MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’Horreur. Essai sur l’Abjection, 1980
Published by Éditions du Seuil
First Edition
Collection M HKA, Antwerp

In Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection, Franco-Bulgarian philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva explores the notion of the abject. Neither subject nor object, the abject – examples of which include faeces, a corpse, or extreme crimes – usually evokes discomfort or even disgust. Kristeva situates the abject before the ‘symbolic order’, or before the emergence of meaning. In the abject, modernist oppositions like nature and culture, intuition and rationality seem to be neutralised, removed. Paradoxically, people are constantly drawn to the abject. Kristeva intertwines Freudian, Lacanian and poststructuralist perspectives, shifting the emphasis to gender, motherhood and the problems women face in patriarchal society. She connects the abject with religion as well as with art and literature, which she approaches as attempts to purify the abject through catharsis. For Kristeva, religious rituals are attempts to contain the abject and to protect us from the depravity and chaos it embodies. The abject is the psychological basis for the religious concepts of sin and uncleanliness. In this context, Kristeva links the fantasy of the 'Jewish threat' and twentieth-century anti-Semitism to fear of the abject.
 

“It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."
— Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection, 1980