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

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You would have the same trouble if you watched someone else expel their spit into a glass and tried to drink that.

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. 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. 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.

Kristeva's language is beautiful (even translated into English), so that made a lot of it almost delightful to read. She talks about the horror genre from a feminist and female perspective, suitable for all discussion about horror in general and women in horror. The abject thus at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a reestablishment of our "primal repression. Depending on your inner ego, depending on how much close to death and horror you have been, this is one of the best books I have ever read. The author shares some fascinating ideas and insight into abjection and how it relates to women in horror, what society and film makers are saying through their stories about women in horror, and how this reflects contemporary culture and society's attitudes to women through the ages.

Intolerance and prejudice, narrow-mindedness and bigotry, prudishness and hypocritical self-righteousness all have their roots in abjection. That said, she could have taken things further: the book is slim in translation (I've yet to see the French original but have no reason to believe it was longer) and there's ample ground she could still cover. Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. One of the book's most compelling aspects is Kristeva's exploration of the abject as a force that blurs the boundaries between self and other. 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.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. To be clear: there's a high amount of Makes-Sense in this book, but it requires you to read each instance of the word "phallus," for example, as "concept of the law," etc. And then, to a certain extent, she turns it around with an account of horror and prohibition in the Old Testament, how that relates to Judaeo-Christian and Platonic concepts. At times I felt like crying, especially after having dragged myself through fifty pages in six to eight hours and I felt like I'd understood nothing at all. 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.

When you get right down to it, abjection is an immature psychological mechanism, useful in beginning stages of differentiation, but less useful thereafter. Not so much that I don’t notice when someone is missing a leg; but to the extent it doesn’t give me nightmares. 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?

She privileges poetry, in particular, because of poetry's willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and meaning, thus laying bare the fact that language is at once arbitrary and limned with the abject fear of loss: "Not a language of the desiring exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges". But what batter subject than one whose relationship to waffles commplicates the clean subject/object structure of selfhood and communication, both sides implicit with auto-destruction? 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.