants to know how your date went last night, but it went so well that you don’t want to tell him; and when you think about moving back home and sleeping in your old bed with the Spiderman pillowcases. We tend to think that animals flee from danger or repulsion, but many are curious to a degree just as humans are, and any psychobiological connections someone as adept on the topic as Kristeva could draw might be very useful. An essential read for those interested in exploring the darker and more unsettling aspects of the human condition. You would have the same trouble if you watched someone else expel their spit into a glass and tried to drink that.According to Kristeva, the best modern literature ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonin Artaud, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Franz Kafka, etc. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down. Where the integrity of that slash (/) in the self /other mental construction is threatened by representations which collapse or disrupt the sign/referent template underpinning it. Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. At a time when simple definitions of human psychology abound this is an unusually deep and rich well and it brings us back to the essential mystery of human beings, who are so much more than flesh, blood and bone.