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

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Therefore, abjection is an operation of the human psyche by which the subject creates and maintains identity by repelling or rejecting anything that threatens its boundaries.

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.As a post-modernist thinker, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva believes that the only way one can relate to or understand the world is through the medium of language, and anything that is completely non-linguistic is literally unintelligible.

The problems abjection causes are really the problems that are created whenever we only have two categories in which to sort things. This statement appears paradoxical, but what Kristeva means by such statements is that we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject (much as we are repeatedly drawn to trauma in Freud's understanding of repetition compulsion).Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror , which theorizes the notion of the 'abject' in a series of blisteringly insightful analyses, is as relevant, as necessary, and as courageous today as it seemed in 1984. The abject, one can suppose, is the melancholic transition between the pre-symbolic mother to the identification with the father (in the symbolic). Ritual, such as through religion or politics, can help to eject the abject from human society (much like the human body ejects waste), however, the human subject can never be completely free from the abject because it helps to define life while threatening to destroy life. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. They've got to load up the structure of signification with all this inherent gender stuff: sign, meaning, and discourse is the real of The Law of the Father, while all that indeterminate iffyness of the imaginary is all on Mom which nowadays makes us chuckle and shake our heads gently with an amused mutter: oh, those Freudians.