#approaching abjection

[ashadeintheshade]

It’s literally impossible for me to write fanfiction without referencing and/or rereading Kristeva

So yeah I made a gif

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

But that word, “fear”— a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess— no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer.

Julia Kristeva, excerpt of ‘Approaching Abjection’ Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (tr. Leon S. Roudiez). 

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

Julia Kristeva, excerpt of ‘Approaching Abjection’ Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (tr. Leon S. Roudiez). 

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

Julia Kristeva, excerpt of ‘Approaching Abjection’ Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (tr. Leon S. Roudiez). 

[herblacktights]

been rereading a lot of psychoanalytic theory that i read in undergrad now as a phd student and have been so pleased by what i have found. first of all, while it might be good from a brain growth/critical thinking perspective to read shit this dense when you are under 22, it is sooo much easier to understand when your brain is done cooking and you realize in many ways, these are someone else's musings upon being a person rather than an intellectual threat or invitation to an argument (ymmv obviously as i do still feel as though lacan is personally inviting me to a duel that i will lose whenever i read his work), anyway i came across this passage in "approaching abjection" by julia kristeva that i never noticed before:

(approaching abjection, julia kristeva, 1982)

the abject is this concept that helps define the places we have cordoned off in society, especially in regards to taboos. i was first exposed to it in an anthropological context but in this reading, it is so clear to me that my interest in the abject and what kristeva has to say about it has so much to do with my interest in writing about taboo or "dead dove topics." kristeva doesn't just say that this pursuit is something that can be done in literature but that it might be the best place that it can be done -- in part because of the sublimation of self and other that goes into writing. like it's part of the work that literature is meant to do for us culturally. anyway, i just thought it was neat and wanted to share also to type out the unholy sentence: "i wonder what julia kristeva would think about kink memes."

[kultur3d]

APPROACHING ABJECTION

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity, No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce. 

Victor Hugo, La Legende des siecles 

NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT 

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts 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. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. 

What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place_where meaning collapses. A certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that, "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it to the father's account [verse au pere—pere-uersion]: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. 

On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.