Book
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection
Copyright Life + 70 years Status unknown Death year unknown for Julia Kristeva.United States In copyright Published in 1980; protected through 2075.
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).
- Published
- 1980
- In
- Paris: Éditions du Seuil
- Language
- French