Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
Powers of Horror
Abjection: what the subject expels – filth, the corpse, the maternal – in order to be a subject at all.
Introduction
Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980) combines psychoanalysis, anthropology and literary criticism. Kristeva’s key term, the abject, names what is neither subject nor object: what the self must expel in order to establish its own borders – bodily fluids, decay, the corpse and, earliest of all, the undivided bond with the mother. She traces how religions manage the abject through rules of purity and defilement, drawing on Mary Douglas and on the food laws of Leviticus. The book ends with a long study of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in whose antisemitism she sees abjection turned into politics. The concept has been taken up widely in feminist theory, film studies and art criticism.
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