Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Although Julia Kristeva does not formally subdivide her book into parts, the chapters organize themselves in three distinct areas, moving from abstraction to concrete examples. After the Translator’s Notes, Chapters 1 and 2 are abstract in nature and introduce the overriding purpose of the book: a discussion of the concept of the abject. In these first chapters, Kristeva details the origin and source of the abject and specifically locates The Abject as the Source of Horror and Disgust. The next chapters examine defilement and prohibitions, particularly in Jewish and Christian societies. In these chapters, her concern is with Exclusion and Marginalization as Societal Responses to the Abject. The final chapters of the book undertake a concrete analysis of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novels. For Kristeva, Céline offers a prime example of the abject in literature, a third thematic concern for the book, The Function of Literature and Art in Unveiling the Abject.

While the translator’s notes are by Leon S. Roudiez, not Julia Kristeva, the notes are integral to approaching this text. His concern over Kristeva’s poetic and often difficult language is echoed by other critics and writers working with Powers of Horror. Carol Mastrangelo Bové calls Kristeva’s prose “dense” (“Review of Powers of Horror.” Discourse, Fall-Winter 1988-89). Like Roudiez, Katherine Goodnow cites Kristeva’s writing style as the reason many find her work inaccessible and difficult to understand. However, Goodnow emphasizes that Kristeva’s “style is deliberate […] She also considers that the act of writing should itself be a way of disturbing an established order (literary or political). In this sense, her style is part of her political position” (Katherine Goodnow. Kristeva in Focus. Berghan Books, 2010). Throughout Powers or Horror, Kristeva’s style reveals several of her major theoretical positions and thematic concerns. For example, Kristeva uses not only examples from Céline but also her own writing to demonstrate how the Semiotic is visible in grammatically straightforward symbolic language through rhythms and poetic images. In her style, she wants to undermine and disturb conventional language and connect with abjection.

Throughout Powers of Horror, Kristeva builds on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan (who himself uses Freud as his starting point) to locate the origin of the abject in the psychosexual development of the subject-in-process. From Freud, she discusses the Oedipal complex of human psychosexual development, wherein the male child initially desires the mother and wishes to kill the father before identifying with the father. Lacan builds on this theory but imposes structuralist linguistics on the model, arguing that the entry into language marks the child’s turn toward the father and away from the mother. However, Kristeva quickly separates herself from their work. For example, she writes, “When psychoanalysts speak of an object they speak of an object of desire as it is elaborated within the Oedipean triangle […] No sooner sketched, such a thesis is exploded by its contradictions and flimsiness” (34). While Kristeva does not entirely reject the Oedipal triangle, she places much more significance on the role of the mother within it, representing an intrinsically different viewpoint from male-centric early psychoanalysts.

In addition, Freud and Lacan suggest that as the child enters language and identification with the father, the child represses the desire for the mother. Kristeva, on the other hand, argues that this is a secondary repression. For her, the “primal repression” occurs long before the child enters the Symbolic order (the world of language) and begins during the earliest stage of psychosexual development in a pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal maternal space, during what Kristeva calls the “semiotic chora,” the first phase of her psychosexual development model. Abjection arises here as the child attempts to break away from the mother. “The abject confronts us […] with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside of her” (13). In other words, about the same time the child becomes aware of expelling substances from their body, which they sense is disgusting, they begin breaking away from their mother. The child rejects both the expelled substances (such as feces and vomit) and the mother. Unlike repression in Freudian and Lacanian theory, however, Kristeva argues that primal repression is incomplete and can have horrific consequences: subjectivity, an individual’s sense of selfhood, “rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed” (13). Thus, for Kristeva, the subject is a fragile construct, one that can be torn apart when the incomplete repression fails to hold back the abject.

Although Kristeva’s approach during the opening chapters focuses largely on psychoanalytical philosophy, she also builds the groundwork to discuss abjection in feminist, queer, and political literary theories. Her emphasis on the maternal, for example, paves the way for later arguments concerning taboos and prohibitions affecting the material conditions of women. In addition, in a display of intertextuality, she demonstrates how the abject surfaces in the literature of Borges, Dostoyevsky, Artaud, Proust, and Joyce. Kristeva herself coined the term “intertextuality,” a foundational concept in postmodern literary theory. Even in the earliest chapter of Powers of Horror, Kristeva asserts that texts are always in conversation with other texts. Her intertextuality, however, goes beyond simple references to other writers and texts or a recognition of influence. Kristeva’s intertextuality allows her to transpose, or overlay, her philosophy of abjection onto other disciplines and artifacts. Her use of literary figures in the first two chapters shows how she privileges poetic language and artistic creativity and how such language and creativity subvert societal marginalization and exclusion.