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

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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. Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is a massively important text for any scholar interested in horror or the abject.

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 paraphilosophical modes of discourse. Psychoanalytic thinkers would likely locate the problem somewhere in that zone where the sexual overlaps with the parental, aka "the ick field. The orphaned turd, once of us, is now abject, viscerally other, yet unlike many other others it has no function; it has no place; it has no purpose: it is shit. In fact, I'm fairly certain I read somewhere that the first edition of Powers of Horror was bound in human flesh and inked in blood, but I might be thinking of something else.

The only real downside to this book is that reading it requires you to translate every damn thing from Freud to Makes-Sense. So, see: the real tension is between our careful Me/not-me mental construct of selfhood and the abject within. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. One aspect of the abject that Kristeva highlights is the fact that its main characteristic is not about sickness or disease, but rather about meaninglessness.

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) by Caitlin Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.The author shares some fascinating ideas and insight into abjection and how it relates to women in horror, what society and film makers are saying through their stories about women in horror, and how this reflects contemporary culture and society's attitudes to women through the ages.

These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. 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". Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which theorizes the notion of the ‘abject’ in a series of blisteringly insightful analyses, is as relevant, as necessary, and as courageous today as it seemed in 1984. Or: diners becoming ill when they learn their soup had a cross dipped in it, or local disgust prompting a hotel owner to burn a bed after learning Ghandi had used it. Kristeva has the idea that we are 'subjects in process' and that there is no such thing as a fixed or stable identity.This then poses the initial organizing structure of cognition as a scheme of fear and desire on an axis of presence and absence. That said, she could have taken things further: the book is slim in translation (I've yet to see the French original but have no reason to believe it was longer) and there's ample ground she could still cover. But what batter subject than one whose relationship to waffles commplicates the clean subject/object structure of selfhood and communication, both sides implicit with auto-destruction? 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 thus at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a reestablishment of our "primal repression.

For Kristeva, abjection is that which can be experienced as disgust (le dégoût), the body's reaction, phobic or revolting, against the polarization of fusion and separation. I have often wondered how long it takes to become desensitized to the material you're working with if your job is to analyze or otherwise handle stool samples. The power of her work however is that she is able to connect the appeal of horror, of the abject, to the concept of the sublime in a way that finally investigates why we enjoy an attraction to things that would seem only to repulse any sane creature.

Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject, rather, with poetic catharsis: "an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it".