Kristeva, Julia (1997). “Powers of Horror” [1982]. Translated by Leon S. Rudiez. In Kelly Oliver, ed., The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 229-247. Originally published in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
p 229-230
“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 [meaning] away.”
In this last sentence, Kristeva invokes Freudian theory involving the ego, superego, and id, of which the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real are loose analogues ^1 [<— see the first comment below for my unbelievably audacious summary of the Freudian conception of the unconsious]. Merging the ego and the superego is a Freudian conception, one that informs the Oedipal struggle between son and father.
For Kristeva, a particular way of thinking about death, shit, perversion, and radical dysfunction is emerging: the abject […UNlike “l’autre”, or the blessed union of self and “differance”] “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses”…a place from which the patriarchal ego/superego tag-team has driven all meaning.
Kristeva isn’t describing a simple, unilateral action. Three actions emerge:
1. The abject is what is jettisoned, expunged, like shit from the rectum.
2. The abject draws us to an unfamiliar space,-
3 a & b. -from which meaning is driven, and to which the abject is banished.
Kristeva suggests that the ego exerts these last two drivings, perhaps, in order to maintain the superego’s symbolic order to which the abject doesn’t conform. (“And yet,” Kristeva adds “…the abject does not cease challenging its master” but instead continues to make itself known. BLC: but we know this already—if it were to submit to banishment, it would in doing so conform to our symbolic logic, and the reason to banish it would dissapate.)
“To each ego its object,” [S <> a] “to each superego its abject”; each ideology, each system of production and territorialization of meaning and value, has its abject, … a Real which the subject within the symbolic realm constantly recognizes, but never knows how to acknowledge. And with the phrase “I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other”, BLC: Kristeva implies the abjectness of abuse, and clarifies something on the theoretical level, too, that we are always in the presence of the abject, we think of it, then we move elsewhere, then think of it again; returning to it each time, we (don’t we?) try to figure out what everyone else must be thinking of it.
Surely, even though no one says so openly, this is what’s expected—that I put up with the abject. Surely everyone else has this figured out. Surely there are good reasons that I should not be fascinated, drawn, to the abject, reasons which mature persons have internalized and that I eventually will internalize also.