Maternal Body
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This concept page does not yet have synthesis content. The extractor flagged it as a load-bearing concept; a future synthesis pass will populate it. The All Occurrences section below shows every place it appears in the corpus.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (2)
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#01
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.30
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.
the feminine body, the maternal body, in its most un-signifiable, un-symbolizable aspect, shores up, in the individual, the fantasy of the loss in which he is engulfed
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#02
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.118
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.
the mastered repetition of a more archaic separation (from the maternal body) as well as the condition of division (high-low), of discretion, of difference, of recurrence, in short the condition of the processes that underpin symbolicity.