Art and religion are its main ciphers, but it also demarcates the liminal moments (rites of passage) that organise the individual’s life. In some societies it is purposefully brought forth and exorcised within the ring-fence of the sacred. Sometimes the Real, henceforth experienced as the abject, resurfaces. Taking this structure, it is clear why corporeal waste/decay and the physicality of sexuality are the two most universal sources of abjection.
The model A – not-A, becomes the organising principle of language, where meaning is constantly deferred across a signifying network. A signifying system takes the place of the Real, which is repressed, and “I” becomes a centre in relation to all that is “other”.
Here un-mediated experience (the Real) becomes conceptual. And the third level is the psychic leap to the conceptual level of language, or the moment of thesis as Kristeva calls it. The second level is constituted by family structure and involves the internalisation of social law, particularly in regard of sexual roles. Sensation, physical and psychological, is concentrated in these areas and it is the processes attached to them that provide the conceptual models, at the level of the Real (material experience) for meaning in language. She delimits and directs the raw drive energies to points where inside and outside meet: mouth, anus, genitals. Tempered by language, it is the fusion reactor of the soul.Īccording to Kristeva, it is around and over this singularity that subjectivity is encouraged, firstly by the mother’s organisation of the child’s body on a corporeal level: washing, feeding, excreting. It is a dangerously desirable moment where the self and the universe can become singular again. It is like a blind spot, or more exactly, like a black hole, so dense, and so unbelievably, irresistibly attractive. This is the paradox at the foundation of being that requires denial in the form of a leap of faith.
Julia kristeva powers of horror fence skin#
One could even find a filmic metaphor of this process in Franju’s Eyes without a Face, where the father of a girl who has lost her face in an accident desperately tries to cover it over, first with a plastic mask, and then with skin from the faces of other girls. Imagination emerges out of it to cover it up, and all that is repressed as cultural detritus is hidden there. This divide, the abyss, is where both the abject and the sublime reside. This divide is characterised by a tremendous sense of loss and desire for reunion with the mythic oceanic mother, and simultaneously by the fierce hate and fear of losing self that that reunion means. Kristeva sees both subjectivity and culture as emerging out of the physical and psychic divide between mother and child. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” In this sense, the abject is both intimately connected and threatening to the moral fabric for both the individual and society – morality being defined as not simply right and wrong, but the organising principles of a system. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. She defines the abject as: “What disturbs identity, system, order. One of the most comprehensive theories of the abject and the experience of abjection, Julia Kristeva’s seminal text Powers of Horror, posits it as intimately tied into the construction of the speaking subject and his/her mœbius-like relationship to culture through signifying practices, or more specifically, language. Georges Franju directs a masked Edith Scob in Eyes Without a Face, 1959
Thus A Clockwork Orange becomes a political artefact – a moral warning against the dangers of a fascist controlling state and the sociopathy it engenders Man Bites Dog – a comment on the role of the press as accessory to the crime? The abject used in this way turns into a moral metaphor, upholding exactly what it has just destroyed. Some films present an idealised fantasy imaginary, where spectacle and the joys of hermeneutic consistency dominate, others function more like art objects, provoking thought and analysis in the viewer. Disturbing and confronting, they nevertheless seem to generate ontological significance. These films have two things in common: they have created a visceral reaction in their audiences, and, more importantly, they have all aroused a fervent moral polemic. Recent months have seen the release of a number of “art house” films such as Noé’s Seul contre tous, Catherine Breillat’s Romance, Von Trier’s The Idiots, Solondz’s Happiness (the list goes on) that push the boundaries of the acceptable, and border on, if not actively engage with the abject – the transgressive, the disturbing, the horrifying.
The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, 1971 Beyond the Clean and Proper By Kimberley Cooper
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