Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

In the final three chapters, Kristeva concludes her reading of Céline and contemplates the problem of nihilistic modernity. Although Kristeva wrote this book some 80 years after the start of the 20th century, the aftershocks of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb still resonate. Nihilism, the rejection of all moral and religious rules and principles, holds that life is meaningless. It is this problem that faces Kristeva in light of Céline’s apocalyptic and carnivalesque writing. Kristeva asks whether style is enough and concludes that it is, as style allows the abject to be unveiled, and for the Semiotic to disrupt the Symbolic. Nonetheless, Kristeva appears to be looking for something deeper to replace the respite of religion and fill the void made by the loss of God in the modern world.

Although Kristeva writes that she does not condone Céline’s views, her inclusion of his texts and her admiration for his style presents an ethical question for the book as a whole; regardless of criticism, it gives wider circulation to antisemitic writing. Although Kristeva writes, “His adhering to Nazism, ambivalent and paltry as that action was, is not one that can be explained away,” she minimizes his culpability by suggesting his support was “ambivalent and paltry” (136). She suggests that his attachment to Nazism is a “security blanket,” a way of establishing his own identity. Moreover, she attributes his hatred to “delirium.” It is unclear if she uses this as an excuse for his extreme views or not. Nonetheless, any reader of Powers of Horror must be prepared to confront not only the abject in Céline’s writing but also the repugnance of his views.

Stylistically, Kristeva’s writing becomes increasingly fluid, musical, and poetic. She attempts to connect to the preverbal Semiotic in her writing and, in doing so, invites an eruption of the abject into her analysis in passages such as this:

Throughout the night without images but buffeted by black sounds; amidst a throng of forsaken bodies beset with no longing but to last against all odds and for nothing; on a page where I plotted out the convolutions of those who, in transference presented me with the gift of their void—I have spelled out abjection (207).

Abjection surfaces in this passage, not only in the images of bodies and black sounds but also in her own undermining of the passage. Although she says she writes in a night without images, she piles on one image after another. Bodies, night, and void all erupt into her text.

Kristeva also utilizes intertextuality in these chapters through direct references to Greek oracles, Hebrew prophets, Dante, the Palestinian apocalyptic, and the Bakhtinian carnival. All bring with them a catalog of meaning, deepening the work’s context through explicit intertextuality. In addition, by titling one subsection of Chapter 10 “The Laughter of the Apocalypse,” Kristeva may be alluding to the work of her fellow French feminist scholar, Hélène Cixous, who wrote “The Laugh of the Medusa,” an essay that calls on women to abandon patriarchal systems and signification and use their bodies to connect with new forms of writing. Her essay recalls Kristeva’s discussion of the Semiotic as fluid, emotional, and connected to the body. Kristeva, however, rejects the notion of écriture feminine (feminine writing, Cixous’s formulation) a few pages later. Instead of ascribing this kind of writing to only women, she addresses both men and women, asking “Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis?” (208). In so doing, Kristeva offers up literature as the “fragile obverse of a radical nihilism” (206). In other words, Kristeva looks to literature (and other art) to bear the weight of meaning in a post-religious world.