Kristeva argues that anthropology and psychology, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject. Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his/her own, but that he/she "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" ( Powers of Horror, p.85). For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. However, Aldana Reyes suggests that the overwhelming focus on abjection in relation to female bodies is problematic. He writes that, Kristeva argues that the abject exerts a tremendous psychological impact on individuals and, indeed, on societies as a whole. Religion is a natural response to the abject, for if one truly experiences the abject, he is prone to engage in all manners of perverse and anti-social behaviors. Therefore, religion creates a buffer between one's mind and the abject and further represses them. Kristeva follows Freud in her belief that repressed desires tend to manifest themselves unconsciously and symbolically. This can happen occasionally in something like the slip of the tongue—the so-called "Freudian slip"—but it also happens in art. Indeed, art is indispensable to investigating the abject, because its non-linguistic nature prevents it from ever being directly expressed. Kristeva traces the influence of the abject, particularly the abject as related to mother-lust, in the development of Judaism and Christianity. She sees the strict Mosaic laws as reducing, fundamentally, to the incest taboo, the most basic (and obvious) response to one's repressed mother-lust. Christianity builds upon (but also contradicts) Judaism by identifying the abject almost directly—with the new, Christian concept of sin as something inside of oneself—but then strictly forbidding it. In the Christian world, one becomes more divided than ever.

Pulsions du temps, foreword, edition and notes by David Uhrig, Fayard, Paris, 2013 (trans. Passions of Our Time, ed. with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman, Columbia University Press, New York, 2019)Kristeva examines the notion of abjection—the repressed and literally unspeakable forces that linger inside a person's psyche—and traces the role the abject has played in the progression of history, especially in religion. She turns to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine as an almost ideal example of the cathartic, artistic expression of the abject. Organizational theory literature on abjection has attempted to illuminate various ways in which institutions come to silence, exclude or disavow feelings, practices, groups or discourses within the workplace. Studies have examined and demonstrated the manner in which people adopt roles, identities and discourses to avoid the consequences of social and organizational abjection. [23] In such studies the focus is often placed upon a group of people within an organization or institution that fall outside of the norm, thus becoming what Kristeva terms "the one by whom the abject exists," or "the deject" people. [24] Institutions and organizations typically rely on rituals and other structural practices to protect symbolic elements from the semiotic, both in a grander organizational focus that emphasizes the role of policy-making, and in a smaller interpersonal level that emphasizes social rejection. Both the organizational and interpersonal levels produce a series of exclusionary practices that create a "zone of inhabitability" for staff perceived to be in opposition to the organizational norms. Stemberger, Martina. 2006. Irène Némirovsky: Phantasmagorien der Fremdheit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. A final way the abject can be represented in horror is through the representation of the maternal figure as ‘other,’ like in Psycho and Carrie. When female monsters are presented in horror, Creed explains, their monstrosity is almost always inextricably tied to ‘mothering and reproductive functions’ (2015). She goes on to explain that these images of bodily waste linked with reproduction, such as menstrual blood, fill the viewer and the protagonist ‘with disgust and loathing’ as they threaten the constitution of the subject (Creed, 2015). The reason these images of maternal functions, and the monstrous-feminine, horrify and repulse is by reminding the viewer of the time spent in the semiotic stage, at a time when they had no identity or understanding of their body.

Le Vieil homme et les loups, Fayard, Paris, 1991(trans. The Old Man and the Wolves, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994) Then she flushes that idea with a chapter of Lacanian jargon, pretty much the sole academic vocabulary that just reads in my mind as "Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Bullshit bullshit can also bullshit." In Impostures intellectuelles (1997), physics professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Kristeva's use of mathematics in her writings. They argue that Kristeva fails to show the relevance of the mathematical concepts she discusses to linguistics and the other fields she studies, and that no such relevance exists. [38] Alleged collaboration with the Communist Regime in Bulgaria [ edit ] Le Génie féminin: la vie, la folie, les mots, Fayard, Paris, 1999- (trans. Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001–2004): When you know about abjection, it’s not hard to find yourself abjecting all over the place. Think about any part of yourself you would really rather not have. Let’s say you hate your big, soft belly. If you could just cut it off and remove it, you would; but what you settle on doing is exercising and trying to eat right, but mostly just hating it. Of course, you will not only hate your belly, you’re going to hate other people’s big bellies, too. The person you’re going to hate the most, and be the most abjected by, is going to be that big, fat person, eating an ice cream cone, waddling down the street. You’re going to think that person is disgusting. What are you disgusted by? You’re looking at an abjected version of yourself.State University of New York at Stony Brook". Archived from the original on 2004-11-20 . Retrieved 2004-11-23. Hall’s article goes on to demonstrate this in the works of Tim Burton and Stephen King. In her article ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity…Vulnerability’, Kristeva argues that all should learn to recognise the abject within ourselves; such action, she suggests, will lead to the inclusion of people with disabilities within society, particularly in politics (Kristeva, 2010). So, see: the real tension is between our careful Me/not-me mental construct of selfhood and the abject within. It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's idea of a gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) led to his setting up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater. The group used animal carcasses and bloodshed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas Mekas. Nitsch organised a series of performances which influenced the radical New York art scene. Other members of the Viennese Actionists, Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade. Rudolf Schwarzkogler is known for his photos dealing with the abject.

Religion, according to Kristevea, is a natural response to the abject, for if one truly experiences the abject, they are prone to engage in all manners of perverse and anti-social behaviors. Therefore, religion creates a sort of buffer between one's mind and the abject and further represses them. She later turns to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and the publication of 'Journey to the End of the Night' as an almost ideal example of the purgative, artistic expression of the abject. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, I.B.Tauris, 2007, pp. 154–55 It has also been suggested (e.g., Creed, 1993) that the degradation of women and women's bodies in popular culture (and particularly, for example, in slasher films) emerges because of the threat to identity that the mother's body poses: it is a reminder of time spent in the undifferentiated state of the semiotic, where one has no concept of self or identity. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.

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Ginzburg, Leone. 2002. “Nota Introduttiva.” In Fëdor Dostoevskij (ed.), Memorie del sottosuolo. Trans. Alfredo Polledro. Torino: Einaudi. If differentiation is the most fundamental act of cognition, then maybe our first such act is noticing the difference between mom-is-here and mom-is-not-here (but not our complicated idea of "mom," just a warm food-source presence filling eyes and mouth). This then poses the initial organizing structure of cognition as a scheme of fear and desire on an axis of presence and absence. Absence= I want (will I have it again?). Presence= I have (but I might lose it again). Sens et non sens de la révolte, Fayard, Paris, 1996 (trans. The Sense of Revolt, Columbia University Press, 2000) So where's all the HORROR? 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. The material version of that slash (SKIN!) in turn becomes a representation of the inside/outside demarcation and assertions of selfhood bring forth all it contains, the juicy stuff:

Abjection theory, particularly in regard to horror studies, has been a useful tool for reframing the ways in which we view the female body in the genre. As Xavier Aldana Reyes highlights in Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (2016), Childers, Joseph (1995). Childers, Joseph; Hentzi, Gary (eds.). The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. p. 1. ISBN 978-0231072434. Kristeva, J (2010) ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and... Vulnerability’, 38(1/2), 251-268. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25679842 Possessions, Fayard, Paris, 1996 (trans. Possessions: A Novel, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998) Kristeva, J (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.You have spit in your mouth all the time and frequently swallow it; but, by expelling it from your body, you make it an object apart from you; sort of. It’s not like any other external object because before you spit it out, it was a part of you. You had no trouble with it then and you would have no trouble drinking the water before you spit in it, even though the water was not a part of you, an other. After you expelled the spit, it became other; but a special kind of other, an other that has been abjected. Try to drink it again and the concepts of self and other become all mixed up and confused. That’s when the trouble begins. Drink that glass of water with your spit in it and you’ll demonstrate to yourself how. If you were to succeed, you would do so by telling yourself it’s all right and forcing it down. Do that repeatedly and, in time it’ll be no big deal. It’s not that you’ll learn to relish spit, but you’ll be able to drink it if you needed to. This is how garbage men and sewage workers come to tolerate their jobs, how a nurse can clean your wound of pus, and how a shrink can listen to hours of crazy talk without going crazy himself, most of the time. Kristeva starts strong, with a fascinating idea-- the abject-- and then seems to signpost the way to some very interesting research, contrasting it with the sublime and relating it to the close relationship between the human ideal and the human body, and what happens when those two don't really sync up. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet (1952) (Note: Jean Genet wrote a journal in which abjection was an important theme) Sofia, Reuters in (March 28, 2018). "Julia Kristeva was communist secret agent, Bulgaria claims". the Guardian. {{ cite web}}: |first= has generic name ( help)