Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Sigmund Freud (1836-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the father of modern psychotherapy. His most important work (such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Ego and the Id, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle) focused on the ways that the unconscious mind affects conscious behavior. In addition, his theories concerning human psychosexual development, based on the myth of Oedipus, continue to exert wide influence across many fields, including psychology, literary criticism, and cultural analysis. The cultural influence of the Oedipus complex—whether or not it is accurate—cannot be overstated; as Terry Eagleton writes, “The Oedipus complex is for Freud the beginning of morality, conscience, law, and all forms of social and religious authority” (Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary edition, Minnesota UP, 2008). These issues form the basis of many of the concepts explored by Kristeva in her book. Likewise, Freud’s formulation of the id, ego, and superego play an important role in Powers of Horror, as do his influence on the writings of Jacques Lacan and other psychoanalysts.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a psychoanalyst and philosopher who garnered international attention and acclaim for his reworking of Freudian concepts. His series of seminars offered in Paris from 1953 to 1980 attracted some of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Lacan began studying Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology. What these scholars did for their own disciplines by introducing a structuralist approach, Lacan did for Freudian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s interests included many disciplines, so he also integrated ideas from literature, art, mathematics, philosophy, and history into his work. His interdisciplinarity meant that his influence spread rapidly among post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers across fields.

Lacan argued that subject development is a linguistic issue. Indeed, for Lacan, human understanding of reality itself is mediated by language and symbolic systems. Some of his major concepts that are particularly important in Powers of Horror include the mirror stage of human development, wherein children learn to see themselves as individuals; the three realms of human experience, including the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; and the role of desire and lack in human development. Whereas Freud’s project was to bring the unconscious id to the awareness of the conscious ego, thereby strengthening the ego and identity, Lacan argued that such a task is fruitless as the ego itself is an illusion created by unconscious drives. Kristeva acknowledges Lacan’s influence on her own thoughts and refers to him often within the text of Powers of Horror. At the same time, while she uses Lacan (and Freud) as her starting point, she expands on their ideas dramatically.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a French novelist and physician. His work serves as the basis for several chapters of Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. Although he is considered one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, he is also known for his antisemitism, attraction to fascism, and collaboration with Nazi Germany in World War II. After being found guilty of collaboration by a French tribunal, he went into exile and lived in Denmark for several years until he received a pardon from the French government. He returned to France and reestablished his medical practice.

His 1932 debut novel, Journey to the End of the Night, offers an unorthodox and innovative narrative style and idiosyncratic system of punctuation. He viewed the human condition as one of suffering. The world of his novel denies moral order and asserts that human progress is illusory. His book is filled with grotesque horror and abjection. In his language, subject matter, and style, Céline draws on the abject. Kristeva examines this novel in the latter chapters of Powers of Horror. Specifically, she discusses the style and form of the novel as subversive, Céline’s antisemitism and its role in his novel, and the book’s confrontation with the maternal.

Mary Douglas (1921-2007) was a British anthropologist famous for both her fieldwork and her studies in ethnography. Her ethnographical work in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) resulted in the publication of The Lele of Kasai in 1963. Kristeva draws on Douglas’s best-known book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), in her own analysis of filth and defilement. In addition, Douglas’s chapter, “The Abomination of Leviticus,” is an important influence for Kristeva in her discussion of religion and food prohibitions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a French anthropologist and the father of anthropological structuralism. He revolutionized the discipline of cultural studies by studying and defining the underlying structures of human societies. He applied the theories of linguistic structuralism developed by Ferdinand de Saussure to culture and argued that all culture is the product of the human mind.

His most famous books included The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and The Raw and the Cooked (1964). His influence extended beyond anthropology to disciplines including philosophy, sociology, and literature. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva draws on Lévi-Strauss in her discussion of food prohibitions and the construction of the Inside/Outside. In addition, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of anthropology paved the way for Jacques Lacan to do the same with psychology, offering another influence on Kristeva’s Powers of Horror.

Tel Quel was a French avant-garde literary magazine published between 1960 and 1982. Founded by Phillipe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier, it published some of the most important and influential articles and writers of its day. The journal published structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructive essays. Julia Kristeva (who married Sollers in 1967) served on the editorial board and was a contributor to the journal. The Tel Quel group, as they came to be called, included a who’s who of literary theorists working in the 1960s and 1970s, including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

In the 1970s, the group no longer endorsed the French Communist Party and briefly aligned itself with Maoism. However, after members of the Tel Quel editorial board including Kristeva visited China, the group disavowed its connection to Maoist communism in 1976. The journal ceased publication in 1982. By all accounts, Tel Quel had a profound influence on the literary and cultural debates of the 1960s and 1970s.