Abject - definition: The abject is the assigned, humiliating, dirty and despised element in the human being; A key concept in the thinking of the psychoanalyst and literary scholar Julia Kristeva. The term refers to the state of the self in its pre-linguistic phase. The abject is identified with the narcissistic being of the organism, with the chaos it is in during its symbiosis with the mother. The abject is the sense of panic that the body transmits to us before it has crystallized into the whole self; The humiliating presence of the other within what could have been "I".
The abject is a state in which the subject is both "I" and "not I", the "terrifying void", the absolute end and beginning of a heterogeneous and fragmentary space, from which one can escape only through exile, expulsion, separation from the mother. The being of the organism as an abject is first and foremost its presence as an "liquid" system based on instincts, which involves inside and outside and undermines the boundary between object and subject, between instinct and sign. The abject is the shock (the projection, the contempt); The terrifying presence in which the sublime and the humiliating alternate roles - the frightening presence of infinity, which is beyond our linguistic inclusion ability; The return of the repressed from within the walls of the symbolic order. The exaggerated image of this presence, Kristeva says, is the corpse, the unrepresentable and indescribable death. The corpse represents the terrifying infinity: a corpse can be presented, it cannot be presented as a sign. The corpse is the "dirty thing," the denied, the unclean, the impure.
the abject is fulfilled in the act of writing . Kristeva's writing does indeed present the flickering linguistic boundaries of her research subject: humanized poetic language, ostensibly trying to penetrate beneath the thin mantle of "skin" (the conceptual style of academic research), to reach the interior of the body (the body of language) that vomits the Himself out. " Its formulations imply that the real districts in which anxiety about emptiness can, if at all, take shape are the districts of memory of literary language. There the language appears in the extreme, hallucinatory, frightening dimension: it is a rebellion against the tolerable possible, the imaginable, put there, quite close, though unappropriated.
The abject evokes desire and lust , but it leaves them unsatisfied. It is outside its definition as an object (of thinking or of fantasy). The abject is thus the opposite of the object (which can be grasped and thought), but it is also the opposite of the ob-jest. The ob-jest expresses another standing in front of me, engaged in a constant search for desire. Like an object, an abject has only one clear feature: it stands in front of the "I". The abject marks my desire for meaning ; The abject is in a place where meaning is humiliated, collapsed.
The super-ego, which represents the paternal desire for knowledge, is opposed to the abject. The abject expresses the "brutal suffering" in which the self becomes a mixture of the sublime and the lowly, a mixture that creates the perversion. The perversion, says Jacques Lacan, followed by Kristeva, is the place where the father is despised, a certain version that separates from his complete presence. The abject communicates the dark mass of the threatened (Uncanny), making the home a stranger arouses horror: his father's house makes the scene of a crime. The abject, Kristeva concludes, is neither presence nor pure negation ("Nothing"). It is "Something", which is on the verge of existence and hallucination. Once I recognize this borderline reality, I am crushed beneath it
