Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

An idea developed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnival is a reaction to oppressive forces. It is a liberating and subversive force that breaks down social hierarchies and barriers. Carnival can be an event, text, or artwork in which boundaries are dissolved, allowing for the eruption of the abject.

The first stage of psychosexual development, according to Kristeva, lasts from birth to six months. This is a pre-language state in which the infant does not distinguish themselves from their mother. It is a time of feelings, perceptions, and needs without any boundaries. The chora is Semiotic, pre-Symbolic.

The ego, id, and superego are the areas of the psyche as theorized by Freud. The ego refers to the conscious self; the id refers to libidinous, unconscious drives; and the superego is the conscience or moral rules internalized by the person.

Intertextuality is a postmodern term coined by Julia Kristeva referring to the inter-relatedness of all texts, including literature, culture, history, and all other forms of human production. No texts exist in isolation; all texts exist in response to and in dialogue with other texts. This goes beyond mere influence; even a text that does not include allusions to other texts or demonstrate the influence of other writers still exists in relationship to all other texts. Kristeva uses the word “mosaic” to describe this web the texts.

“Jouissance” is a concept used in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and further developed by Julia Kristeva. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva uses the term to encompass pleasure that disrupts conventional boundaries, order, and identity and is closely associated with psychic and emotional pain. For Kristeva, jouissance emerges in confrontation with the abject. She uses the example of Céline as representative of such a confrontation and resulting jouissance.

The object is something or someone that exists independently of the subject, sometimes referred to as the Other. In Kristeva’s philosophy, a child initially has no sense of the object but rather experiences itself and its mother as one organism. Gradually, as the child begins the process of individuation from the mother, it begins to form the concept of the object, or other.

The Oedipus complex is a central concept in the psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud. It describes a child’s unconscious desire for their opposite-sex parent, along with feelings of rivalry and hostility toward their same-sex parent. The complex is named after the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. In Freud’s formulation, the child is invariably male, and he sexually desires his mother but is fearful of his father because of his large phallus. Eventually, the child begins to identify with the father and thus discounts the mother as an object of desire. Lacan and Kristeva also draw on the Oedipal complex, although their formulations extend and modify Freud’s original model.

The mirror stage is an important part of Lacan’s theory of psychosexual development. Sometime between six and 18 months, a baby will see themselves in a mirror and begin to imagine themselves as a whole being, separate from the mother. The image becomes the basis for the baby’s ego formation and sense of self.

In Kristeva’s work, primal repression is the initial act of repression experienced by an infant when they separate from their mother. The separation is a necessary stage in the development of subjectivity. Primal repression can result in feelings of isolation, alienation, and fragmentation as the infant separates from and rejects the maternal body. For Kristeva, primal repression marks the boundary between the undifferentiated infant and the person growing toward full subjectivity. Rejecting the mother’s body is the source of the abject.

Not to be confused with “semiotics,” the study of language, the term “Semiotic” as defined by Kristeva is a preverbal, pre-Oedipal stage of human psychosexual development associated with the maternal body and corresponding to Lacan’s phase called “The Real.” The Semiotic, according to Mary Klages, “is a layer of libidinal energy, which is disruptive to the Symbolic, and to the logic and grammar of stable language” (Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: The Complete Guide, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Kristeva theorizes that the Semiotic erupts in the Symbolic through poetic language; she uses Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s work as an example of Semiotic writing.

Whereas Freud would identify the word “subject “with “self” or even “ego,” Lacan sees the subject as at once a grammatical structure and also the “I” created by that structure. Kristeva uses the word subject in much the same way, although she more often refers to the “speaking subject” to mean the human who has reached the Symbolic stage of psychosexual development. She uses “subject-in-process” to refer to the child who is moving through the early stages of development. Neither Lacan nor Kristeva views the “subject” as innate and unchangeable.

In both Lacan and Kristeva’s philosophy, the Symbolic Order is the third phase of human psychosexual development and marks the infant’s entry into language. The child binds the sound-image “I” or “me” to a concept of self and becomes a speaking subject when reaching this third phase.