Concept
Abjection
Kristeva's term, set out in Powers of Horror (1980), for the reaction of horror and loathing with which a subject casts out whatever threatens the border between self and not-self. Its objects include bodily waste, the corpse, and above all the archaic, engulfing maternal body from which the child must separate in order to become a speaking subject. The abject is neither subject nor object: what is expelled never fully leaves, and it returns to unsettle identity, order and meaning. Kristeva ties abjection to primal repression and to the rituals of defilement by which religions and cultures mark their limits, and reads writing such as Céline's as a place where the abject is given form.
Read more- Introduced by
- Julia Kristeva
- Key works
- 1
- Related
- Primal repression
introduced by
- Julia Kristeva 1980 Kristeva gave abjection its psychoanalytic sense in Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980), as the expulsion of what threatens the borders of the emerging subject before the object is constituted.
derives from
- Primal repression Kristeva ties abjection to Freud’s primal repression: the abject marks the subject’s first, precarious separation from the archaic mother, before the distinction of subject and object is secured.