The division or separation of mother and child makes up the two sides of the sacred. Kristeva asserts that sex and violence form the primal intersection for humanity, and women are the victims of the symbolic order. The Murder of the Mother and the Prohibition of Incest is the precondition of the emergence of human subjectivity and the formation of society. It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new signifiance. The abject is related to perversion. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away-it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. As a result the abject is a “crisis of narcissism.” Kristeva asserted, The chora will, of course, return, but it is held in tenuous check by the sign or the image the subject has formed narcissistically of itself. Inspired by the rejection of the maternal body, the (unstable) prohibition of incest includes autoeroticism and is located in what Kristeva, borrowing a term from Plato, called the chora. Imagine the chora as a receptacle, a place where the repressed is pent up.
The human subject is founded upon the imposition of the Symbolic Law of the Father and the abjection of the mother to prevent incest. Although through these lessons in “horror,” the Mother is abjected, in signifying horror, reconciliation with the maternal body is possible. In order for the child to become detached from the mother, the Mother must be abjected: “The abject would thus be the object of primal repression.” The Mother is gradually rejected through rituals of cleanliness, toilet training, eating habits and so on. But the symbolic (intervention of the Father between the mother and child) alone is not enough to ensure the separation. Before the intervention of the Symbolic, there is a prior impulse compelled to expel the Mother and the mother becomes the Abject.
Abjection is part of the earliest and forgotten struggle to separate from the mother who is reluctant to recognize the realm of the symbolic or the law of the Phallus. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray.įor Kristeva, the abject is part of one’s personal archaeology or buried consciousness. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines-for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject-constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, fold- able, and catastrophic. She contrasts the ob-ject to the ab-ject, which is connected to the Freudian mechanism or process of repression, denial and repudiation that are part of the formation of the human subject. Kristeva decided to write about that which is been repressed, of that at which one does not want to look or smell or experience–the skim on milk, fingernail parings, waste, cadavers and so on. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. A certainty protects it from the shameful-a certainty of which it is proud holds-on to it.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside sickened, it rejects.
It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark re-volts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. Following in the footsteps of Luce Irigaray, this book was written expressively, in a “lightning style” and explores the psychoanalytic status of the Mother in terms of “horror,” “love,” melancholy.” There are things that are repulsive and horrible in life, things that are grotesque and formless, but what is their status? Stabbing with her pen, Kristeva replicates the powers of horror itself in her essay, “Approaching Abjection,” Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980/1982) was a turning point in her career and in postmodern theory because she re-located the origin of psychoanalysis in the notion of abjection.
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