Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1980

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Translator’s Note-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

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Background

Authorial Context: Julia Kristeva

Born in Bulgaria in 1941, Julia Kristeva grew up in an intellectual family. Her father was a practicing Orthodox Christian despite periods of religious oppression by the Bulgarian communist government. Her mother, on the other hand, was a Darwinian atheist. Kristeva attended a Dominican school staffed by French-speaking nuns and later the Alliance Française. After attending university in Bulgaria, she won a research fellowship to study in France, and she moved to Paris in 1965. She studied with some of the most important French scholars of the day and became part of the influential “Tel Quel group,” made up of philosophers and critics who published in the Tel Quel literary journal. In 1967, she married Phillippe Sollers, a novelist and the founder of Tel Quel.

Although Kristeva’s early works were in the field of linguistics, where she distinguished herself with her exploration of the Semiotic as opposed to Symbolic order and introduced the concept of the subject-in-process, her interests and research were wide-ranging, and she soon turned to psychoanalysis as her primary field. In addition, she quickly established herself as a force in structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy.

Kristeva is a prolific writer and has published work in fields such as linguistics, literary criticism, cultural analysis, art, politics, and feminist theory. Her development of the concept of the abject within a psychoanalytical framework, explored in Powers of Horror, has been essential in feminist, Marxist, and queer theories and has made this volume one of her most influential contributions to literary, psychoanalytical, and cultural studies. She has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honour, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vaclav Havel Prize. She holds the rank of Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Université de Paris VII.

Although Kristeva is frequently identified with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray as French feminists, she generally rejects the label of “feminism” for her work. Kristeva argues that there have been three stages of feminism: the suffragette struggle for political rights, the demand for equality, and “a potential third stage in which feminism might embrace rather than denigrate the ‘plasticity of mind and body’ that motherhood necessitates” (Miller, Lucasta. “Mother Complex.” The Guardian, 7 April 2007). Kristeva wrote Powers of Horror shortly after giving birth to her son, David, and her emphasis on the maternal has led some feminist theorists to take issue with her work. Kristeva distances herself from much criticism; for example, in Powers of Horror, she names some feminist thought as being “the last of the power-seeking ideologies” (208).

Critical Context: The Abject in Literary Theory, Cultural Analysis, and Art Criticism

Because of its focus on the abject, Powers of Horror is widely regarded as one of Kristeva’s most influential essays, particularly in psychoanalytical, feminist, and queer literary theory, as well as art and film criticism. Kristeva’s discussion of the abject in Céline’s novels and pamphlets provides a model for reading and analyzing abject literature. Her emphasis on the reading experience of works such as these is an example of reader response criticism, a field that emphasizes the impact of a text on the reader. Likewise, by identifying the abject as a phase of psychosexual human development deeply connected to the female body, this work underpins psychoanalytical and feminist literary criticism. Her use, amplification, and reinterpretation of Freud and Lacan provide fertile interpretive ground.

Powers of Horror’s identification of abjection as the primary means of societal marginalization and exclusion serves queer and gender theorists in their interpretations of both literature and culture. Taboo and prohibition, discussed at length in the book’s midsection, demonstrate boundary formation and the ways that societal and religious systems work toward excluding the abject to preserve boundaries. Theorists such as Judith Butler in gender studies and Homi K. Bhabha in postcolonial theory directly refer to Kristeva’s concept of the abject as an influence. In addition, Powers of Horror has been particularly influential in aesthetic definitions and concerns. The British Tate Galleries, for example, links abject art directly to Kristeva and Powers of Horror (“Abject Art.” Tate Gallery) Artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, among others, engage in work that reflects Kristeva’s concept of the abject, and art critic Rosalind Krauss directly references Kristeva in her work.

Philosophical Context: Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva

Although Kristeva openly credits Freud and Lacan as important influences in Powers of Horror, she uses the book to mark out her distinctiveness as a philosopher. She redefines, amplifies, and rearticulates the commonly held psychosexual development model introduced by Freud and then modified by Lacan.

Freud theorizes that human children pass through predictable stages as they develop. Each stage focuses on a particular part of the child’s anatomy. Freud calls the first phase the oral stage when the child derives pleasure and satisfaction through the mouth at the mother’s breast. The second phase concerns the passage of feces through the anus and is called the “anal stage.” From there, the child begins to demonstrate interest in the genitals. At this point, Freud argues, the Oedipal complex emerges, wherein the child sexually desires the mother and envies and fears the father. However, in Freud’s system, the fear of castration motivates the child to begin identifying with the father and repressing his desire for the mother. (It should be noted that Freud initially genders the child as male in his system, although he later modifies his analysis to include girl children in something he calls the “Electra complex.” In this, the girl child initially desires the father and rejects the mother, and the girl child envies the boy child’s penis.) According to Freud, transitioning through these stages successfully produces a stable adult personality, comprised of the ego (self), id (desires repressed in the subconscious), and superego (the conscience and internalized strictures of society.)

Lacan, on the other hand, imposes a structuralist linguistic model on human development. Consequently, while Freud imagines a biological and neurological basis for human development, Lacan’s theory argues that the so-called “self” is created by language itself. Lacan’s model of psychosexual development, while using elements of Freud’s theory, is distinct in how it names and interprets developmental phases. Lacan calls the first stage the Real. As Mary Klages writes, the baby’s needs are always fulfilled in this stage: “The baby thus has no language, and no sense of self or identity; it experiences only completion and fullness and union with its caregivers” (Klages, Mary. Literary Theory. Bloomsbury, 2017). There is no way to write about or think about this phase for the adult because, without language, it cannot be represented in any way. However, the child always longs for the Real but can never recover it. In the second phase, the Imaginary, the child begins to develop a sense of the “other”; that is, the child begins to understand that they are somehow different and separate from the mother. During this phase, an important moment arises when the child catches a glimpse in the mirror and begins to formulate an understanding of the self. The so-called mirror stage prepares the child for entry into the Symbolic or subject state. It is here that the child becomes a user of language, and the self is constituted through language.

Although Kristeva adopts Lacan’s three-phase model, she distinguishes her model with the names the Semiotic, the Abject, and the Symbolic. Like the Real, the Semiotic is a preverbal, pre-Oedipal stage. For Kristeva, the separation from the mother happens at the border between the Semiotic and the Symbolic, as the child begins to reject their bodily wastes but before the child has access to language. Therefore, in Kristeva’s model, the world of the Semiotic is fluid, bodily, and maternal, while the world of the Symbolic is orderly, language-linked, logical, and paternal. While Lacan argues that there can be no contact with the Real, for Kristeva, the Semiotic can never be fully repressed; it erupts into the Symbolic as the abject. Subversive and ambiguous, the abject threatens and maintains the borders of selfhood and society. This eruption can elicit both fascination and horror because it recalls a time before the speaking subject existed and anticipates a time when the speaking subject will no longer exist (through death).