There is a great deal going on in this essay, so I will attempt to describe the general project and some of its most compelling points. It must be emphasized that this essay is presented in a 'mobile' fashion, it passes through a number of conceptual view points briefly though incisively. That said, there seems to be a consistent project taking place. Kristeva's essay appears to simultaneously interrogate and re-figure the concept of the abject within the realm of psychoanalysis and its philosophical underpinnings. As mentioned, the abject is the pivotal concept, and Kristeva offers a number of perspectives on it. In attempting to understand this concept for myself, I made a rough sketch of its characteristics:
-the abject is a violent revolt of being that repulses desire.
-the abject is neither object nor subject. This seems like a crucial point. Later Kristeva suggests that the object puts one in search of meaning and the abject collapses meaning. This statement is also posed in psychoanalytic terms: "to each ego its object, to each superego its abject" (230).
-the abject can not be the thing that an ego makes its end, it involves the subject psychically.
-Kristeva goes on to consider the protection that comes with repugnance; she indicates retching, vomiting, loathing, gagging, spasm as modes of being that impel one away from what she describes as defilement, sewage.
-She affirms this sense of movement by suggesting that these modes may be instances of becoming other by expelling myself; a movement that means death. The pieces of the self that are wasted in its very movement suffer a kind of death.
-This places the I at the border of its conditions of living. And these conditions of living are not merely the bodily processes but also the psychological. As Kristeva states: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order, what does not respect borders, positions, rules" (232).
-In this way she identifies crimes as an example for exposing the fragility of the law.
-Here Kristeva makes a major point: The subjective experience culminates in the abjection of its own self as it understands that all its objects are founded on a constitutive loss.
-therefore, all abjection recognizes foundational want.
-this experience precedes the being/object dichotomy; before there is the field of signifying objects that constitute the territory of the subject, there is abjection.
-Kristeva then introduces the concept of the deject: the deject is the one by whom the abject exists. Kristeva describes this figure as a kind of transient.
-The deject's space is not homogenous or totalizable but rather divisible.
-its movement is described spatially as alternately straying and situating, and temporally as alternately veiled infinity and bursting revelation.
-Kristeva is trying to describe a subjectivity for which experience is heterogeneous. This brings the abject again into focus as part of this subject's being is constituted of the Other who has dwelt within as an alter ego. This Other as alter exists within the subject, it is identified as other through loathing, through repulsion, through a pushing away.
-Kristeva will again assert the primacy of this concept by locating it in the primal repression, one that is constitutive of subjectivities and therefore precedes any later forms of repression.
-In the later phases of the essay Kristeva will locate the place of the abject in a variety of other disciplines and thinkers. It is from this perspective that she identifies a formative capacity to the abject in the domain of religion and continues her critique of psychoanalysis, extending it to its philosophical roots in Plato. Kant and Hegel are also indicated, particularly in their displacement of the abject as defilement into marriage and from there sadness.
-In concluding, it seems that Kristeva is suggesting a libidinal, poetic, and unsettling approach and cohabitation with the abject, with that foundational loss and want that mobilizes in that it repulses.
-Anderson
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7 comments:
I am having trouble understanding what exactly the abject is supposed to be (the article was very difficult to understand). Is it perhaps a psychoanalytical term in addition to "ego", "superego", and "id"?
Perhaps it is the "dark side" of the ego, but a part that it needs in order to set itself off from something. In other words, the abject is the negation of self/ego by which the ego can assert itself. I detect this meaning especially when Kristeva writes about repulsion and defilement in connection with food (pages 230-232). The expellation of waste constitutes the borders of the body. Perhaps this is an analogy to the ego and its negative sides. (As I wrote in the beginning, this article was hard to understand...)
I understand the abject in two ways. First as a way of calming, oddly enough, the trauma one could (would) experience when faced with the totality of life. In other words, that corpse (shit, vomit, milk skin, etc.) before you is you, was you. Without the repulsion, we would be crushed. Second, abjection does not create/produce a subject in relation to objects. It operates in that murky place where "I" does not yet exist, and thus manifests as affect (patroling the border[s] between human and animal?)
I think Kristeva’s notion of the abjected sounds a lot like Butler’s notion of the subject’s constitutive outside (and it is probably the latter being influenced by the former). Kristeva speaks of it as the “edge of non-existence and hallucination, a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.” Butler speaks of it as “that which can only be thought – when it can – in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders.” One difference, however, seems to be that Butler’s theories draw from psychoanalysis but operates on a societal level where the excluded is not the mother’s body but the homosexual, the masculine woman, the feminine man, etc. Kristeva’s theories appear to be more based on the individual body, or the mother’s body, which to me is both interesting and problematic. It is interesting since the mother’s body is such an obvious origin of human ontology that has almost always been ignored or devalued by men throughout the history of philosophy. On the other hand, and in complete opposition with that, I find it problematic that her theories solidify the womb as the origin of subject formation. For if both female and male identities are based on repressed semiotic, sexual energy accumulated through a violent move from an original lack of differentiation to an awareness of a separate identity, the separation of mother/child, does that not render the maternal body ontologically more prior and superior to every other non-maternal body? Or does that objection just expose my roots in “the egalitarian and universalist context of Enlightenment humanism”…
Does the possibility of being cast off by the object of desire implicate a discrete desiring apparatus? The Irigiray line about masculine desire for empirics, or a phallic object of desire, desire in terms of its object. Or the Kristeva discussion on 233, which I do not understand, ".. a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects".
In response to Carolynn, i think she says that the expellation of waste constitutes not only the borders of the body, but constitutes the border between life and death. The abject, the grotesque waste of the body fallsaway: "There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border"- So the fact that gross stuff falls away below the border actually atriculates the fact that the living body is still to the other side of it, untill the whole body falls below the line (when its a corpse and is finally ALL waste, waste, when the border becomes an object).
It is interesting that the "place where I am not" (dung), is what allows me to BE- the corpse, the utmost abjection is the moment where "it is no longer I who expel, I am expelled"-utmost abjection, she says, is death encroaching on and threatening life. so the abject is that which crosses the border between life and death?
Erica, are you saying that abjection is a mechanism that creates distance between yourself and the corpse...etc.? So abjection serves to differentiate (and thus safeguard) the self from the abject?
I am in the process of writing a paper on police and would like to pose them as agents of abjevction. People who straddle varies boundaries and who are needed but never entirely trusted. You all seem quite clued up on Kristeva and wanted to know ifyou had any thoughts about this...
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