Pharmakos
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#01
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.94
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.
It is precisely such a dynamics of reversals that makes of him a being of abjection and a pharmakos, a scapegoat who, having been ejected, allows the city to be freed from defilement.