Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Having established a basis for what she means by the term “abjection,” Kristeva uses the next three chapters to consider the ways religion and culture use abjection to establish group identity through taboos and prohibitions. The movement in these chapters is again from the abstract to the concrete, from the secular toward the sacred.

Kristeva leans heavily on British anthropologist Mary Douglas, best known for her 1966 book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Douglas was influenced by French structuralists, especially Claude Lévi-Straus. In her book, she examines the practices of so-called “primitive” societies, as well as early Judaic culture. Of particular importance for Kristeva, Douglas distinguishes how cultures define and view dirt. Cultural context is essential for understanding the symbolic significance of what a culture considers pure or impure.

In addition, Douglas discusses the role of dirt as a boundary marker. Kristeva writes, “The anthropological analysis of these phenomena was for Mary Douglas essentially syntactic at first: defilement is an element connected with the boundary, the margin, etc. of an order” (66). Kristeva generally agrees with this first-level analysis; however, when Douglas enters into what dirt means to a culture, Kristeva takes issue with the “hasty assimilation of such data” that led Douglas “naively to reject Freudian premises” (66). Consequently, while Kristeva agrees with the structuralist approach to cultural analysis, where she differs is in her consideration of the integration of the individual speaking-subject into the “symbolic order,” or language, of a society, and the ways that filth and defilement function as social markers.

Kristeva employs the rhetorical devices of redefinition and amplification to distinguish her theory from Douglas’s. She uses the terms “filth” and “defilement” to expand on Douglas’s terms. She writes, “Filth is not a quality in itself, but applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, on its other side, a margin”(69). That is, filth is not merely dirt, sewage, or literally unclean particles; rather, Kristeva identifies filth with what an individual or society deems repulsive, and thus abjects, or places beyond the boundary of the individual or society. Likewise, defilement is a communally adopted religious definition of items and practices against which the community or religious systems issue taboos or prohibitions. In a sense, it is the spoken definition and the verbal pronouncement of taboo or prohibitions that marks a practice or item as abject, not the practice nor person nor thing-in-itself. Thus, language itself determines what is inside the system and what is outside it.

Additionally, using a psychoanalytical framework, Kristeva demonstrates that abjection occurs within psychosexual development when the subject-in-process separates from and rejects the mother. During the phase of abjection, the subject-in-process turns away from the Semiotic mother and toward the Symbolic father; in other words, the subject-in-process moves away from the nonverbal, pre-Oedipal phase of the Semiotic and toward language acquisition, as spoken by the Symbolic father. Further, just as individuals use abjection to differentiate themselves from their mothers, the collective “we” uses abjection to shape culture and differentiate their culture from other human collectives. That is, just as abjection allows the speaking-subject to differentiate and become an individual, it also allows a society to exclude and marginalize people and ideas. Filth and defilement come to represent important boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable within a society. Just as the subject-in-process turns away from and devalues the mother, the culture as a whole may initiate taboos and prohibitions that identify women as abject objects.

Kristeva’s theoretical underpinnings concerning the abjection of women are crucial to the critical territory she stakes out in Powers of Horror. Although she embraces much of Freud’s theory as a starting point in her discussion, she diverges from Freud on this important point: “Incest taboo, which Freud did not account for, turns on non-differentiation in pre-objectal relationship. The retrieval of the import of incest taboo therefore brings the maternal function into view” (Beardsworth, Sarah. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. New York State UP, 2004). In other words, Freud’s interest in the murder prohibition focuses on the father figure in the Oedipal triangle; Kristeva, on the other hand, points to the prohibition of incest with the mother to be the more important taboo. The theory behind the abjection of women becomes especially important in the book’s later discussion of Céline’s work, where Kristeva tackles difficult questions arising from his construction of female characters.