Download - McCormick, I.- Kristeva on the Abject a Summary of the Strengths and Weaknesses (Summary-2008)
Definitions of the Abject
The cast off; the taboo; the unclean; filth
The exrescence: mucus, blood (especially menstrual), nails, urine, excrement
The uncanny; the corpse
The monstrous mother; the alien
A psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory exponded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
"To each ego its object, to each superego its abject". (Kristeva)
“On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems
to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile
border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only
barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.”
(Kristeva)
Cultural Applications: Louis-Ferdinand Céline; Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty
Abject Art: Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Carolee Schneemann
Mary Kelly , Genesis P. Orridge, GG Allin, Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee , Kira
O' Reilly. Joel Peter Witkin, Andres Serrano.
Whitney Museum of Abject Art (1993).
Strengths and weaknesses of the Kristeva model of the Abject
Strengths
Appeals to universal sense of disgust when faced with body fluids and waste products
Explains popular cultural narrative of horror and misogyny
Builds on a tradition of psychoanalysis derived from Freud and Lacan
Appeals to the reality of violence against women and links with its psychosocial
dimensions.
Relates to common patterns of encoding based on distinctions between clean and
unclean
Creates an ambiguous and richly poetic metaphor for the sense limit and liminality
Outlines a conflict in gender between patriarchal signification and the female
imaginary
Explains female oppression as an inability to cast off the internalization of the mother
Maps out an aesthetic and political category derived from both from psychoanalytic
reading and corporeal differences
Establishes a widely- deployed key term to describe and organize an abject art
movement
The Weaknesses
A fuzzy, confused and contradictory category is loosely sketched.
The psycho-analytic foundations have been superseded and discredited.
The psycho-analytic models appeal to an academic and professional cult rather than
open enquiry
Tends to re-enforce horror and disgust rather than celebration of the open body
(Bakhtin)
The abject category relies on a questionable notion of primary matricide
The explanatory model is grounded primarily in its application to avant-garde art
Rather than being actually or potentially emancipatory, the abject school of enquiry
reproduces the script of exclusion and exploitation. ‘Why not develop a certain degree
of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you?’ (Spivak
1992: 62)
The mythological or aestheticizing approach displaces the actuality and singularity of
lived bodily experience
It is unclear how affirmative or redemptive aspects of the abject upstage and displace
negative and destructive modes of abjection
As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks: ‘What are the cultural politics of application of
the diagnostic taxonomy of the abject?’ (Spivak 1992: 55)
Further reading:
Betterton, R. (2006) ‘Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and
Maternal Imagination’, Hypatia 21(1): 80–100.
Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and
New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London
and New York: Routledge.
Constable, C. (1999) ‘Becoming the Monster’s Mother’, pp.173–202 in A.Kutin (ed.)
Alien Zone II. London: Verso.
Covino, D. C. (2004) Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine
and Culture. New York: The State University of New York Press.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Frueh, J. (2001) Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Gear, R. (2001) ‘All Those Nasty Womanly Things: Women Artists,Technology and
the Monstrous-Feminine’, Women’s Studies International Forum 24(3): 321–33.
Halberstam, J. (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others’, 295–337 in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P.A.Treichler (eds)
Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.
Harrington, T. (1998) ‘Speaking Abject in Kristeva’s Power of Horror’, Hypatia
13(1): 138–57.
Jacobs, A. (2007) On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S.Roudiez.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Menninghaus, W. (2003) Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. H.
Pickford. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1991) “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy
Sherman.” New Left Review 188 137-150.
Oliver, K. (1993) Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Russo, M. (1994) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. NewYork:
Routledge.
Shildrick, M. (2002) Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self.
New York and London: Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1990) ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, 54–60, in Postcolonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym.London: Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1992) ‘Extreme Eurocentrism’, Lusitania 1(4) (Special Issue ‘TheAbject
America’): 55–60.
Ussher, J. (2006) Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive
Body. London: Routledge.
Yaeger, P. (1992) ‘The “Language of Blood”: Toward a Maternal Sublime’,
Genre 25 (Spring): 5–24.
Young, I. M. (2005) On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other
Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.