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.
Development
1980
Julia Kristeva introduced by
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.
Relations
- 1980 introduced by Julia Kristeva
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.
Works
- 1980
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Kristeva's essay on abjection: the horror with which the subject casts off whatever threatens the boundary between self and other, from bodily waste and the corpse to the archaic maternal body from which it must separate. The book moves from Freud's case of Little Hans and the problem of phobia, through the laws of purity and defilement in Leviticus and their reworking in Christianity, to a long reading of Céline's prose as a literature of the abject. It opened a sequence of three psychoanalytic studies, continued in Histoires d'amour and Soleil noir. Leon S. Roudiez translated it into English as Powers of Horror (1982), and Noam Baruch into Hebrew (Resling, 2005).
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection1980 Evidence for a relation