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

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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.

In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. In Powers of Horror though she's at her finest, drawing on her dual careers as a practicing psychoanalyst and a linguist. I’m a little nonplussed here, after reading two pages I thought this was going to be a good read, a slow read, but a good one. You had no trouble with it then and you would have no trouble drinking the water before you spit in it, even though the water was not a part of you, an other. The last third of this book has the most beautiful writing (in translation, anyway) but for that go to Kristeva on Proust, cuz here she just does it on Celine the Nazi.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. When on a roll, I also wonder if the desensitization is permanent: suppose your duties (sorry) change, does the desensitization degrade to extinction over time? When mentally feeling my way about such matters, I like to switch stuff out: (a version of Roland Barthes' "commutation test") imagine pious believers bowing before a grand plinth holding up a revered brown coil of crap, or tourists lined up in an American museum to look at glass boxes containing the preserved vomit of our Founding Fathers.

Another reviewer mentioned that once you get past this middle but, the good stuff comes back and her critiques become as brilliant as Sontag's--I've never read Sontag, but exploring her work sounds like a better use of my time at this point. Having two categories is twice as good as having one, in which everything is a single, undifferentiated mass, but it’s not as good as having many categories in which you can capture subtle differences. Whether she wasn't aware of that information or left it out because it didn't fit her argument, I have no idea. 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.For instance, how can you reduce your belly without hating your belly and all those who have big bellies? An essential read for those interested in exploring the darker and more unsettling aspects of the human condition. It’s there, too, when, after a certain age, your mother wants to dress you in certain clothes, but you have your own stuff; when your father wants to know how your date went last night, but it went so well that you don’t want to tell him; and when you think about moving back home and sleeping in your old bed with the Spiderman pillowcases. Finally, although the abject is constantly present, it must be repelled at all costs because it threatens annihilation. You would have the same trouble if you watched someone else expel their spit into a glass and tried to drink that.

It is something rejected from which does one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Once these items are outside of the body, they are abject due to the threat they pose to the “full” or “complete” subject. and present threats to the subject on the level of The Real like for real, a lesson learned long before science. Some of the theory went absolutely over my head, and some I thought were absolutely nonsense, but I actually enjoyed a lot of it. In phobia, Kristeva reads the trace of a pre-linguistic confrontation with the abject, a moment that precedes the recognition of any actual object of fear: "The phobic object shows up at the place of non-objectal states of drive and assumes all the mishaps of drive as disappointed desires or as desires diverted from their objects".A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. 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. Labai gera pradžia, kur iškart aiškinama abjekcija, ir kiek tas veiksmas apima, tiksliau, kaip ir iki kiek Kristeva ją išplečia.