Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives) (European Perspectives Series)

Product Information

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. It was good when it turned you away from your mother’s breast and made you interested in eating solid food, but when it gets you repulsed by anyone with a big belly, including yourself, the side effects start to outweigh the benefits.

So the subject/object thing is trembly with the tension between two dangers: to seal off into a regressive narcism, or to overidentify with scattered others for a fragmented ego. I have often wondered how long it takes to become desensitized to the material you're working with if your job is to analyze or otherwise handle stool samples. Because you can see yourself as part of an accident, you’re drawn to it even though you dread the thought. This is how garbage men and sewage workers come to tolerate their jobs, how a nurse can clean your wound of pus, and how a shrink can listen to hours of crazy talk without going crazy himself, most of the time. However, I would quite appreciate anybody to respond with a summary of anything interesting in this book, as I found very little; and I'm very intrigued to find this book got such a high rating from so many readers.The institutions which wield power in the modern world, which she believes to be oppressive and inhumane, are built upon the notion that man must be protected from the abject. Kristeva is one of the leading voices in contemporary French criticism, on a par with such names as Genette, Foucault, Greimas and others. The abject, one can suppose, is the melancholic transition between the pre-symbolic mother to the identification with the father (in the symbolic). Likewise, there are many more literary examples she could approach: it would not be hard to produce a 500+ page book from this topic at all. As Kristeva puts it, "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection.

For Kristeva, abjection is that which can be experienced as disgust (le dégoût), the body's reaction, phobic or revolting, against the polarization of fusion and separation. Then she takes it to even higher heights with this simultaneously adulating and excoriating criticism of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and it's one of the few pieces of literary criticism that reaches the brilliance of a Susan Sontag or a Walter Benjamin. Where the integrity of that slash (/) in the self /other mental construction is threatened by representations which collapse or disrupt the sign/referent template underpinning it. What amuses me about Lacanians, especially the main one, Jacques Lacan, is that they (and especially he) will go to great lengths trying to mimic the rhetoric and rigor of science but not notice the real thing when it's close enough to smell. Closely related to narcissism, abjection can thereby be equated to Lacan's mirror formation, and women, not men, are even more structurally closer to abjection throughout their lives.

Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on paraphilosophical modes of discourse. We did all the usual tourist things, but what I remember best was my first sight of a man with a missing leg, struggling to get through the subway turnstile. In Powers of Horror though she's at her finest, drawing on her dual careers as a practicing psychoanalyst and a linguist. Leon Roudiez (who died in 2004 I believe) translated several of Kristeva's works and I did enjoy reading those but the translation he did for this book seems a little off.

Nors abi tos analizės reikalingos – pirmoji abjekcijos veiksmą rodo esantį paveldėtoj/ išmoktoj kultūroj, antroji – geroj literatūroj, kitaip sakant, kūryboj. It did suit you in the beginning when you were a fetus, swimming in your mother’s womb, all your needs provided before you even knew you had them. The Imaginary is that mental phase, or that facet of conscious selfhood's structure, where we have representations in our minds of the things in the world around us, of things that are "other," but which have not been totally subsumed by and defined within the context of social consensus, language, law, science, etc. Then she flushes that idea with a chapter of Lacanian jargon, pretty much the sole academic vocabulary that just reads in my mind as "Bullshit bullshit bullshit.In Powers of Horror , Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which theorizes the notion of the ‘abject’ in a series of blisteringly insightful analyses, is as relevant, as necessary, and as courageous today as it seemed in 1984.