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0.2 Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and the ‘I’/Other system destroyed

Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror is cited frequently in attempts to ‘capture’ the horror of horror, the ‘thing’ horror does to the subject, or why seemingly rational civilized persons are still victims of apparently irrational phobias and fears. Kristeva’s model appeals to law, which creates and makes possible abjection, as the guiding ethic of its behavior. This book appeals to bodies. In a discussion with Kristeva, I will attempt to suggest my own ethic of horror that does not appeal to a higher order but to the flesh.

Kristeva’s formulation of the notion of abjection is deeply embedded, defined and made possible by its entrenchment within the ‘normalized’ oedipal symbolic structure. The abject exists through borders, definitions, rigid seals and hermeneutic boundaries. It exists by virtue of what it transgresses yet always depending on that which it transgresses in order to be. All borders of filth, from faeces to the corpse, exist at “the place where I am not and which permits me to be”. [12] Similarly these borders must stay in place in order that the abject may be, for in a post-hermeneutic world the abject is no more relevant than the object or the integrated ‘I’. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of flight’ is a comparative yet more positive version of what Kristeva refers to as a falling. [13] Where Deleuze and Guattari’s flying suggests autonomy, and a casting away of the symbolic structure, Kristeva’s falling seems to verge on madness, with the symbolic casting away the ‘I’ instead of the ‘I’ flying from the symbolic. The ‘I’ does not have hope for change because falling is a re-gression rather than progression, however it remains a form of transformation that may not always align itself with madness or with nihilistic male phantasy.

Powers of Horror is a rather traditional psychoanalytic text, and traditional psychoanalysis refers, whether through exploring or critiquing such a referent, to integrated, valued male subjectivity. Many elements of Powers of Horror affirm such a referent. At its most hopeful, Powers of Horror is, however, an exercise as much in what psychoanalysis repudiates, as what integrated subjectivity repudiates in order to live. In brief, the abject is that which is not knowable by the subject, not clearly divided from the subject and what the subject must identify as outside of itself in order to remain in the proper clean world of integrated subjectivity. The abject is an encroachment and defiler of borders, barriers and hence clearly defined ‘things’, be they ‘I’ or Other, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, desirable or disgusting, language or madness, God or self. Every opposition bleeds into its polar term within abjection, every integrated thing can no longer be known as a dividuated entity unique to itself. This state of ambiguity is not a state of emergency but rather a state in which all things exist and which must be constantly checked and repudiated by the surveying psyche. Our psyche exists not only to create and affirm our dividual being but to re-create and re-affirm it, every time we are confronted with filth (our own or others) or horror. The abject is a volatile, ambiguous thing which is opposed to or confuses the simplest of psychoanalytic relationships - the ‘I’ and the Other. The abject is the not-quite-object that is necessarily repudiated by the ‘I’ in order to exist - filth, defilement - while also being a condition which the non integrated or disintegrated ‘I’ potentially verges on in madness, in horror and in the constant condition of fear that taking an unidentified object as the object of desire causes in the subject. Any object that is the object of desire, the Other, and which cannot be defined, known and encompassed by the ‘I’ causes fear. As soon as the object or Other is unclear, abjection sets in. Where the subject vehemently refuses desire for such an other, phobia or fear is evident.

Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such a daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up - fear. [14]

Fear seems a non-corporeal, psychical defense. It takes its form from the inability of the subject to know its object, a confusion of the ‘figuring out’ of object choice, similar to that which occurs when the pervert is analyzed in order to excavate the reasons behind any non-normalized desire. Object choice is figured in order that ‘I’ may exist as a constant. Fear occurs when an object is no longer clear, yet not unclear. Ambiguity is most important in abjection. It encroaches both on borders of ‘I’ and Other as well as on borders of knowable/unknowable, clear/unclear and clean/unclean. The reason object in abjection is unclear, the preliminary condition for fear, is due to that which attacks the basic ‘I’ and Other relationship - non-specific want. Kristeva points continually to want without object and hence inevitably without ‘I’. She states

But if one imagines (and imagine one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here) the experience of want itself as logical, preliminary to being and object - to the being of the object - then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified. [15]

Want is difficult to figure within a traditional psychoanalytic structure. It is desire that refers itself to a higher order by being a veiled desire for a specific established signifier, and it is available theoretically only to anaclitic (i.e. male) subjects. Want for the male subject is always about first setting eyes upon an object of desire and afterwards desiring the object (whether or not this is based upon desire for the mother is beyond the scope of this discussion). In chapter one, ‘Pleasure’, I will discuss Foucault’s anxieties about using the word ‘desire’ for this very reason. Deleuze uses ‘desire’ in an unbound form and I use the term pleasure to indicate the futility of any concept of autonomous choice in desire, where choosing a singular object becomes the most important sexual activity.

Pleasure indicates for me both a non-specific object (or abject or quality or ‘thing’, that which is not necessarily definable) and a non-predictable feeling, that changes the whole self; hence affect and not effect which would return the self to its previous subjectivity. Kristeva asks us to imagine want in a similar way to how I imagine pleasure - simply a condition of process, of drive without aim or object. Imagination will become important when I discuss the ethics of watched horror but here suffice it to say that the failure of imagination in configuring want (Deleuze’s desire and my pleasure) is a failure that occurs through appealing to a higher order - God, language, psyche - the symbolic. Those who appeal to such orders are traditionally male subjects because psychoanalysis only allows such subjects an object of desire. Female desire is based on narcissism in psychoanalytic writings, so that the woman affirms herself as object only by assuring she exists within the ‘I’/object system of desire, even if it is as the subordinated term. According to traditional psychoanalysis, any time a woman wishes to stray from this configuration, but does not wish to ‘become male’ by simply switching places, her newly ambiguous position (or lack of position) would thrust her into abjection. This idea leaves many post-structuralist feminists dissatisfied with psychoanalysis. I do not wish to suggest that the fear, which accompanies such ambiguity in object choice when one has broken free of the object/’I’ dualism, disappears. It is an affect-ive sensation and Kristeva emphasizes repeatedly the jouissance of such affect. Like the ambiguity of abjection itself, the affect of abjection is ambiguously violent and soothing, fascinating and horrifying, good and bad all at once. It is, as have already claimed, an already present condition in the stabilized psyche of integrated subjectivity, which must be constantly monitored and repudiated. To allow the jouissance, both terrible and wonderful, of abjection to permeate subjectivity is not necessarily to wallow in madness but at the most basic level to express dissatisfaction with the concept of irrefutably sealed integrated subjectivity. And to be able to express such dissatisfaction presumes an integrated subjectivity was possible, which, for women and racially other subjects, is never a necessary given.

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