general 55 occurrences

Abjection

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Where it appears in the corpus (55)

#01

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.11

POWERS OF HORROR > APPROACHING ABJECTION

Theoretical move: Kristeva establishes abjection as a structural category that is neither subject nor object but a prior, foundational exclusion that both constitutes subjectivity and threatens to dissolve it — locating in abjection the originary "want" on which being, meaning, language, and desire are grounded, and positioning literature as abjection's privileged signifier.

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. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.
#02

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.19

POWERS OF HORROR > BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Theoretical move: Kristeva deploys Lacanian categories (repression, foreclosure, jouissance, objet petit a, the Other) to argue that abjection constitutes a logic of exclusion that precedes and exceeds the Freudian unconscious, operating through a "border" structure rather than through negation, thereby challenging the conscious/unconscious dialectic and positing a pre-objectal, affect-laden mode of subjectivation anchored in the Symbolic Other.

abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.
#03

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.21

POWERS OF HORROR > AT THE LIMIT OF PRIMAL REPRESSION

Theoretical move: Kristeva theorizes abjection as the "object" of primal repression—a pre-subjective, pre-objectal residue that precedes and conditions narcissism, the sign, and sublimation, positioning it topologically between the somatic symptom and the sublime, and showing how it erupts as a narcissistic crisis whenever secondary repression's symbolic resources are overwhelmed.

The abject would thus be the 'object' of primal repression... Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is witness to the ephemeral aspect of the state called 'narcissism'
#04

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva

POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED

Theoretical move: Kristeva maps abjection as the generative underside of all religious structuring, arguing that successive historical forms of the sacred (pagan, monotheistic, Christian) are differentiated by the specific mode in which they handle abjection, and that art inherits this cathartic function when religious forms collapse.

Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse.
#05

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.27

POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > OUTSIDE OF THE SACRED, THE ABJECT IS WRITTEN

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that great modern literature (Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Céline) constitutes the privileged site where abjection is symbolized and traversed, and that the aesthetic act of speaking/writing the abject—at the boundary of the symbolic construct and primal repression—performs a catharsis that simultaneously discloses and partially redeems what escapes signification.

'subject' and 'object' push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject
#06

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.35

POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > BORGES

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that literature's proper "object" is the abject itself—figured through Borges's Aleph as the impossible real toward which the repetition-compulsion drives—and that writing enacts a sublimation of abjection without consecration, substituting for the sacred's former role at the limits of social and subjective identity.

The abject is the equivalent of death. And writing, which allows one to recover, is equal to a resurrection.
#07

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.36

POWERS OF HORROR > CATHARSIS AND ANALYSIS

Theoretical move: Kristeva uses the Lacanian linkage of abjection to the saintliness of the analyst as a pivot to genealogize 'catharsis' through Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Aristotelian poetic catharsis—unlike Platonic purification—works by immersion in and repetition of the abject rather than its elimination, and that this rhythm-based discourse of the body is the only viable analogue to analytic practice.

That abjection, which modernity has learned to repress, dodge, or fake, appears fundamental once the analytic point of view is assumed.
#08

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.40

POWERS OF HORROR > PHILOSOPHICAL SADNESS AND THE SPOKEN DISASTER OF THE ANALYST

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that analytic speech achieves a "poetic" catharsis by passing through abjection rather than sublating or purifying it, positioning the analyst's mimetic identification with the analysand as the site where Freudian jouissance disrupts the Kantian-Hegelian tradition of ethical consciousness that would reduce defilement to normative sadness and silence.

it is the 'poetic' unsettlement of analytic utterance that testifies to its closeness to, cohabitation with, and 'knowledge' of abjection...cathartic—meaning thereby that it is the equivalent...not of purification but of rebirth with and against abjection
#09

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.48

POWERS OF HORROR > "I AM AFRAID OF BEING BITTEN" OR "I AM AFRAID OF BITING"?

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that want and aggressivity are logically coextensive rather than causally sequential: symbolic language (the paternal prohibition) intervenes from the outset to shape drive aggressivity, so that neither pure deprivation nor pure violence can be isolated as originary — the two terms are mutually constitutive, and their disarticulation produces clinical pathology (obsession or paranoia).

I am not the one that devours, I am being devoured by him; a third person therefore (he, a third person) is devouring me.
#10

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.52

POWERS OF HORROR > DEVOURING LANGUAGE

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that language acquisition and verbal activity originate in the attempt to introject a lost (maternal) object, making the phobic object the "hallucination of nothing" — a metaphor-as-anaphora pointing toward an unknowable non-thing — and that writing, unlike analytic interpretation, does not convert this confrontation with the ab-ject into a fantasy of desire but instead unfolds the logico-drive strategies of abjection itself.

putting into flesh (a horse) those logical constructs that set us up as beings of abjection and/or as symbolic beings.
#11

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.55

POWERS OF HORROR > DEVOURING LANGUAGE > PHOBIC NARCISSISM

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia reveals how the paternal metaphor's failure—rather than any object-relation failure per se—leaves the drive without an object, cathecting symbolicity itself as a substitute; this structure, distinct from narcissism, psychosis, and hysteria, is the template for abjection, which is defined as a revolt entirely within language that makes the subject eminently productive of culture.

Abjection—at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion—shares in the same arrangement. The loathing that is implied in it does not take on the aspect of hysteric conversion... In abjection, revolt is completely within being. Within the being of language.
#12

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.57

POWERS OF HORROR > DEVOURING LANGUAGE > AIMING AT THE APOCALYPSE: SIGHT

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that abjection marks the threshold moment in subject constitution for borderline patients—neither full object-relation nor psychotic non-relation—and that the failure of paternal function produces a 'fortified castle' structure where language desemantizes into pure signifier, with affect making its only imprint in the gaps of that disintegrated discourse; religious codes of defilement/taboo are then read as cultural solutions to the same subject/object instability that abjection names clinically.

It seems to be the first authentic feeling of a subject in the process of constituting itself as such, as it emerges out of its jail and goes to meet what will become, but only later, objects. Abjection of self: the first approach to a self that would otherwise be walled in.
#13

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.63

POWERS OF HORROR > WHY DOES LANGUAGE APPEAR TO BE "ALIEN"?

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the collapse of the paternal/condensation function in borderline patients dissolves the sign's constitutive unity of word-presentation and thing-presentation, producing a desperate erotization of abjection as the only remaining anchor to the Other—a position that demands psychoanalysis attend to the heterogeneity of signifiance rather than reducing language to a purely philosophical or Saussurian model.

the body's inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside... Abjection then takes the place of the other, to the extent of affording him jouissance
#14

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.67

POWERS OF HORROR > FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the sacred has a "two-sided" structure: one side anchored in the Freudian murder-of-the-father narrative (guilt, atonement, obsessional ritual) and a hidden, non-representable other side organized around the maternal, incest-dread, and non-separation of subject and object—a side that Freud repeatedly gestures toward but ultimately suppresses in favor of the paternal-signifier account, and which Kristeva proposes to theorize through abjection and phobia.

Abjection, or the journey to the end of the night.
#15

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.68

POWERS OF HORROR > PROHIBITED INCEST VS. COMING FACE TO FACE WITH THE UNNAMABLE

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the "feminine" as unnamable otherness is not a primeval essence but a pre-verbal border zone—coextensive with primary narcissism—that precedes the paternal prohibition and the advent of language; poetic language is theorized as an attempt to re-symbolize this archaic, pre-verbal jouissance, while the failure to traverse it opens onto psychosis or perversion.

I shall set aside in this essay a different version of the confrontation with the feminine, one that, going beyond abjection and fright, is enunciated as ecstatic.
#16

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.73

POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT AS RITUAL RESCUE FROM PHOBIA AND PSYCHOSIS

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that incest prohibition serves a libidinal-economic function—veiling the ambivalence of primary narcissism and foreclosing a jouissance-laden return to abjection—and that ritual defilement operates where symbolic prohibition is too weak to contain the abject maternal, threatening not castration but total dissolution of the subject.

This abjection, which threatens the ego and results from the dual confrontation in which the uncertainties of primary narcissism reside—is it such as to motivate, if not explain, the incest dread of which Freud speaks?
#17

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.77

POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT AS RITUAL RESCUE FROM PHOBIA AND PSYCHOSIS > THE FUNDAMENTAL WORK OF MARY DOUGLAS

Theoretical move: Kristeva, engaging critically with Mary Douglas and structural anthropology, argues that abjection is a universal, subjective-symbolic phenomenon coextensive with the social-symbolic order, proposing that defilement rituals function as collective elaborations of the same border-logic that constitutes the speaking subject — thereby requiring Lacanian symbolic order and subjective dynamics to supplement (and correct) purely syntactic anthropological accounts.

abjection is coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level. By virtue of this, abjection, just like prohibition of incest, is a universal phenomenon
#18

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.88

POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT? > FEAR OF WOMEN—FEAR OF PROCREATION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that pollution rituals and abjection are socially elaborated responses to the archaic generative power of the mother, functioning to separate the speaking being from the body and secure patrilineal/patriarchal order; the Indian caste system's endogamy is read as a special case where sexual balance is achieved at the cost of multiplying abjective separations elsewhere in the social hierarchy.

abjection (of the mother) leads me toward respect for the body of the other, my fellow man, my brother
#19

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.89

POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT? > FEAR OF WOMEN—FEAR OF PROCREATION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that pollution rituals and abjection are socially elaborated responses to the archaic generative power of the mother, functioning to separate the speaking being from the body and secure patrilineal/patriarchal order; the Indian caste system's endogamy is read as a special case where sexual balance is achieved at the cost of multiplying abjective separations elsewhere in the social hierarchy.

Subjects and objects have only, on that basis, the status of ab-jects for one another.
#20

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.96

POWERS OF HORROR > HIERARCHY AND NONVIOLENCE

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads the two Oedipus plays as marking a transition in the logic of abjection: from a mythico-ritual economy of spatial exclusion and purification (*Oedipus the King* / pharmakos) to a symbolic-contractual assumption of abjection as the constitutive not-known of the mortal speaking being (*Oedipus at Colonus*), thereby locating the ground of abjection in sexual difference and the symbolic order rather than in any archetype of purity.

The abjection of Oedipus at Colonus is the not known of the speaking being who is subject to death at the same time as to symbolic union.
#21

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.103

POWERS OF HORROR > SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical impurity (tahor/tame) is not simply a demonic force or a divine ordinance, but a "logicizing" of what departs from the symbolic order—rooted in the cathexis of maternal function—which monotheism subordinates to the Law, thereby instituting a "strategy of identity" constitutive of the speaking subject and social community alike.

the 'material' semes of the pure/impure opposition that mark out the biblical text are not metaphors of the divine prohibition resuming archaic, material customs, but are responses of symbolic Law, in the sphere of subjective economy and the genesis of speaking identity.
#22

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.104

POWERS OF HORROR > TABOO FORESTALLS SACRIFICE

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that taboo (pure/impure distinction) operates metonymically to sustain participation in the sacred order, while sacrifice operates metaphorically by violently connecting two irreconcilable terms; the priority of taboo over sacrifice is then deployed to theorize biblical abomination as a sublimation of sacrificial murder, making Judaism the religion that substitutes sustained abjection-logic for killing.

Through sustained abomination, Judaism parts ways with sacrificial religions. And to the extent that religion and sacrifice overlap, biblical abominations perhaps constitute the logical explicitation of the religious.
#23

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.106

POWERS OF HORROR > THE MAN/GOD DISTINCTION: A DIETARY DISTINCTION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the biblical system of dietary abomination is not merely a code of food taboos but a structural logic of separation whose deepest function is to differentiate the speaking subject (the son) from the archaic, abject maternal body — thereby establishing that symbolic identity, signifiability, and law itself are founded on the violent exclusion of the feminine/maternal.

it becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together.
#24

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.111

POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical purity codes (Leviticus) follow an internal logic of separation whereby abjection of leprosy, bodily defect, flow, and blood all converge on a single fantasy: the subject's self-rebirth through rejection of the non-introjected, devouring maternal body, such that the clean, proper, symbolic body is constituted precisely by expelling all traces of its debt to nature/the mother.

The obsession of the leprous and decaying body would thus be the fantasy of a self-rebirth on the part of a subject who has not introjected his mother but has incorporated a devouring mother.
#25

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.113

POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY > FROM SEXUAL IDENTITY TO SPEECH AND FROM ABOMINATION TO MORALS

Theoretical move: Kristeva traces a logical progression in Leviticus whereby material abomination (food, blood, bodily mixing) is sublimated into sexual identity prohibitions and finally into a purely symbolic register, where defilement becomes profanation of the divine Name—the monotheistic One that grounds separation as such and converts impurity from material admixture into symbolic transgression (idolatry, substitution, doubles).

the impure will no longer be merely the admixture, the flow, the noncompliant, converging on that 'improper and unclean' place, which is the maternal living being.
#26

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.115

POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY > INCEST TABOO

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the incest taboo functions as the originating "mytheme" underlying the entire system of biblical dietary and purity prohibitions, such that abjection — oral, excremental, and corporeal — is structurally inseparable from the symbolic contract, not merely one semantic value among others but its unconscious foundation.

Biblical abjection thus translates a crucial semantics in which the dietary, when it departs from the conformity that can be demanded by the logic of separation, blends with the maternal as unclean and improper coalescence, as undifferentiated power and threat, a defilement to be cut off.
#27

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.120

POWERS OF HORROR > ABOMINATION OF CORPSES WARDS OFF DEATH WISH. TAXONOMY AS MORALS

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical abomination-taboos constitute a structural displacement of sacrifice: where sacrifice binds the subject to the sacred through a killed/fascinating object, abomination operates metonymically to install symbolic law and taxonomy in place of sacrificial logic — a move that channels the death drive into a persecutory "machine" of abjection that simultaneously constitutes the subject of the Symbolic.

The abject tears me away from the indifferentiated and brings me into subjection to a system. In short, the abominate is a response to the sacred, its exhaustion, its ending.
#28

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.123

POWERS OF HORROR > *. . . QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI*

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the New Testament enacts a structural transformation of abjection: by interiorizing impurity (relocating defilement from outside the body to inside the speaking subject), Christianity installs a new topology of subjectivity—the inside/outside boundary—that simultaneously reconciles with the maternal/pagan principle and sublates it into the category of Sin, thereby constituting a split, polyvalent speaking subject.

An essential trait of those evangelical attitudes or narratives is that abjection is no longer exterior. It is permanent and comes from within. Threatening, it is not cut off but is reabsorbed into speech.
#29

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.128

POWERS OF HORROR > FROM ABOMINATION TO LAPSE AND LOGIC. FROM SUBSTANCE TO ACTION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Christianity effects a structural transformation of abjection by converting it from a matter of *substance* (the pure/impure dichotomy) into a matter of *action* (sin as act), with the Eucharist functioning as catharsis of the primal oral-devouring fantasy; yet this spiritualization cannot fully sublate the carnal remainder, leaving the subject as a "lapsing" being split between body and spirit—a heterogeneity that is ultimately Real.

man is a spiritual, intelligent, knowing, in short, speaking being only to the extent that he is recognizant of his abjection—from repulsion to murder—and interiorizes it as such, that is, symbolizes it.
#30

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.131

POWERS OF HORROR > SIN AS DEBT, HOSTILITY, AND INIQUITY

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the Christian conception of sin operates on two registers—as debt/iniquity (constitutive of the subject, anchoring superego morality under the gaze of the Other) and as the reverse side of love/beauty (enabling a conversion into jouissance that exceeds legalistic retribution and tames the demoniacal), making sin the unexpected requisite for the Beautiful.

Such heterogeneity does not cease revealing the moral and symbolic existence of infamy; nevertheless, as it is communicated to the sinner by means of his very being, it saves him from the abject.
#31

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.138

POWERS OF HORROR > AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Christian (Pauline) theology transforms biblical abjection into sin by interiorising and spiritualising it — making it a subjectified, drive-laden relation to the Law and the flesh — such that abjection, rather than being expelled, becomes the privileged site of jouissance, sublimation, and mystical communication with the Other.

sin is subjectified abjection. [...] abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh and the law.
#32

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.141

POWERS OF HORROR > AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE > FELIX CULPA: SPOKEN SIN. DUNS SCOTUS

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Duns Scotus's sacramental theology enacts a shift from judicial-punitive abjection to a verbal-covenantal logic, whereby the act of enunciation (confession, spoken sin) becomes the locus of absolution — making *felix culpa* a phenomenon of enunciation rather than moral action, and grounding art as a lateral extension of this same speech-power over abjection.

lust, erroneous judgment, fundamental abjection are remitted—not suppressed, but subsumed into a speech that gathers and restrains
#33

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.143

POWERS OF HORROR > CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary style operates as a site of abjection that cannot be reduced to thematic content, biography, or politics: through rhythm, carnivalesque polyphony, and an apocalyptic style that hovers between disgust and laughter, Céline transforms the abject into a writing practice that both enacts and momentarily stabilizes the dissolution of the subject — his anti-Semitism being readable as a symptomatic counterweight (a delirium) against the very identity-dissolution that his scription unleashes.

today's universe is divided between boredom (increasingly anguished at the prospect of losing its resources, through depletion) or (when the spark of the symbolic is maintained and desire to speak explodes) abjection and piercing laughter.
#34

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.150

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND HORROR

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's narrative, suffering and horror are not merely thematic content but the structural principle of abjection itself: when the subject-object boundary collapses, narrative form disintegrates from linear story into cry, then into poetic violence and silence, while sublimation (writing, music, love) marks the infinitesimal distance that keeps the speaking subject from total dissolution into abjection.

the necessity of going through abjection, whose intimate side is suffering and horror its public feature... the incandescent states of a boundary-subjectivity that I have called abjection
#35

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.155

POWERS OF HORROR > ACCOUNTS OF DIZZINESS

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that narrative is the primary social mechanism for domesticating abjection—transforming suffering, dizziness, and bodily horror into communicable form—but that in Céline, writing exceeds narrative by converting the abject body into rhythm and music, thereby achieving a "beyond" of sense that mere storytelling cannot reach.

fear, disgust, and abjection crying out, they quiet down, concatenated into a story.
#36

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.157

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's writing, suffering and desire collapse into a zone of "debility" where drive overwhelms representation and signification dissolves — a point where desire founders in drive/affect, erasing the distinction between physical suffering, psychic pain, and sexual excess, leaving only a raw inebriation beyond meaning or glory.

There is no glory in this suffering; it is not an ode: it opens up only onto idiocy. Debility is that ground
#37

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.158

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > SCATOLOGY TURNED COMMONPLACE

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary scription is constituted through a necessary confrontation with the "entirely other" of abjection—decay, excrement, and the human corpse—such that abjection is not perversion but a structural device that simultaneously shatters and coheres narrative, recalling archaic religions of defilement and producing a fascination with death that destabilises the subject's identity.

what is disconnected regains its coherence in the permanence of abjection
#38

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > FERDINAND THE PAIN: A MURDERER

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's subway murder scene as a literary staging of the death drive, where the narrator's hypnotic, rhythmic interiority reveals the murderous process as the underground lining of abject subjectivity — a drive-governed act beneath conscious thought.

Murder as underground lining of the unclean-thinking being.
#39

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.163

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's scription locates itself at the crest of abjection—where decomposition and composition, suffering and music, abomination and ecstasy coincide—and that his apocalyptic vision is not a philosophical revelation of truth (aletheia) but an exposure of jouissance as History's abject motive, irreducible to any ideological or ontological grounding.

Suffering, horror, and their convergence on abjection seem to me more adequate as marks of the apocalyptic vision constituted by Celine's scription.
#40

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.164

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > A NARRATIVE? NO, A VISION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the abject vision shatters Freudian primal fantasies (Urfantasien) under the pressure of a drive overloaded with hatred/death and a narcissistic wound, locating the paradigmatic scene of abjection not in the primal scene but in childbirth, and further identifies this economy of horror and suffering as the libidinal foundation tapped by Fascism—one that neither theoretical reason nor merely desiring art could address.

The vision of the ab-ject is, by definition, the sign of an impossible ob-ject, a boundary and a limit.
#41

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.166

POWERS OF HORROR > SUFFERING AND DESIRE: A DEBILITY > I56 SUFFERING AND HORROR

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary practice occupies a privileged position with respect to historical horror: not by representing or resolving it from the outside, but by inhabiting and enacting it through writing, thereby implicating both author and reader within the horror rather than offering protection or clarity.

is any realist (or socialist-realist) literature up to the horrors of the Second World War? Celine, for his part, speaks from the very seat of that horror, he is implicated in it
#42

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.167

POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > THE TWO-FACED MOTHER

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's split maternal figure as the structural locus of abjection: the idealized/artistic mother and the suffering/castrated mother together embody the threat that femininity poses to infinity and to the subject's narcissistic integrity, making maternity the privileged site where abjection and scription intersect.

This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject.
#43

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.169

POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > LIFE? A DEATH

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's identification with Semmelweis as the paradigmatic structure of abjection: the confusion of life/death and feminine/masculine at the bodily threshold (puerperal fever) drives both the writer's vocation and his particular resolution of the Oedipal situation—not through neurotic triangulation but through simultaneous occupation of all three positions (father/son/feminine), making style itself the impossible third party that separates while touching.

beyond the foulness of abjection, for his two unyielding protagonists to appear—death and words
#44

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.172

POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > COURTLINESS AFFRONTED

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that in Céline's amorous code, abjection and courtly idealization are structurally co-dependent: the sublime feminine (figured as ballerina, priestess, Molly) is the necessary obverse of sadistic/pornographic degradation, and this conjunction of opposites reveals that phallic idealization of Woman requires the prior devalorization and parcelization of sex through partial drives.

Without it abjection could not exist, could not be spoken as our other, as the nocturnal reverse of the magnificent legend
#45

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.173

POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > MY CHILD, MY SISTER

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's idealization of femininity—figured through childlike, sisterly, or angelic women—operates as a phantasmatic defense against abjection: by displacing sexuality onto innocence and carnivalesque ambiguity, the subject defers the abject encounter with feminine sex, while the resulting identity-dissolution (brother/father/satyr) is ultimately resorbed into the grotesque rather than resolved.

the phantasmatic advantage of deferring the abject encounter with feminine sex, for in the body of a childdancer thus presented to one's gaze, touch, hearing, and scent, the sexual component being everywhere is actually nowhere.
#46

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.176

POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > THE PHALLUS\* VOYEUR

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's voyeuristic idealization of the feminine body as the staging of an "absolute phallus" — a phallic jouissance attached to unaltered, pre-symbolic femininity — whereby the male subject's position is constituted as the waste cut off the phallus, structuring a fantasy in which Woman replaces reason as the law-giving instance.

the jouissance of being the waste cut off the phallus [. . .] murder dominates
#47

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.178

POWERS OF HORROR > CARNIVAL—IN HYSTERICAL FASHION, SOCIETY—IN PARANOID FASHION

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's figuration of femininity and paternity as twin poles of abjection: the hysterical/carnivalesque feminine (Gioconda) and the paranoid/social feminine (Henrouille) mark an otherness that cannot be sublimated, while the cartoon father (Auguste/Des Pereires) embodies the bankruptcy of paternal authority and the castration of modern man, together constituting the post-Catholic destiny of a world bereft of jouissance and tipping toward fascist totalitarianism.

They are the prototypes of an abject femininity that, for Celine, is capable of neither music nor beauty; instead, mistress and victim, it breaks out into the world of instincts
#48

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.189

POWERS OF HORROR > LOGICAL OSCILLATIONS: AN ANARCHISM

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's pamphlets are structured by two interlocking logics: a rage against the Symbolic Law (religion, reason, abstraction) and a fantasy substitution of a full, immanent, primary-narcissistic Law embodied in Race/Family/Rhythm/Jouissance — and that when this anarchic negativism attempts to totalize, it crystallizes into the Jew as the phantasmatic object of abjection, making anti-Semitism a parareligious formation that intensifies wherever the symbolic code fails to contain abjection.

anti-Semitism will be the more violent as the social and/or symbolic code is found wanting in the face of developing abjection. That, at any rate, is the situation in our contemporary world, and it is also, for more personal reasons, that of Celine.
#49

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.194

POWERS OF HORROR > BROTHER ...

Theoretical move: Kristeva's analysis of Céline's anti-Semitic fantasy reveals it as a structure of abjection: the Jew is constituted as the unbearable conjunction of Law and Jouissance, brother and father, subject and object, such that anti-Semitic discourse becomes the symptom of its own repressed identification with the abject — a psychoanalytic-structural argument that anti-Semitism is the inverted, possessed servant of the very monotheistic symbolic power it attacks.

The Jew becomes the feminine exalted to the point of mastery, the impaired master, the ambivalent, the border where exact limits between same and other, subject and object, and even beyond these, between inside and outside, and disappearing—hence an Object of fear and fascination. Abjection itself.
#50

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.199

POWERS OF HORROR > IN THE BEGINNING AND WITHOUT END . . .

Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's stylistic project as a movement from emotional depth through rhythm and sound toward the void, tracing how the drive to "resensitize language" stages an encounter with an unnameable otherness that traverses abjection rather than merely expressing it — the trajectory being: emotion → melody/rhythm → void.

Such dizziness leads him to the fulfillment of a kind of challenge to abjection; it is only thus that he can, by naming it, both have it exist and go beyond it.
#51

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.214

POWERS OF HORROR > SEGMENTATION: INTONATION, SYNTAX, SUBJECTIVITY > ELLIPSES: THREE DOTS AND A SUSPENSION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's late-novel syntax stages a structural condensation of enunciation and statement—where intonation, ellipsis, and exclamatory noun phrases replace the predicate relation and lexical signification, making affect itself the carrier of subjective position, and thereby marking a "return of the repressed" at the level of the statement that borders on drive and abjection.

an affect bursts out, in sound and outcry, bordering close on drive and abjection as well as fascination. Bordering on the unnamable.
#52

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.217

POWERS OF HORROR > THE LAUGHTER OF THE APOCALYPSE

Theoretical move: Kristeva identifies Céline's "comedy of abjection" as the literary-stylistic limit-form of abjection: a laughing apocalypse without god, in which exclamatory suspension encodes an affective ambivalence at the level of enunciation itself, and where jouissance and horror coincide in a style that dissolves all ideological support.

A language of abjection of which the writer is both subject and victim, witness and topple.
#53

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.218

POWERS OF HORROR > POWERS OF HORROR

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that literature is the privileged signifier of abjection—the "ultimate coding" of civilizational crises—and that the psychoanalyst, positioned in the void, is the rare contemporary witness capable of demystifying the sacred horror underlying religious, moral, and political power, precisely through an "abject knowledge" that is undermined by forgetfulness and laughter.

On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.
#54

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.222

POWERS OF HORROR > NOTES > 2. SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus for Kristeva's chapter on phobia situates the theoretical architecture of abjection at the intersection of Freudian object-loss, primal repression, and the semiotic — arguing that the phobic/abject object is located on the trail opened by Freud's pre-ego defensive modalities, which depend on symbolic function and language.

Would not the phobic 'object,' and the abject as well, be located on that trail, which was blazed by Freud?
#55

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.82

POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT?

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that defilement rites function as a "scription without signs"—a translinguistic inscription of the archaic border between the semiotic (maternal authority) and the symbolic (paternal law), and that the ambivalent remainder in Brahmanism exposes a non-totalizing logic that challenges mono-logical symbolics by perpetually positing a non-object at once polluting and generative.

defilement is the translinguistic spoor of the most archaic boundaries of the self's clean and proper body. In that sense, if it is a jettisoned object, it is so from the mother.