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

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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.

Reading this book makes you feel like you're uncovering the darkest, most sinister secrets of the universe. Because you can see yourself as part of an accident, you’re drawn to it even though you dread the thought. In fact, I'm fairly certain I read somewhere that the first edition of Powers of Horror was bound in human flesh and inked in blood, but I might be thinking of something else. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. We tend to think that animals flee from danger or repulsion, but many are curious to a degree just as humans are, and any psychobiological connections someone as adept on the topic as Kristeva could draw might be very useful.Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) by Caitlin Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4. For example, the blood that is poured on Carrie White (as well as her menstruation blood at the start of the film) are abject because they threaten meaning. do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject".

One aspect of the abject that Kristeva highlights is the fact that its main characteristic is not about sickness or disease, but rather about meaninglessness. 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. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. Kristeva also associates the abject with jouissance: "One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit].A thing's thingness must be delimited, and that boundary that excludes what it is not is a substantial element of its identity.

The only real downside to this book is that reading it requires you to translate every damn thing from Freud to Makes-Sense.

If you are horrified at the thought of wearing clothes your mother picked out for you, telling your father about your sex life, and living once again in your childhood home, it’s because you have differentiated yourself. Religion, according to Kristevea, is a natural response to the abject, for if one truly experiences the abject, they are prone to engage in all manners of perverse and anti-social behaviors.