Book
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’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).
Main ideas
- Abjection is the expulsion of what threatens the borders of the emerging subject, before subject and object are securely distinct.
- The abject is neither inside nor outside, neither subject nor object, and what is cast off keeps returning.
- The maternal body is the privileged site of abjection: the child must separate from it to become an individual.
- Kristeva ties abjection to Freud's primal repression.
- Religions mark their limits through rites of purity and defilement, from Leviticus to Christianity.
- Céline's writing gives literary form to the abject.
What it shows
- 1980
Julia Kristeva introduced Abjection
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.
Abjection 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.