Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives) (European Perspectives Series)

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One of the book's most compelling aspects is Kristeva's exploration of the abject as a force that blurs the boundaries between self and other. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, which theorizes the notion of the ‘abject’ in a series of blisteringly insightful analyses, is as relevant, as necessary, and as courageous today as it seemed in 1984. She concludes her essay by revealing the importance of the abject in its ties to politics and religion; the most powerful - yet inhumane and oppressive - institutions built on the notion that we must be protected from the abject. After reading some of the reviews here I was a little worried that I was not going to like this "essay".

However, I would quite appreciate anybody to respond with a summary of anything interesting in this book, as I found very little; and I'm very intrigued to find this book got such a high rating from so many readers. Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on paraphilosophical modes of discourse. This statement appears paradoxical, but what Kristeva means by such statements is that we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject (much as we are repeatedly drawn to trauma in Freud's understanding of repetition compulsion).abjection and the long human recourse with it is not only a psychoanalytic approach to disgust, horror, rejection and violence but also a cultural genesis from which all literature and religion can be seen as exhale and spell. That said, she could have taken things further: the book is slim in translation (I've yet to see the French original but have no reason to believe it was longer) and there's ample ground she could still cover. She later brings up ancient vampire stories as representative of the biblical version of the corpse, the body without a soul.

As a post-modernist thinker, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva believes that the only way one can relate to or understand the world is through the medium of language, and anything that is completely non-linguistic is literally unintelligible. She later turns to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and the publication of 'Journey to the End of the Night' as an almost ideal example of the purgative, artistic expression of the abject.The abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious. The orphaned turd, once of us, is now abject, viscerally other, yet unlike many other others it has no function; it has no place; it has no purpose: it is shit.