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

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In Powers of Horror , Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. abjection and the long human recourse with it is not only a psychoanalytic approach to disgust, horror, rejection and violence but also a cultural genesis from which all literature and religion can be seen as exhale and spell. According to Kristeva, the best modern literature ( Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonin Artaud, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Franz Kafka, etc.

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. Closely related to narcissism, abjection can thereby be equated to Lacan's mirror formation, and women, not men, are even more structurally closer to abjection throughout their lives. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. and present threats to the subject on the level of The Real like for real, a lesson learned long before science.That's my theory, but Freudians take this presence/absence thing into that whole Oedipal castration business; how a child knows a father "has" something down there which mom "has not," is no matter for my speculation (see the dep't. What we are confronted with when we experience the trauma of seeing a human corpse (particularly the corpse of a friend or family member) is our own eventual death made palpably real. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. Religion, according to Kristevea, is a natural response to the abject, for if one truly experiences the abject, they are prone to engage in all manners of perverse and anti-social behaviors. Until then we are an unboundaried everything everywhere, undifferentiated from all sounds, sights, smells, skins, sheets, and poop.

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. Because you can see yourself as part of an accident, you’re drawn to it even though you dread the thought. If you could just cut it off and remove it, you would; but what you settle on doing is exercising and trying to eat right, but mostly just hating it. You would have the same trouble if you watched someone else expel their spit into a glass and tried to drink that. By facing the abject face-to-face one tears away the support of these institutions and embarks on the first movement that can truly undermine them.This then poses the initial organizing structure of cognition as a scheme of fear and desire on an axis of presence and absence. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. The power of her work however is that she is able to connect the appeal of horror, of the abject, to the concept of the sublime in a way that finally investigates why we enjoy an attraction to things that would seem only to repulse any sane creature.

On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other. This seems obvious, but if we apply it to the subject it suggests that the conceptualization of other people as such precedes the formation of the "I. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016). Therefore, abjection is an operation of the human psyche by which the subject creates and maintains identity by repelling or rejecting anything that threatens its boundaries. This is probably only going to really resonate with people with some familiarity with Lacan and psychoanalytic theory.Kristeva's language is beautiful (even translated into English), so that made a lot of it almost delightful to read. 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. Finally, although the abject is constantly present, it must be repelled at all costs because it threatens annihilation. Or: diners becoming ill when they learn their soup had a cross dipped in it, or local disgust prompting a hotel owner to burn a bed after learning Ghandi had used it. Important to this book and all others in its field is the idea that the identity of things is not just maintained by what they are, but by what they are not.

Interestingly, her pre-AIDS argument posits tears and sperm as non-threatening excresences, but I feel if she'd been born later the sperm-threat would involve Patriarchal Authority or somesuch rather than The Real reasons. Take the usual sense of the gross, the repulsive, the degraded in the abject, haul along the Latin roots for "throw away" (or "make distant" or "define as other than yourself") and name yourself--the thrower--"the subject" and we're well on our way to getting at this book's premise.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Leon Roudiez (who died in 2004 I believe) translated several of Kristeva's works and I did enjoy reading those but the translation he did for this book seems a little off. She privileges poetry, in particular, because of poetry's willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and meaning, thus laying bare the fact that language is at once arbitrary and limned with the abject fear of loss: "Not a language of the desiring exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges". It did suit you in the beginning when you were a fetus, swimming in your mother’s womb, all your needs provided before you even knew you had them. 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.

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