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

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The word "abject" comes from the Latin roots ab ("away") and jacere ("to throw"), and I'm not bringing that up just to change the subject, but introduction of the abject always changes the subject. 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. They've got to load up the structure of signification with all this inherent gender stuff: sign, meaning, and discourse is the real of The Law of the Father, while all that indeterminate iffyness of the imaginary is all on Mom which nowadays makes us chuckle and shake our heads gently with an amused mutter: oh, those Freudians.

Then she takes it to even higher heights with this simultaneously adulating and excoriating criticism of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and it's one of the few pieces of literary criticism that reaches the brilliance of a Susan Sontag or a Walter Benjamin. Freudianism is indeed omnipresent here; as a result, some of the author's concepts sound at the very least far-fetched when compared to her otherwise clever approach - especially to the Judeo-Christian religion(s) and Scriptures.Likewise, there are many more literary examples she could approach: it would not be hard to produce a 500+ page book from this topic at all. I should make it clear as well that I'm no expert, and I certainly have not read this book in the original language as my French extends no further than the edges of a menu.

We did all the usual tourist things, but what I remember best was my first sight of a man with a missing leg, struggling to get through the subway turnstile.

Kristeva in this book exposes the tenuously constructed and easily dismantled nature of the self and takes the reader to a place outside of the cultural security of linguistic definitions of societal being, a place where markers of certainty can disappear and everything is in a state of flux. It was good when it turned you away from your mother’s breast and made you interested in eating solid food, but when it gets you repulsed by anyone with a big belly, including yourself, the side effects start to outweigh the benefits. Few original ideas, but plenty of interesting references to diverse sources (Freudian psychoanalysis, the Bible, anthropology, semiology, modern literature) to which Kristeva's essay is too heavily indebted to be regarded as a truly groundbreaking work.

Intolerance and prejudice, narrow-mindedness and bigotry, prudishness and hypocritical self-righteousness all have their roots in abjection. That which I understood and agreed with were so eloquently put I kept exclaiming "That's how it really is! The fear of, say, heights really stands in the place of a much more primal fear: the fear caused by the breakdown of any distinction between subject and object, of any distinction between ourselves and the world of dead material objects (reference page? The abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious. and present threats to the subject on the level of The Real like for real, a lesson learned long before science.She later brings up ancient vampire stories as representative of the biblical version of the corpse, the body without a soul. I could see how people could mix this up because of the fact that filth and impurity can absolutely be counted as abject. An essential read for those interested in exploring the darker and more unsettling aspects of the human condition. Depending on your inner ego, depending on how much close to death and horror you have been, this is one of the best books I have ever read. Once these items are outside of the body, they are abject due to the threat they pose to the “full” or “complete” subject.

So the subject/object thing is trembly with the tension between two dangers: to seal off into a regressive narcism, or to overidentify with scattered others for a fragmented ego. Psychoanalytic thinkers would likely locate the problem somewhere in that zone where the sexual overlaps with the parental, aka "the ick field. Semiotics has a pretty cut-and-dried conceptualization of the sign: (Object--mental image of object--Sound Image--standing for object [heard word]--Visual Version of Sound Image [print/writing]--motor skill representation, spoken and written). Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. Oh but here's the deal: the gross juicy parts that should reside on the inside this-side boundary of the Me/Other demarcation are realized as like totally icky Other (who is not grossed out by their own guts, snot, pus, etc?To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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". A thing's thingness must be delimited, and that boundary that excludes what it is not is a substantial element of its identity. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature. This then poses the initial organizing structure of cognition as a scheme of fear and desire on an axis of presence and absence.