Approaching Abjection

Author(s): Julia Kristeva and John Lechte

Source: Oxford Literary Review , 1982, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (1982), pp. 125-149
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43973647

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Approaching Abjection

Julia Kristeva

Pas de bête qui n'ait un reflet d'infini;

Pas de prunelle abjecte et vile qui ne touche
L'eclair d'en haut, parfois tendre et parfois farouche.
V. Hugo, La Legende des siècles 1

Neither Subject nor Object

There is, in abjection, one of those violent and obscure revolts of being
against that which threatens it and which seems to it to come from an
outside or an exorbitant inside; something that is thrown next to the
possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It is there, very close, but
unassimilable. It solicits, disturbs, fascinates desire, which,
nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Fearful, it turns away.
Sickened, it rejects. It is protected from the vileness by an absolute of
which it is proud, to which it is attached. But at the same time, even so,
the élan , this spasm, this leap, is attracted towards an elsewhere as
much tempting as it is condemned. Tirelessly, like a wild boomerang, a
pole of attraction and repulsion draws the one inhabited literally out of
himself.
When I am invaded by abjection, this torsade made of effects and
thoughts to which I give this name, does not have, strictly speaking, any
definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject in front of me that I name or

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection , translated by Leon S. Roudiez, will be published

by Columbia University Press in the autumn of 1982.
OLR acknowledges the permission of the publisher to print this independent translation.
125

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 1 26 Oxford Literary Review

imagine. Neither is it this 'ob

systematic quest of desire. T
offering me a support on som
to be more or less detached a
one quality with the object - t
opposed, the object offers m
desire for meaning which in
homologous to it, the abject, o
radically excluded, drawing me towards the point where meaning
collapses. A certain 'ego' (moi) which has become bonded with its
master, a superego (sur-moi), has unambiguously chased it away. It is
outside, out of the whole of which it seems not to recognise the rules of
the game. However, from this exile, the abject does not cease to defy its
master. Without making a sign (to him), it provokes a discharge, a
convulsion, a cry. To each ego its object, to each super-ego its abject.
This is not the white sheet or full calm boredom of repression, nor the
versions and conversions of desire plaguing bodies, nights and
discourses, but a brutal suffering which 'l', sublime and ravaged, makes
the best of; for 'l' attributes it to the father da verse au père I père-
version ?)): I put up with it for I imagine that such is the desire of the
other. This massive and abrupt irruption of a strangeness which, if it was
familiar to me in an opaque and forgotten life, now importunes me as
radically separated and repugnant. Not me. Not that. But not nothing
either. A 'something' that I do not recognise as a thing. A whole lot of
nonsense which has nothing insignificant and which crushes me. At the
border of inexistence and hallucination, of a reality which, if I recognise
it, annihilates me. Here the abject and abjection are my safety railings.
Seeds of my culture.

The Unclean2

Distaste for a particular food, of dirt, of refuse of rubbish. Spasms and

vomiting which protect me, repulsion and nausea which separate and
turn me away from the impure, from the cloaca, from filth. Ignominy of
compromise, the in-between of treachery. Shudder of fascination which
both leads me there and separates me from it.
The distaste for certain foods is perhaps the most elementary and the
most archaic form of abjection. When the skin on the surface of milk,
inoffensive, thin as a cigarette paper, seedy as nail-clippings, is
presented to the eyes, or touches the lips, a spasm ensures, first at the
back of the throat and then lower down in the stomach, abdomen and all
the intestines; it stiffens the body, brings forth tears and bile, makes the
heart palpitate and beads the forehead and hands with perspiration.
With the vertigo which blurs the vision, the nausea makes me double up
in protest against this creamy milk, and separates me from the mother
and father who give it to me. 'I' do(es) not want it, 'l' do(es) not want to

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 Julia Kristeua 127

know, 'l' do(es) not assimilate it, 'l' expel(s) it. But since this
nourishment is not an 'other' for 'me' who am only their desire, I expel
myself I spit myself out, I abject myself in the same movement by which
'l' claims to be me. This detail, which is perhaps insignificant, but which
they look for, they load with meaning, appreciate and impose on me, this
trifle turns my insides out: thus they see that / am in the process of
becoming another at the cost of my own death. In this trajectory where
'l' become, I give birth to me in the violence of sobbing and vomit. Mute
protestation of the symptom, the shattering violence of a convulsion,
inscribed, it is true, in a symbolic system, but which, without wanting or
being able to integrate itself in order to respond, it (ça) reacts, it (ça)
abreacts. It (ça) abjects.
The corpse (cadavre: from cadere , to fall), that which has irremediably
fallen, sewer and death, throws the identity of the one who is confronted
by it into still greater turmoil, like some fragile and fallacious event. A
sore of blood and pus, or the sugary and acrid odour of sweat or of
putrification, do not signify death. Faced with death signified - for
example by the straight line of an encephalogram - I would understand,
I would react or I would accept. No, as if in a real theatre without make-
up or mask, the refuse (déchet), like the corpse, indicates to me what I
keep permanently at a distance in order to live. These humours, this
impurity, this shit are what life painfully bears (la vie supporte à peine) at
pain of death (avec peine de la mort). I am at the limits of my condition
as a living being. In relation to these limits, my body detaches itself as a
living being. These waste particles fall so that I might live, to the point
that nothing remains from one loss to the next and my whole body falls
beyond the limit, cadere , corpse. If filth signifies the other side of the
limit where I am not and which allows me to be, the corpse, the most
sickening example of refuse, is a limit which has invaded everything. It is
no longer me who expels, 'l' is expelled. The limit has become an object.
How can I be without limits? This other place that I imagine beyond the
present, or that I hallucinate in order to speak to you in the present, to
think you, is here now, thrown, abjected, in 'my' world. Deprived of a
world, then, I faint. In this insistent thing, raw, insolent under the bright
sun of the room at the morgue crammed with adolescents who have lost
their way, in this thing which no longer demarcates and thus no longer
has any meaning, I contemplate the collapse of a world which has
effaced its limits: fainting. The corpse - seen without God and outside
science - is the height of abjection. It is death infesting life. Abject. It is
something rejected from which one is not separated, from which one is
not protected as is the case with an object. An imaginary strangeness
and a menace that is real, it calls to us and finishes by devouring us.
It is not then an absence of health or cleanliness which makes
something abject, but that which perturbs an identity, a system, an
order; that which does not respect limits, places or rules. It is the
between, the ambiguous, the mixed. The traitor, the liar, the crimin
with a good conscience, the rapist without scruple, the killer who cla

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1 28 Oxford Literary Review

to save ... All crime, because it indicates the fragility of the law, is
abject, but premeditated crime, sly murder, hypocritical vengeance are
still more so because they emphasise this exhibition of legal fragility. He
who refuses morality is not abject - there can be grandeur in the amoral
and even in a crime which proclaims its disrespect for the law: a crime
rebellious, liberating, and suicidal. But abjection is immoral, murky,
devious and suspect: a terror which is dissimulated, a smiling hatred, a
passion which abandons the body instead of inflaming it, a man in debt
who sells you, a friend who stabs you in the back.
In the obscure rooms of the museum which is what remains of
Auschwitz, I see a pile of children's shoes, or something similar, th
have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree for example, som
dolls I think they were. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apog
when death, which kills me anyway, is mixed with what, in my liv
universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood and science,
amongst other things . . .

The Abjection of the Self

If it is true that when the abject at the same time solicits and pulverises
the subject, one understands that it is felt at maximum force, when,
wearied by its vain attempts to recognise itself outside itself, the subject
finds the impossible in himself: when he finds that the impossible is his
very being, discovering that he is nothing other than abject. The
abjection of the self would be the culminating form of this experience by
the subject to whom it is revealed that all his objects exist only by virtue
of the inaugural loss founding his own being. There is nothing like the
abjection of the self for demonstrating that all abjection is in fact a
recognition of the fundamental lack of all being, meaning, language and
desire. One always slides too quickly over this word lack (manque), and
psychoanalysis today only retains in sum the more or less fetishistic
'object of lack'. But if one imagines (and it is indeed a question of
imagining, for it is the work of imagination which is established here) the
experience of lack itself as logically prior to being and the object - to the
being of the object - then one understands that its only signified is
abjection, and more correctly the abjection of the self. And its signifier is
. . . literature. Christian mysticism has made this abjection of the self the
ultimate proof of humility before God, as is testified by St. Elizabeth,
who 'as great a princess as she was, liked above all the abjection of
herself'.3
There remains open the question of the trial (this time entirely secular)
that abjection can be for the subject who, in the recognition called the
recognition of castration, turns away from his perverse outlets in order to
offer himself - his body, his own ego - as the most precious non-
object, henceforth lost as his own and thus fallen, abject. The end of the
psychoanalytic cure can lead us there, as we shall see. Torments and

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 Julia Kristeua 129

delights of mas
Essentially different from the 'uncanny' and also more violent,
abjection is constructed through the non-recognition of what is close to
it: nothing is familiar to it, not even a shadow of memories. I imagine a
child, having swallowed his parents too early, becoming frightened 'all
by himself' and, in order to escape, rejecting and vomiting up all the gifts
and objects that he is given. He has, he could have, the sense of the
abject. Even before things can be for him - before therefore they are
signifiable - he ex-pels (ex-pulse) them, dominated by the drive
( pulsion ), and conducts his own territory bordered by the abject. This is
a sacred figure (Sacrée figure). Fear cements his enclosure which shares
a common border with another world vomited, expelled, fallen. What he
has swallowed in the place of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a
maternal hatred without words for the word of the father; it is of this that
he tries to purge himself, tirelessly. What comfort does he find in his
disgust? Perhaps a father, existing but shaken, likeable but unstable,
simply a ghost (revenant), but a permanent ghost. Without him, the
sacred kid (sacreé môme) probably would not have any sense of the
sacred; as a non-subject he would be confounded with the rubbish-heap
of always fallen non-objects, from which, on the contrary, he tries to
save himself armed with abjection. For the one through whom the abject
exists is not mad. From the terror which has frozen him before the
untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, this torpor which
has cut his impulses from their objects, that is from their representations,
from this torpor he brings forth, with distaste, a word - fear. The
phobic has no other object than the abject. But this word 'fear' - a fluid
mist, an ungraspable clamminess - scarcely has it come into being than
it blurs like a mirage all the words of language, impregnating them with
inexistence and a fantasmatic and hallucinatory glimmer. Thus with fea
having been placed in parenthesis, discourse will only appear possible on
condition that it be ceaselessly confronted with this other place, a weight
which repels and is repelled, an inaccessible and intimate base of
memory: the abject.

Beyond the Unconscious

This is to say that there are existences which are not sustained by any
desire , in that desire is always a desire for objects. Such existences are
founded on exclusion. They are clearly distinguished from those
understood in terms of neurosis or psychosis which are articulated by
negation and its modalities, transgression, dénégation and foreclosure.4
Their dynamic brings into question the theory of the unconscious, when
the latter is seen as a tributary of a dialectic of negativity.
The theory of the unconscious assumes, as is known, a repression of
contents (affects and representations) which, due to this fact, do not
accede to consciousness, but operate in the subject either modifications

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1 30 Oxford Literary Review

of discourse (slips, etc.), or of the body (symptoms) or of both

(hallucinations, etc.). As a correlate to the notion of repression , Freud
proposed that of dénégation in order to conceptualise neurosis and
rejection (foreclosure) in order to situate psychosis. The asymmetry of
these two repressions is accentuated by the fact that dénégation has a
bearing on the object, whereas foreclosure affects desire itself (what
Lacan, in a line direct from Freud interprets by 'foreclosure of the Name
of the Father').
However, faced with the ab-ject and more specifically with the phobia
and the split of the ego (moi) (to which we will return), one might
wonder if these articulations of negativity proper to the unconscious
(inherited by Freud from philosophy and psychology) are not outmoded.
The 'unconscious ' contents here remain excluded but in a strange way:
not radically enough to allow a solid differentiation subject/object, and
nevertheless with sufficient clarity for a position of defence and of
refusal but also of sublimatory elaboration to be able to occur. It is as if
the fundamental opposition were, at this point, between I and Other, or,
more archaically still, between Inside and Outside. Or as if this
opposition subsumed the opposition elaborated from neurosis, that of
Consciousness and Unconscious.
On account of the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Outside -
an opposition that is vigorous but permeable, violent but uncertain
some contents 'normally' unconscious in neurotic subjects therefore
become explicit, if not conscious, in 'limit' discourses and behaviours
(borderlines5). These contents often manifest themselves overtly in
symbolic practices without for all that being integrated into the judging
consciousness of the subjects in question. Because they render the
opposition conscious/unconscious impertinent, these subjects and their
discourse are the propitious terrains of a sublimatory discursivity
('aesthetic' or 'mystical', etc.) rather than scientific or rationalist.

An Exile who says: 'Where?'

The one through whom the abject exists is thus an outcast who places
(is placed), separates (is separated), situates (is situated) and therefore
wanders, instead of recognising himself, desiring, belonging or refusing.
Situationist in a sense, and not without laughing - since laughter is a
way of placing or displacing abjection. He is necessarily dichotomist,
somewhat manichean, he divides, excludes, and, without strictly
speaking wanting to recognise his abjections, he does not ignore them
for a moment. Besides, he often includes himself in them, thereby
introducing into himself the scalpel through which he effects his
separations.
Instead of asking himself about his 'being', he asks himself about his
place: ' Where am I?' rather than ' Who am I?' For the space with which
the outcast, the excluded is preoccupied, is never one ; it is neither

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 Julia Kristeua 131

homogeneous nor totalisible, but esssentially divisible, pliable,

catastrophic. A constructor of territories, languages ( langues ) and
works, the outcast never stops delimiting his own universe, the fluid
confines of which - because constituted by a non-object, the abject -
constantly put at issue his solidity and incite him to start again. An
indefatigable builder, the outcast is in sum a lost soul (égaré). A voyager
in an endless night. He has a feeling of the danger, of the loss
represented by the pseudo-object which attracts him, but he cannot
prevent himself from taking the risk even at the moment when he takes
his distances from it. And the more he becomes lost, the more he is
saved.

Time: Oblivion and Thunder

For it is from this wandering on excluded terrain that he draws his

jouissance. This abject from which he never stops being separated is fo
him, in sum, a land of forgetting constantly remembered. In a time which
has been effaced, the abject must have been a magnetised pole of
covetousness. But the ash of oblivion now makes a screen and reflects
aversion and repugnance. What is proper ( propre ) (in the sense of the
incorporated and the incorporable), becomes dirty. What is being sought
turns into what is banished, and fascination into opprobrium. Now the
time forgotten arises brusquely and condenses in a fulgurating lightning
flash an operation which, if it were thought, would be the uniting of two
opposed terms, but which, due to this fulguration, is discharged like a
clap of thunder. The time of abjection is double: there is the time of
oblivion and the time of thunder, of the infinite as veiled and the moment
of the flash of revelation.

Jouissance and Affect

Jouissance , in sum.6 For the wanderer considers himself to be equivalen

to a Third. He takes over this latter's judgment, uses his power as
ground for condemning, bases himself on his law in order to forget or
tear away the veil of oblivion, but also in order to erect his objec
obsolete (caduc). As fallen (chuté). Parachuted in by the Other. This
ternary structure, if you like, held up by the Other, its keystone, b
'structure' thrown out of orbit, a topology of catastrophe. For hav
made himself an alter ego , the Other ceases to control the three poles
the triangle where subjective homogeneity is maintained, and lets
object fall into an abominable real that is inaccessible other than in
jouissance. In this sense jouissance alone enables the abject to exist as
such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one simply enjoys it.
Violently and with pain. A passion. And, as in jouissance where the
object of desire named 'a' shatters with the broken mirror where the ego

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1 32 Oxford Literary Review

gives up its image in order to

nothing objective about it - o
repulsive gift that the Other,
that 'l' may not disappear in
fallen (déchue) existence. A jo
engulfed but in which the Ot
rendering it repugnant. One
the abject are fascinated victi
Abjection is without doubt a
Because, although it demarcat
from what menaces it - on th
danger. But also because abjec
affect, of condemnation and
archaism of the pre-objectal rel
which a body is parted from
this darkness where the conto
the imponderable affect alone
does not yet appear to me as
conditioned by laws, and eve
this look, this gesture, which la
constitute and provoke an effec
of pure loss in order to exclude
me, an assimiliable world. Obviously, / am only as someone else: a
mimetic logic of the accession of the ego, of objects and of signs. But
when 'l' look for (myself), lose (myself) or ' come ' (jouis), then I is
heterogeneous. This ambiguity, which is one of embarrassment,
malaise, vertigo, delimits through the violence of a revolt against ,
delimits a space from which signs and objects arise. Thus twisted,
woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory which I
can say is mine because the Other, having inhabited me as alter ego,
indicates it to me by way of disgust.
This is to say once again that the heterogeneous flux, which marks out
the abject and expels abjection, already inhabits a greatly 'othered'
(altéré) human animal. I experience abjection only if an Other has
plonked itself down in place of, and on behalf of, what will be 'me'. Not
another with whom I identify or that I incorporate, but an Other who
precedes and possesses me and by this possession causes me to be. This
possession is anterior to my accession to being: it is the being-there of
the symbolic that a father may or may not incarnate. Inherence of
signifiance in the human body.

At the Limit of the Originary Repression

If, due to this Other, a space is demarcated which separates the abject
from what will be a subject and its objects, then this is because a

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 Julia Kristeua 133

repression which
of its the
obj ego,
turn are tributar
posteriori on a fo
of which in phob
and in a more ima
limits of the human universe.
At this limit, and at the limit, one could say that there is no
unconscious, for the unconscious is constructed when representations
and affects (bound or not bound to them) form a logic. Here, on the
contrary, consciousness has not claimed its right to transform into
signifiers the fluid demarcations of still-unstable territories where an 'l' in
the process of formation ceaselessly wanders astray. We are no longer in
the orbit of the unconscious, but at this limit of originary repression
which has nevertheless found an intrinsically corporeal and already
signifying mark, a symptom and a sign: repugnance, nausea, abjection.
There is a fermentation of object and sign which are not object and sign
of desire, but of an intolerable signifiance and which swings round
towards non-sense or the impossible real, but which present themselves
all the same in spite of 'me' (who is not) as abjection.

Premises of the Sign: Lining of the Sublime

Let us pause a moment at this point. If the abject is already the germ of a
sign for a non-object, at the borders of originary repression, it is
understandable that it skirts the somatic symptom on the one hand and
the sublimation on the other. The symptom: a language, in announcing
its withdrawal, structures an unassimilable foreigner in the body, a
monster, a cancerous tumour that the monitors of the unconscious
cannot hear because the wayward subject huddles up away from the
paths of desire. Sublimation , on the contrary, is nothing other than the
possibility of naming the pre-nominal, the pre-objectal, which are in fact
only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal. In the symptom the abject invades
me, I become it. Through sublimation I hold on to it. The abject is
bordered by the sublime. It is not the same moment of its trajectory, but
it is the same subject and the same discourse which enable both abject
and sublime to exist.
For the sublime does not have an object either. When I am fascinated
by the starry sky, some broad-backed sailor or a stained-glass window of
violet rays of light, then it is a bundle of meanings, colours, words,
caresses, light touches, odours, sighs, cadences which loom up,
envelop me, carry me away and sweep me beyond the things that I see,
hear or think. The sublime 'object' is dissolved in the transports of a
bottomless memory. It is this memory which, from station to station,
recollection to recollection, love to love, transfers this object to the
luminous point of bedazzlement where I lose myself in order to be. As

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1 34 Oxford L iterary Review

soon as I perceive it and name it, th

already activated - a cascade of perce
the memory to infinity. I then forg
myself borne along in a second univ
where 'l' am: delight and loss. The su
short of perception and words, but
them: it is an in addition which inflates and exceeds us and has us be at
one and the same here , cast out, and there , other and brilliant. Gap,
impossible closure, failed Totality, joy: fascination.

Before the Beginning: the Separation

The abject can appear then as the most fragile (from a synchronic point
of view), the most archaic (from a diachronic point of view) sublimation
of an 'object' still inseparable from drives. The abject is the pseudo-
object which is constituted before , but which only appears in the
breaches of secondary repression. The abject would be, therefore , the
' object ' of originary repression.
But what is originary repression? It is, let us say: the capacity of the
speaking being, always already inhabited by the Other, to divide, to
reject, to repeat. And this without one division, one separation, one
subject/object being constituted (not yet, or already no longer). Why?
Perhaps because of maternal anxiety unable to satiate itself in the
ambiant symbolic.
The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with the fragile states
where man wanders in the territories of the animal. Thus, through
abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise zone of their
culture in order to detach it from the menacing world of the animal or of
animality, imagined as the representatives of murder and sex.
On the other hand, the abject confronts us in our personal
archaeology, with our most original attempts to mark ourselves out from
the maternal entity even before ex-isting outside it thanks to the
autonomy of language. This demarcation is violent and clumsy, always
threatened by a relapse into dependency on a power that is as reassuring
as it is stifling. The difficulty a mother has in recognising (or in being
recognised by) the symbolic instance - in other words her predicaments
with the phallus which represents her father or her husband - is
obviously not of such a nature as to help the future subject leave the
natural lodging. If the child can serve as its mother's index of her own
self-authentification, there is hardly any reason for her to be an
intermediary so that it can be made autonomous and become
authenticated in its turn. In this relation of body to body,7 the symbolic
light that a third party, the father eventually, can bring, is used by the
future subject (if he is found to be endowed in addition with a robust
constitution of drives), to continue the unwilling battle, with that part of
the mother that will become abject. Repression, pushing back; being

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 Julia Kristeua 135

repressed, being p
In this conflict w
which it becomes h
in sum logically an
not, but 'l' separat
(broadening the m
of narcissism. It is
The more or less beautiful specular image where I see myself or
recognise myself, rests on an abjection which fissures it when
repression, the permanent watchman, loosens its grip.

The 'Chora', Receptacle of Narcissism

Let us enter for a moment into the Freudian aporia called originary
repression. A curious origin, this, where what is repressed does not
really fit in its place, and where that which represses always borrows its
force and authority from what is apparently very secondary: language.
We should not then speak of an origin, but rather of an instability of the
symbolic function in its most significant aspect, namely, the forbidden
nature of the maternal body (the defence against auto-erotism and the
incest taboo). Here, it is the drive which reigns in order to constitute a
strange space that we will name, with Plato (Timaeus, 48-53), a chora , or
receptacle.
To the benefit of the ego or against the ego, the drives (be they of life
or of death) have the function of correlating this 'not yet me' with an
'object' in order to constitute both of them. This movement which is
dichotomising (inside-outside, me-not me) and repetitive, nevertheless
has something centripetal about it: it aims to place the ego at the centre
of the solar system of objects. The fact that by dint of returning, the
movement of the drives ends up by becoming centrifugal, thus attaching
itself to the Other and being produced there as a sign in order thereby to
have meaning; this fact is what is strictly speaking exorbitant.
But just at this moment, when I recognise my image as a sign and
begin to change in order to signify myself, another economy becomes
installed. The sign represses the chora and its eternal return. Desire
alone will be henceforth the witness of this 'originary' palpitation. But
the desire ex-patriates the ego towards another subject and no longer
admits the demands of the ego other than as narcissistic. Narcissism
then appears as a regression in retreat from the other, a return towards a
self-contemplating, conservative, self-sufficient haven. In fact this
narcissim is never the unruffled image of the Greek god in a tranquil
spring. The conflicts of the drives muddy the bottom, disturb its water
and bring along all that which for a given system of signs is, through its
non-integration, abjection.
Abjection is then a kind of narcissistic crisis: it testifies to the
ephemeralness of this state called, God knows why with reprobate

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1 36 Oxford L iterary Review

jealousy, 'narcissism'; more still, a

thing and the concept) its status o
Nevertheless, it suffices that an int
bar the desire directed towards the
demands, not provide satisfaction
back in mid-stream on the 'same', thus disturbing the waters of
Narcissus. It is precisely at the moment of narcissistic disturbance (the
permanent state in sum of the speaking being, insofar as he hears
himself speak) that secondary repression, with its lining of symbolic
means, seeks to transfer to its own account thus overdrawn, the
resources of originary repression. The archaic economy emerges into full
daylight, signified, verbalised. Its strategies (rejecting, separating,
repeating-abjecting) thus find a symbolic existence, and even the logics
of the symbolic, reasonings, demonstrations, proofs etc., must submit
themselves to it. It is then that the object ceases to be circumscribed,
reasoned, dismissed: it appears as . . . abject.
Two apparently contradictory causes provoke this narcissistic crisis
which brings, with its truth, the vision of the abject. The too great
severity of the Other , confounded with the One and the Law; and the
failing of the Other which shows through in the collapse of the objects of
desire. In both cases, the abject appears in order to support 'l' in the
Other. The abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' which is
always lost. The abject breaks through the wall of repression and its
judgments. It re-sources the ego at the abominable limits from which, in
order to be, the ego has become detached - it re-sources it at the non-
ego, the drive and death. Abjection is a resurrection which goes via
death (of the ego). It is an alchemy which transforms the death drive into
a brusque movement of life and new signifiance.

Perverse or Artistic

The abject is related to perversion. The feeling of abjection that I

experience is anchored in the superego. The abject is perverse for it
neither abandons nor assumes an interdiction, a rule or a law; rather, it
turns them aside, leads them astray, corrupts them; it helps itself to
them, uses them the better to deny them. It kills in the name of life: it is
the progressive despot; it lives in the service of death: it is the trafficking
geneticist; it retames the suffering of the other for its own good: it is the
cynic (and the psychoanalyst); it re-establishes its narcissistic power
while feigning to expose its abysses: it is the artist who practices his art
as a 'business' . . . Corruption is its most widespread and most evident
form. It is the socialised figure of the abject.
An unshakeable adhesion to the Interdiction and the Law is necessary
if this perverse in-between-ness is to be framed and put aside. Religion,
Morality, Right. Obviously these are always more or less arbitrary;
inevitably they are repressive, rather more than less; and they are finding

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 Julia Kristeua 137

it increasingly d
Contemporary
seems to be wri
perversity. It ob
Right - their bi
absurd. Like per
Yet it keeps its
by the abject, im
in consequence p
another point o
judge and accom
it. One could th
dichotomous cat
and Immoral, is
For the subject firmly installed in his superego, such writing
necessarily participates in the in-between-ness which characterises
perversion; and for this reason it provokes abjection in its turn.
Nevertheless, these texts call for a softening of the superego. To write
them supposes the capacity of imagining the abject, that is, to put
oneself in its place and to put it aside only by the displacement of
language games. It is only eventually after his death that the writer of
abjection will escape his lot of being waste, scrap or abject. Then, either
he will fall into oblivion, or he will accede to the rank of
incommensurable ideal. This would make of death the guardian
( conservatrice ) of our imaginary museum; it would protect us in the last
instance from the abjection that contemporary literature prides itself in
expending so much energy in speaking. A protection which puts paid to
abjection, but perhaps also to the disquieting and incandescent stakes of
literature itself which, raised to the level of the sacred, finds that its
specificity has been reduced. In purifying (us of) literature, it constitutes
our lay religion.

Like Abjection - Like Sacredness

Abjection accompanies all religious constructions, and it reappears, in

order to be elaborated in a new way, when they collapse. We shall
distinguish a number of structurations of abjection which determine
different types of the sacred.
Abjection appears as a rite of impurity and pollution in the paganism
which accompanies societies with a dominant or surviving matrilinear
kinship structure. Here it takes on the aspect of the exclusion of a
substance (either nutritive or linked to sexuality), in which the operation
coincides with the sacred which it instigates.
Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (whether in relation to food or
not) in monotheistic religions, in particular Judaism, but tends to slip
towards 'secondary' forms such as transgression (of the Law) in the

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1 38 Oxford Literary Review

same monotheistic economy.

dialectical elaboration in becom
nameable and totalisable alteri
The diverse modalities of purification of the abject - the diverse
catharses - constitute the history of religions, and end up in the
catharsis par excellence which is art, this side of, and beyond, religion.
Viewed from this angle, artistic experience, rooted in the abject that it
expresses and purifies by that very means, appears as the essential
component of religiosity. This is why perhaps it is destined to survive the
collapse of the historic forms of religion.

Outside the Sacred, the Abject is Written

In the modernity of the West, and due to the crisis of Christianity,

abjection finds more archaic resonances, culturally anterior to sin,
enabling it to rejoin its biblical status, and further still, that of the impure
of primitive societies. In a world where the Other has collapsed, the
aesthetic effort - the descent into the foundation of the symbolic
edifice - consists in retracing the fragile frontiers of the speaking being,
as close as possible to its dawning, of this bottomless 'origin' of so-called
originary repression. In this experience sustained nevertheless by the
Other, 'subject' and 'object' push each other back, affront each other,
collapse and start again; they are inseparable, contaminated,
condemned, at the limit of what can be assimilated and thought: abject.
The great works of modern literature are arrayed on this terrain:
Dostoevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Céline . . .

Dostoevsky

The abject is, for Dostoevsky, the 'object' of the Devils: it is the goal and
the driving force of an existence whose meaning is lost in the absolute
degradation engendered by having rejected absolutely the limit (moral,
social, religious, familial, individual) as absolute, as God. Abjection
oscillates then between the fading of all meaning and all humanity, burnt
as in the flames of a fire, and the ecstasy of an ego which, having lost its
Other and its objects, touches, at the precise moment of suicide, the
height of harmony with the promised land. Verkhovenski is as abject as
Kirilov, murder as abject as suicide.

A big fire at night always produces an exciting and exhilarating

effect; this explains the attraction of fireworks; but in the case of
fireworks, the graceful and regular shape of the flames and the
complete immunity from danger produce a light and playful effect
comparable to the effect of a glass of champagne. A real fire is
quite another matter: there the horror and a certain sense of

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 Julia Kristeua 139

personal danger
of a fire at nigh
whose house is burnt down) a certain shock to the brain and, as it
were, a challenge to his own destructive instincts, which, alas, lie
buried in the soul of even the meekest and most domesticated
official of the lowest grade. This grim sensation is almost always
delightful. 'I really don't know if it is possible to watch a fire
without some enjoyment!8'

There are seconds - they come five or six at a time - when you
suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is
nothing earthly. I don't mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his
earthly semblance can't endure it. He has to undergo a physical
change or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable. It is as though
you apprehended all nature and suddenly said: "Yes, it is true - it
is good" (...) What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly
clear and such gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds,
the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds,
I live through a lifetime, and I am ready to give up my life for them ,
for it's worth it. To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would
have to undergo a physical change. I think man ought to stop
begetting children. What do you want children for, what do you
want mental development (sic), if your goal has been attained? It is
said in the gospel that in the resurrection they neither marry nor are
given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. It's a
hint. Is your wife giving birth to a baby?'9

Verkhovenski is abject in his slimy and underhand utilisation of the

ideals which no longer exist from the moment at which the Interdiction
(call it God) fails to operate. Stavrogine is perhaps less so, for his
immoralism involves laughter and refusal, something artistic, a
gratuitous and cynical expenditure which is obviously capitalised to the
profit of a private narcissism, but which does not serve an arbitrary and
exterminating power. One can be a cynic without being irremediably
abject; abjection itself is provoked by that which tries to get on well with
the law that is trampled underfoot.

'He's got everything in his note-book', Verkhovenski went on.

'Spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and he is
obliged to inform against them. Everyone belongs to all the others
and all belong to everyone. All are slaves and equals in slavery. In
extreme cases slander and murder, but above all, equality. To
begin with, the level of education, science, and accomplishment is
open only to men of the highest abilities! Men of the highest ability
cannot help being autocrats, and they have always done more
harm than good; they are either banished or executed. A Cicero
will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged

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 1 40 Oxford Literary Review

out, a Shakespeare will be stored - there you have Shigalyov's

doctrine! Slaves must be equal: without despotism there has never
been any freedom or equality, but in a herd there is bound to be
equality - there's the Shigalyov doctrine for you! Ha, ha, ha! You
think it strange? I am for the Shigalyov doctrine!'10

Dostoevsky has X-rayed sexual, moral and religious abjection as a

collapse of paternal laws. Is not the universe of the Devils a universe of
disavowed, artificial or dead fathers, where reign the no less fantastic
and ferocious fetishes of matrons dizzy with power? And it is in
symbolising the abject, in bringing about in masterly fashion the
jouissance which is the saying of the abject, that Dostoevsky is freed
from this pitiless maternal weight.
But it is in Proust that we will find the more immediately erotic, sexual
and desiring mainspring of abjection; and it is in the work of Joyce that
we will discover that it is the feminine body, the maternal body in its
unsignifiable and unsymbolisable aspects which support, for the
individual, the fantasm of this loss where he is engulfed or intoxicated
through his inability to name an object of desire.

Proust

Because it is recognised as inherent in the blissful and impossible

modification of self (moi), recognised therefore as being wedded to
narcissism, abjection has, in the work of Proust, something
domesticated about it: without being 'proper' ('propre') or existing 'in
itself' (' allant en soi'), it is a scandal in which it is a question of
recognising if not the banality, at least the secret of a thinly disguised
snob. Abjection in Proust's work is worldly (mondaine), if not social. It is
the vile inner lining of society. Perhaps it is because of this that one finds
in Proust the only dictionary-attested modern example of the use of the
word 'abject' in the weak sense that it had at the end of the eighteenth
century:

In these almost popular quarters, what modest and abject

existence, yet there was gentleness nourished by the calm and
happiness that he had accepted to live indefinitely.11

Proust writes that if the object of desire is real, it can only prop upon
(s'étayerP2 an abject which it is impossible to fulfil. The object of love
thus becomes unavowable, the subject's double, similar to him but not
him (impropre) because inseparable from an impossible identity.
Amorous desire is thus experienced as a fold internal to this impossible
identity, as an accident of narcissism, an ob-ject, a painful alteration,
deliciously and dramatically condemned to finding the other only in the
same sex. It is as if one could only accede to the (abject) truth of

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 Julia Kristeua 141

sexuality through

I had not even c

until several min
Jupian's shop, w
imagine that fe
sounds were so
up an octave hig
one person was
that subsequent
taking a bath to
from this later o
namely pleasure
fear of an event
case, despite the
- an immediate

Compared to this, the Sadian orgy, conforming to a gigantic

philosophy, even if it is a philosophy of the boudoir, has nothing abject
about it. Regulated, rhetorical, and, from this point of view, regular, it
enlarges Meaning, the Body and the Universe but has nothing exorbitant
about it: everything (tout) is nameable for it; the whole (le tout) is
namable. The Sadian theatre integrates: it has no elsewhere, there is
nothing unthinkable or heterogeneous for it. It is rational and optimistic,
it does not exclude. This is to say that it does not recognise any sacred,
and in this sense it is the anthropological and rhetorical culminating point
of atheism. Prousťs writing, on the contrary, never renounces a judging,
perhaps Biblical, instance, which splits, expatriates, divides up or
condemns; and it is in relation to this instance, with or against it, that the
web of Prousťs sentence, memory, sexuality and morality is
constructed. A web which gathers infinitely, differences (of sex, class
and race) into a homogeneity made only of signs, a fragile net stretched
over an abyss of incompatibilities, rejects and abjections. Desire and
signs weave in Prousťs work the infinite canvas which does not hide
vileness, but allows it to appear in filtered form. In fact as failure,
embarrassment, shame and gaffe. As a permanent threat, in sum, for
the homogenising rhetoric that the writer constructs against and with
the abject.

Joyce

Dazzling, interminable, eternal - and so weak, so insignificant, so feeble

- such is the rhetoric of Joyce's language. Far from taking us away
from the abject, Joyce makes it resound in that prototype of literary
speech (parole) which is for him Molly's monologue. If this monologue
displays the abject, it is not because it is a woman speaking. But

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1 42 Oxford Literary Review

because, from a distance , the w

order to make it speak, in order
word (parole) and turns out to b
woman with another, her mother of course, the absolute, because
primordial, place of the impossible: of the excluded, the outside-
meaning, the abject. Atopia.

(...) the woman hides it not to give all the trouble they do yes he
came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anywhere love its not or
hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those
night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel story
he made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who
did I meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else
who let me see that big babbyface I saw him and he not long
married flirting with a young girl at Pooles Myriorama and turned
my back on him when he slinked out looking quite conscious what
harm but he had the impudence to make up to me one time well
done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of all the big
stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor only for I hate having
a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some little bitch or
other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the sly if they only
knew him as well as I do yes because the day before yesterday he
was scribbling something a letter when I came into the front room
for the matches to show him Dignams death (. . .)15

Here, the abject is not in the thematics of masculine sexuality as Molly

would see it. It is not even in the fascinated horror which other women,
emerging behind the men, inspire in the speaker. The abject is, beyond
these themes, and for Joyce in general, to be found in the way of
speaking: it is verbal communication, it is the Word which dis-covers the
abject. But at the same time, the Word alone purifies the abject, and this
is what Joyce seems to say when he restores to the masterly rhetoric of
his Work in Progress all rights against abjection. A single catharsis: the
rhetoric of the pure signifier, of the music in letters, Finnegans Wa/re.16
Céline's voyage, to the end of its night, will also encounter rhythm and
music as the only way out, the ultimate sublimation of the unsignifiable.
But, contrary to Joyce, Céline will not make of it a salvation, himself
fallen, Céline will become, body and language, the apogee of the moral,
political and stylistic revulsion which marks our epoch. An epoch which
seems to have entered, a century past, an endless process of giving
birth. Enchantment remains always and still for another time.17

Borges

Vertiginous and hallucinatory: such is in any case the object of literature

according to Borges. It is the Aleph which appears, in its truth of the

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 Julia Kristeua 143

transfinite, or the
of the house of b
dares to record th
of an archaic mem
This Aleph is exorb
the narration of in
is to say, excessiveness, the without-limit, the unthinkable, the
untenable, the unsymbolisable. But what is this? If not the tireless
repetition of a drive, which, propelled by an initial loss, does not stop
wandering, unappeased, deceived and falsified, until it finds its only
stable object, death. The manipulation of this repetition, its staging, its
exploitation to the point at which it delivers up beyond its eternal return,
its sublime destiny of being a battle with death - is it not this which
characterises writing? Yet to touch death in such a way, to deceive it, is
this not infamy itself? The literary narrative which speaks the
mechanisms of repetition, must of necessity become, beyond the
fantastic, the detective story or the série noire , a narrative of infamy.
(Historia universal de la infamia, Historia de la eternidad.) And the writer
does not go without recognising himself derisory and fallen, in that
abject individual, Lazarus Morell, the frightful redeemer who only
resuscitates his slaves the better to have them die, not without having
them circulate - and make a profit - like coinage. Is this to say that
literary objects, our objects of fiction, like the slaves belonging to
Lazarus Morell, are only some all too ephemeral resurrections of this
ungraspable Aleph? Is it this Aleph, impossible 'object', impossible
imaginary, which sustains the work of writing, the Aleph which is
nevertheless only a provisional stop in the Borgesian race towards death
contained in the depths of the maternal cavern?

The stealing of horses in one state and selling them in another were
barely more than a digression in Morell's criminal career, but they
foreshadowed the method that now assures him his rightful place
in a Universal History of Infamy. This method is unique not only for
the peculiar circumstances that distinguished it but also for the
sordidness it required, for its deadly manipulation of hope, and for
its step by step development, so like the hideous unfolding of a
nightmare. (...)
Flashing rings on their fingers to inspire respect, they travelled
up and down the vast plantations of the South. They would pick
out a wretched black and offer him freedom. They would tell him
that if he ran away from his master and allowed them to sell him, he
would receive a portion of the money paid for him, and they would
then help him escape again, this second time sending him to a free
state. Money and freedom, the jingle of silver dollars together with
his liberty - what greater temptation could they offer him? The
slave became emboldened for his first escape.
The river provided the natural route. A canoe; the hold of a

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 1 44 Oxford Literary Review

steamboat; a scow; a great r

the point or three or four w
what counted was feeling th
unceasing river. The black w
then run away again to the
terrible benefactors (about w
misgivings) cited obscure ex
him one final time. On his r
part of both sales and his fr
worked for a while, and on h
the whip. He then made his
and sleepy. (...)
The runaway expected his freedom. Lazarus Morell's shadowy
mulattoes would give out an order among themselves that was
sometimes barely more than a nod of the head, and the slave
would be freed from sight, hearing, touch, day, infamy, time, his
benefactors, pity, the air, the hound packs, the world, hope,
sweat, and himself. A bullet, a knife, or a blow, and the Mississippi
turtles and catfish would receive the last evidence.18

Imagine this imaginary machine transformed into a social institution

and you have the infamy of . . . fascism.

Artaud

An 'l' invaded by the corpse: such is often the abject in the text of
Artaud. For it is death which figures the most violently this strange state
where a wayward non-subject having lost its non-objects, imagines, by
way of the ordeal of abjection, nothingness. Horror of death that 'l' am,
suffocation which does not separate the inside from the outside but
sucks one into the other indefinitely: Artaud is the available witness of
this torture - of this truth.

A little girl, dead, says: I am the one who blows horror into the
lungs of the living. May they remove me immediately from there.19

But when I was dead, my corpse was thrown on a dung-heap, and

I remember having macerated for I don't know how many days or
hours in the expectation of waking up. For I did not know at first
that I was dead: it was necessary for me to make up my mind to
understand it in order to succeed in raising myself up. Then some
friends, who had at first completely abandoned me decided to
come and embalm my body and were astonished without joy to see
me alive once again.20

I don't have to go to bed with you, these things, for I'm purer than

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 Julia Kristeua 145

you, god, and to go to bed is not to dirty myself, but on the

contrary to enlighten myself about you.21

These different literary texts name types of the abject which involve, as
goes without saying, different psychical structures, as well as different
types of enunciation (narrative and syntactic structures, prosodie
procedures, etc., of the different texts). Thus, the abject, depending on
the author, turns out to be named differently when it is not simply
indicated by linguistic modifications which are always somewhat
elliptical. In the last part of this essay, we will examine in detail a specific
enunciation of the abject: that of Céline. Suffice it to say here by way of
introduction, that modern literature, in all its multiple variants, and when
it is written as the language become at last possible of this impossibility
that is a-subjectivity or non-objectivity, in fact proposes a sublimation of
abjection. It is thus that it has become a substitute for what was formerly
accomplished by the sacred at the limits of subjective and social identity.
But it is a question of a sublimation without consecration. Fallen
(Déchue).

Catharsis and Analysis

This abjection , that modernity has learned how to repress, to evade or to

disguise, appears fundamental to the analytic position. Lacan points this
out when he associates this word with the saint/iness of the analyst, a
coupling which only leaves the black part of humour.23
It will be necessary to keep open the wound over which those who are
engaged in the analytic adventure are situated, and that
professionalisation, along with the cynicism of the times and of
institutions, will have quickly closed up again. There is nothing initiatory
in this passage, if one means by 'initiation' the accession to a purity
guaranteed by the posture of death (as in Plato's Phaedo) or the treasure
without admixture of the 'pure signifier' (as is the gold of truth for the
Republic , or the pure-gold separation of the Statesman in the Politics).
But rather it is a heterogeneous corporeal and verbal experience of
fundamental incompleteness: 'gap' (béance), 'less One' ... For the
destabilised subject which results from this - like a crucified man
opening the stigmata of his desiring body to a word which only
structures on condition that it abandons - every phenomenon, insofar
as it is, whether signifying or human, appears in its being of abjection.
For what impossible catharsis? Freud, at the start of his career, used the
same word to designate a therapeutic method the rigour of which was
later to become clear.

Plato and Aristotle

The analyst is thus always referred to the question which already haun

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1 46 Oxford Literary Review

Plato when he wants to take ov

religion.24 The Logos alone is c
Phaedo, by being stoically separ
passions are the source of impurit
after having sorted the good fr
leaving the door wide open to im
remains fixed on the truth? In
through the harmony of this t
geometric form, and has nothin
with a 'tickle'.
Catharsis seems to be an intrinsic preoccupation of philosophy, in as
much as philosophy is a morality and is unable to forget Plato. Even if the
mixture , coming towards the end of Platonism, seems inevitable, it is
thought alone, harmonious wisdom, which ensures purity: catharsis is
transformed, for transcendental idealism, into philosophy. From the
cathartic incantation proper to its mysteries, Plato, as is known, only
retains the very uncertain role of the poets whose frenzy would be of use
to a State only if it were judged, ordered and purified in its turn by the
wise men.
The Aristotelian catharsis is closer to the sacred incantation. It is this
which has left its name to the current, aesthetic, conception of catharsis.
In miming the passions - from enthusiasm to grief - by &a language
spiced with seasonings', of which the most important are metre and
song (cf. The Poetics ), the soul accedes at one and the same time to
orgy and purity. It is a question of the purification of the soul and the
body via a heterogeneous and complex circuit, passing from 'bile' to
'fire', from the 'masculine warmth' to the 'enthusiasm' of 'intelligence'.
Metre and song thus awaken the impure, the other of intelligence, the
passional-bodily-sexual-virile, but harmonise it, arrange it in a way
different from that effected by the knowledge of the wise man. They
thereby calm frenetic fits (Plato in the Laws only allows this use of
rhythm and metre to the mother rocking her baby) by the contribution of
an external ' poetic rule which fills the hiatus between body and soul
inherited from Plato. To the Platonic death , which monopolised, in sum,
the condition of purity, Aristotle opposes the act of poetic purification: a
process itself impure, which only protects from the abject by plunging
into it. The abject, mimed with sound and meaning, is repeated. No
question of liquidating it - the last Platonic lesson has been heard, one
cannot get rid of impurity - ; but a question of having it exist a second
time in a form different from the original impurity. Repetition in rhythm
and song, thus in what is not yet, or no longer 'meaning', but arranges,
defers, differentiates and organises, harmonises the pathos, the bile, the
warmth, the enthusiasm . . . Benveniste translates 'rhythm' by 'trace'
and 'linking' (enchaînement). Prometheus is 'rhythmed', we would say
'chained' ( enchaîné ) . . . Grasped on this side of, and beyond, language.
There is a discourse on sex, which is not that of knowledge - Aristotle
seems to say - it is the only possible catharsis. This discourse is heard,

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 Julia Kristeua 147

and through the

what this speec

Philosophic Sadness and the Spoken Disaster of the Analyst

This poetic catharsis which will act as a younger sister of philosophy in

an irreconcilable encounter with it for more than two thousand years,
takes us away from purity, and thus from Kantian morality which has for
so long ordered modern ethical codes and which remains faithful to a
certain Platonic Stoicism. By the 'generalisation of maxims', as is
known, the Kant of the Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals or of the
Doctrine of Virtue , advocated an 'ethical gymnastics' in order to make
us, via consciousness, the masters of our impurity ( souillure ), and
through this same consciousness, free and joyful.
Hegel, on the contrary, more sceptical, and to a certain extent more
Aristotelian, rejects a 'ratiocination' claiming to eliminate an impurity
(souillure) which to him appears fundamental. Probably echoing the
Greek city, he can see no other ethic than that of the act. But also being
suspicious regarding the beautiful aesthetic spirits which find purity in
the construction of empty forms, he obviously does not retain Aristotle's
mimetic catharsis. It is in the historical act that the master from Jena
sees the dissipation of the fundamental impurity; an impurity which is in
fact sexual, and whose historical realisation will be marriage. But - and
it is also here that, sadly, transcendental idealism ends up - desire
(Lust), thus normalised in order to escape abject animality (Begierde),
sinks into the banality of sadness and silence. How? Hegel does not
condemn impurity as an exteriority of ideal consciousness; more
profoundly - but also more craftily - he thinks that it can and must be
eliminated of its own accord in the historic-social act. If he differs with
Kant on this point he is nonetheless at one with the latter's
condemnation of (sexual) impurity. He rejoins him in his aim of keeping
consciousness separate from impurity (souillure) which nevertheless,
dialectically, constitutes it. It is reabsorbed into the trajectory of the Idea,
what can impurity become, if not the negative side of consciousness,
that is: failure of communication and speech? In other terms, the impure,
being reabsorbed into marriage, becomes . . . sadness. And in this it has
not moved too far from its logic of being a boundary line of discourse: a
silence.25
It is evident that the analyst, from the abyss of his silence, brushes
against the spectre of this sadness that Hegel saw in sexual
normalisation. This sadness is the more evident to him the more its ethic
is rigorous - situated as it must be in the West, on the remains of
transcendental idealism. But one could also argue that the Freudian
position, dualistic and dissolving, decentres this base. In this sense, it
makes the sad silence of analysis hover over a strange foreign discourse,

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1 48 Oxford L iterary Review

which strictly speaking, brea

of a knowledge and truth wh
apparatus which mimes terror, e
and song more than the Word
called) in the analytic defile of
interpretative speech of the analyst (and not only his literary or
theoretical bilingualism) show its effects in order to be analytic speech.
As a counter-weight to a purity which recognises itself in disabused
sadness, the 'poetic' decentring of the analytic enunciation is what
testifies to its proximity to its cohabitation with, and its knowledge of,
abjection.
I am thinking, in sum, of the totally mimetic identification (transfer and
counter-transfer) of the analyst vis-à-vis the analysands. This
identification allows the binding in place of that which, in fragmented
form, is making them suffer and feel barren. It facilitates a regression to
the affects which allow themselves to be heard in the ruptures of
discourses, also a punctuating (rythmer), a linking (enchaîner) (is this
'becoming conscious'?) of the gaps of a speech which is sad at having
turned its back on its abject meaning. If there is an analytic jouissance, it
is here in this totally poetic mimesis which traverses the architecture of
the spoken word (parole) and goes from the coenaesthetic image to
logical and fantasmatic articulation. Without biologising language for all
that, and while involved in getting away from identification by the
process of interpretation, the analytic utterance (parole) is one which is
'incarnate', in the strongest sense of the term. Only on this condition is it
'cathartic': meaning by this that it is equivalent, for the analyst as well as
the analysand, not to a purification, but to a rebirth with and against
abjection.26
Translated by John Lechte

Notes
1. (Trans.) No beast which does not have a reflection of the infinite;
No abject and vile iris which does not touch
The light from on high, sometimes tender and
Sometimes ferocious.
2. (Trans.) In fact 'L'Impropre', which derives from the adjective 'propre' meaning in
French: distinguishing quality, or that on which an identifying mark is founded, as
well as 'clean' and 'own'. As in the English 'proper', the French 'propre' also connotes
propriety or correct behaviour. To be noted here then is the notion that what is
unclean is also not 'me'; it is a threat to my identity, but at the same time is that
through which my identity is established.
3. Saint Francois de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote , Vol. II I, 1.
4. (Trans.) I retain here the French term dénégation as it corresponds more closely to
Freud's Verneinung , translated in the Standard Edition as 'negation'. See in this
regard Standard Edition Vol. XIX, p. 143 n.1, and p.235, n.2. Freud's remarks in this
article are particularly important here: 'Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what
is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not of course an
acceptance of what is repressed. We can see how in this the intellectual function is

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 Julia Kristeua 149

separateci from the affective process. With the help of negation only one
consequence of the process of repression is undone - the fact, namely, of the
ideational content of what is repressed not reaching consciousness. The outcome of
this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed while at the same time what is
essential to the repression persists' (Ibid, pp.235-6). Thus the negation is not a 'pure'
negation, but a 'dénégation': an acceptance on one level of what is negated on
another.
5. (Trans.) In English in the text.
6. (Trans.) On the difficulty of translating the word jouissance , the reader is referred to
the 'Translator's note' in Stephen Heath's volume of translations from Barthes,
I mage- Music-Text (Fontana/Collins, 1979), pp.7-11.
7. (Trans.) corps à corps, also 'hand-to-hand fighting'.
8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils (The Possessed ), tr. David Magarshack (Penguin,
1965), p. 512.
9. Ibid. pp. 586-7.
10. Ibid., p. 418.
11. Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1913), p.219.
12. (Trans.) For a discussion of the term 'propping' in Freud, see Jean Laplanche, Life
and Death in Psychoanalysis , tr. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976), Ch.1, pp. 15-18 and passim.
13. (Trans.) English translation: The Cities of the Plain, tr. S. Scott- Moncrieff (London,
1957).
14. Ibid., p. 12.
15. James Joyce, Ulysses (London, The Bodley Head, 1960), pp.872-3.
16. (Trans.) Cf. Stéphane Mallarmé, 'La Musique et les lettres', in Oeuvres Complètes
(Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1945), pp.633-657, where, writing of
modem poetry and in particular of 'free verse', Mallarmé says: 'toute âme est un
noeud rythmique' ('every soul is a rhythmical node'), p.644.
17. (Trans.) The series of Céline's novels is called Feerie pour une autre fois
(Enchantment for another Time).
18. Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni
(Penguin, 1975), pp.24-5 and 26-7.
19. 'Suppôts et supplications', in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, Gallimard), XIV, p. 14.
20. Ibid., p. 72.
21. Ibid., p.203.
22. 'Lettre à A. Breton', ibid., p. 155.
23. Jacques Lacan, Télévision (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p.28.
24. Cf. on catharsis in the Greek world, Louis Moulinier, Le Pur et l'impur dans la pensé
des Grecs (Paris: Klinckseick, 1952).
25. Cf. A. Philonenko, 'Note sur les concepts de souillure et de pureté dans l'idéalisme
allemand', Les Etudes philosophiques, 4 (1972), 481-493.
26. (Trans.) I should like to acknowledge the very valuable assistance that I received from
Geoff Bennington in the preparation of this translation. Responsibility for all errors is
of course mine.

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