Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

“Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty on the part of death. Therefore I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.”

The cadaver confronts the speaking subject with its being/not being status. It disrupts the integrity of the subject because it reminds them of the fragile boundary between life and death. This is the abject at its extreme disruptiveness; it threatens to completely undo the living, speaking subject. Kristeva builds emphasis here through italics and swearing—the word “shit” is particularly unusual in an academic context.

“It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that creates abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior.”

Kristeva lists all the forms of the abject takes, using a series of sentence fragments to deepen her characterization. In that it disturbs all social structures, the abject is dangerous. It can cause the disintegration of not only the social structure but also the individual identity. The erasure of borders threatens life itself.

“The ‘unconscious’ contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established.”

In an extension of the Freudian concept of the unconscious, Kristeva argues that the early, preverbal experiences of an infant, while abjected and repressed, are still available to the subject, pushing through in phobias and neuroses. Italics are again used here to add emphasis to certain words and ideas.

“The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion. Seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience, which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity.”

Kristeva views all religions to be inextricably bound up with the abject. By defining defilement and exclusions (also called “taboos”), religion exerts the power to purify those who commit transgressions. At this point, she connects both visual art and literature with expressions of the abject, a means through which the artist and writer achieve catharsis.

“But devotees of the abject, she as well as he, do not cease looking within what flows from the other’s ‘innermost being,’ for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body.”

Kristeva uses a series of juxtapositions here, comparing opposites to highlight the ambiguous nature of the abject. This passage is a warning that the speaking subject, in seeking a return to the womb, risks losing their identity.

“What will concern me here is not the socially productive value of the son-mother incest prohibition but the alterations, within subjectivity when within the very symbolic competence, implied by the confrontation with the feminine.”

In discussing the twin taboos of murder and incest in the Oedipal complex, Kristeva reports that Freud focuses so much on the murder of the father that he overlooks prohibitions of incest. Kristeva wishes to write a corrective: the fear surrounding incest is indifferentiation. The real danger is that the preverbal subject will not separate from the mother or separate subject from object.

“Fixation at this stage will be called narcissism. […] Narcissism is predicated on the existence of the ego but not of an external object; we are faced with the strange correlation between an entity (the ego) and its converse (the object), yet which is nevertheless not yet constituted; with an ‘ego’ in relation to a nonobject.”

Primary narcissism is posited as a stage in the psychosexual development of an infant; the infant feels indistinguishable from the whole world. Kristeva here argues that at this point, the ego is unstable and incomplete because the ego requires an object to establish identity.

“The function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.”

Kristeva’s contention throughout is that the subject can only establish identity through their separation from the mother and their understanding of the mother as other than themselves. According to Kristeva, religion, through ritualized defilement, prohibitions, and purification, takes on the task of protecting the subject from being subsumed by the mother. The danger of this is emphasized by comparing the mother to an ocean through the verb “sinking.”

“No matter what difference there may be among societies where religious prohibitions, which are above all behavior prohibitions, are supposed to afford protection from defilement, one sees everywhere the importance of women and particularly the mother. In societies where it occurs, ritualization of defilement is accompanied by a strong concern for separating the sexes, and this means giving men rights over women.”

According to Kristeva, there is a direct correlation between a culture viewing women as powerful and the number and kind of prohibitions that are placed on women to limit that power. That women can give birth is particularly worrisome to men as a symbol of power and is seen as a danger to not only themselves but also their society.

“That other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed.”

Through the process of abjection of the mother and of women in general, women are not only separated from men, subjected to behavioral prohibitions, and given fewer rights than men; they are also labeled witches or essential evil. In Western Christian cultures, the figure of Eve has been traditionally blamed for the fall of mankind.

“But it is the corpse […] that takes on the abjection of waste in the biblical text. A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming […] the corpse represents fundamental pollution.”

In Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the corpse is the perfect example of the abject. What once was living and whole is now deteriorating. The corpse reminds the viewer that they, too, will die, which produces horror and revulsion in the viewer.

“The abjected object from which I am separated through abomination, if it guarantees a pure and holy law, turns me aside, cuts me off, and throws me out. The abject tears me away from the indifferentiated and brings me into subjection to a system. In short, the abominate is a response to the sacred, its exhaustion, its ending.”

Kristeva examines the way that a religious system, by calling an object or practice abominable, safeguards the system. The profane, through the process of abjection, exists outside of the sacred—Kristeva uses juxtaposition here by comparing the sacred and the “abominate,” which carries connotations of sacrilege. Believers themselves are protected members of the system because of the abject abominations.

“The brimming flesh of sin belongs, of course, to both sexes; but its roots and basic representation is nothing other than feminine temptation. That was already stated in Ecclesiasticus: ‘Sin originated with woman and because of her we all perish.’”

Kristeva identifies the biblical source of women shouldering the blame for the fall of humankind, rooting her analysis in biblical scholarship. However, she turns the argument on its head by asserting that it is not Eve who creates sin but rather God by his pronouncement of sin existing.

“A source of evil and mingled with sin, abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh, and the law.”

Kristeva argues that abjection serves a vital role in the subject’s wholeness and continuation within the religious system. By abjecting evil and sin (that is, making evil and sin something separate from the subject itself) and by providing the means for the subject to reenter the religious system through a spoken avowal of faith (such as confession), religious communities reestablish their wholeness and distinctiveness.

“Power no longer belongs to the judge-God who preserves humanity from abjection while setting aside for himself alone the prerogative of violence […] Power henceforth belongs to discourse itself, or rather to the act of judgment expressed in speech, and in less orthodox and much more implicit fashion, in all the signs (poetry, painting, music, sculpture) that are contingent upon it.”

Kristeva concludes that power is not in God as the judge of good and evil but rather resides within the act of making such pronouncements. By disrupting and undermining these speech acts, art and literature can wield great power and upend social restrictions.

“Lacking illusions, lacking shelter, today’s universe is divided between boredom (increasingly anguished at the prospect of losing its resources, through depletion) or (when the spark of the symbolic is maintained and the desire to speak explodes) abjection and piercing laughter.”

Kristeva identifies “the world of illusions” with “the world of religions” and argues that contemporary human existence exists without either. Abjection and laughter can be the only human response to this ennui, this sense that nothing makes sense for the individual or the culture. This passage is full of juxtapositions, contrasting boredom, abjection, and laughter with each other to highlight the absurd nature of the modern world.

“Céline’s effect is quite other. It calls upon what, within us, eludes defenses, trainings, and words, or else struggles against them. A nakedness, a forlornness, a sense of having had it; discomfort, a downfall, a wound.”

Kristeva asserts that Céline’s writing opens a door to the Semiotic. Not only does Céline demonstrate that being human is all “death and horror,” but he also unexpectedly reveals love, or jouissance—unconventional pleasure that transgresses boundaries and order—and the possibility of transcendence. In his abject writing, he touches on the truth of human existence. Kristeva’s string of fragmented statements at the end of this excerpt emphasizes Céline’s effect building on abject feelings through additional descriptors.

“A universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and mingled identities, wanderings of the subject and its objects, fears and struggles, abjections, and lyricisms. At the turning point between social and asocial, familiar and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder.”

Kristeva notes what readers experience when reading Céline, again through a string of impressionistic images and sentence fragments. For Kristeva, Céline’s explorations in the abject demonstrate with poignancy the existential anguish of human life.

“His adhering to Nazism, ambivalent and paltry as that action was, is not one that can be explained away.”

Céline remains a controversial writer because he supported the Nazis during World War II. Although Kristeva says that this is “not something that can be explained away,” she nonetheless attempts to contextualize it, suggesting that being a part of the group was important for Céline’s individuation and that the quality of his writing grows out of that individuation.

“The narrative web is a thin film constantly threatened with bursting. For, when narrated identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject and object is shaken, and when even the limit between inside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what is challenged first.”

In her discussion of Céline’s use of suffering and horror in his novels, Kristeva argues that the novel enters abjection at the point where the narrative breaks down. All that remains is disordered syntax and multivalent vocabulary, a place where there is no stable meaning. When pushed to its limits, narration ends, and silence ensues. She compares narrative logic to a spiderweb through a metaphor, emphasizing its delicate nature and potential for disruption.

“When Céline locates the ultimate of abjection—and thus the supreme and sole interest of literature—in the birth-giving scene, he makes amply clear which fantasy is involved: something horrible to see at the impossible doors of the invisible—the mother’s body.”

Kristeva uses juxtaposition to compare something typically considered joyful and profound—childbirth—with the abject. She demonstrates how the mother’s body becomes the site of horror at birth as the infant, previously inside the mother’s body, violently exits the maternal space and exists as a separate being outside the mother’s body.

“The theme of the two-faced mother is perhaps the representation of the baleful power of women to bestow mortal life.”

Kristeva recalls again the abjection of the mother figure. Although the mother is powerful in that she gives birth to new life, she also bestows on her offspring certain death: To be born is also to die. The mother exists on both sides of the dividing line between birth and death, and her body is the site of violent separation.

“Passing through the memories of a thousand years, action without scientific objective but attentive to religious imagination, it is within literature that I finally saw it carrying, with its horror, its full power into effect.”

After exploring the concept of the abject, the prohibitions, defilement, and rituals of religion, and after an intense examination of Céline’s fiction, Kristeva concludes that through literature, the abject can be glimpsed in all its subversion and destructiveness. Kristeva writes in poetic, apocalyptic prose, her style increasingly semiotic as opposed to symbolic.