Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Julia Kristeva and the Abject

I should note that due to time constraints, I will be focussing only on the first chapter from the assigned readings – Approaching Abjection. As I read the excerpts from Julia Kristeva’s 1980 book Power of Horror, I came to wonder about the manner in which the abject is constructed by daily practise. After all, many of the specific items which cause Kristeva herself to turn away in revulsion are abject in relation to her, and not to another. In this context I am thinking of the corpse, to which I shall return throughout this presentation. And from the corpse, I am led to wonder about my own interest in violence and horror as operations within cinema. Fundamentally, why am I drawn to that which I reject from my daily life to the best of my conscious efforts. If the sight of something repulses me, why am I drawn to aesthetic events which ritualise and habitualise exposure?

         But first we need to examine definition, before any degree of application can be attempted. The abject is that which is rejected as an impurity. Often, it manifests in terms of the marks of death lacking mediation – an open wound, bodily excretions, corpses without rituals of passage (funerary rites). The abject is that which is cast off and away from the subject as a corrupting influence.

          And yet Kristeva does not hesitate in positioning the abject as fundamental to subject-identity formation, stating on the first page that “the abject has only one quality of the object ... that of being opposed to ‘I’”. The fact that I is in question marks is important, as Kristeva is later to link the self-consciousness subject – the I which reflects upon itself – through the Freudian unconscious to the transcendence of Platonic rationalism. The abject is the projection of negation itself into the void of transcendence. Accordingly, it draws the subject “to a place where meaning collapses” (2). Interestingly enough, Kristeva begins her argument with food, as she describes her aversion to milk cream which she vomits up, and in so doing “abjects herself with the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself” (3). Aversion to corruption in food reflects a survival impulse: an organism turns away from food which could kill through contamination, putrefaction, or poison. The taboo of cannibalism was perhaps the first socially constructed abjection, as the flesh of humans was made sacred relative to a civilisation’s supply of food.

         For Kristeva, food exemplifies the principle of abjection as a symbol and domestification of death and a removal of violence from the fabric of the common. Unlike the prepared steak which the better entices the closer it is to being untouched, raw with a trace of cooking, flesh from the human body is repulsive when unmediated. The butcher or supermarket which handles and prepares animal flesh for human consumption, the coffin which circumscribes and contains what would otherwise be the power of the corpse for abjection, the representation and archiving of violence in cultural artefacts, dead humans televised within the context of war or accident – these symbols of death allow a logic for understanding and acceptance. However when presented naked, the abject signals a return to the space of death by reminding the subject of their corporeality. From page four, “the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection”. The corpse grounds the subject within loss: I am a living body/subject precisely in opposition to the death with causes the flesh before me to appear inhuman.

          Identity is grounded in loss. From page five, “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded”. Because of this sense of loss within the object, abjection is the only signified for the subject, who views itself as already under forfeiture. And yet for Kristeva, the abject is more violent than Freud’s conception of the uncanny, for it sits alone lacking memory of the words (law) of the father, which are in other words the generative aspects of the subject which also silence it. The abject demonstrates that there is an aspect of subjectivity distinct from the traditional conception of the unconscious mind, in which the subject is created and sustained by desire. From page eight, “the one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing”. Here we note a sympathy with the Kristeva of Strangers to Ourselves, as she traces the subject who as a foreigner, in exile, is immersed in the geography and time of bodily experience.

         As jettisoned and judged from the position of the Other, the subject is only able to access alterity through “a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant” (9). Abjection thus recognizes the danger which alterity poses to the subject, but it does so within the law (in terms of both obedience and transgression). As she states on the following page, Kristeva positions identity within a replacement of the self by the foreign: “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me’”(10). Abjection is thus a limnal space and manifests as an intrinsically corporeal presence. Kristeva emphasizes that this geography circumscribes the limits of human experience. Significance in this context is not contingent with the Freudian unconsciousness, but rather by the degree to which noise is added to a system. “the abject is that pseudo-object that is made up before but appears only within the gaps of secondary repression” (12) It is here that the self-reflexive or narcissistic subject creates meaning through aversion of animal nature (the primitive or repressed self). Kristeva states on page 14 that the abject is “a kind of narcissistic crisis” which negotiates an archaic economy of libidinal desire.

         This crisis is caused either by “Too much strictness on the part of the Other (a process which involves Law and transgression), and “a lapse of the Other”, in which the objects of desire decompose. In both cases, corruption is the most common and obvious appearance of the abject: “that is the socialised appearance of the abject”, as Kristeva writes on page 16. The power for signification elicited by the abject involves its transgressive nature, for in a sense the abject uses the Law (the name of the father) to undermine and satirise its power over the subject. At this point, Kristeva concludes this first chapter of her book and her definition of the abject by enshrining the latter within “art as a secular religion”. Along with religious and legal institutions, art seeks to purify the abject (and by extension the thinking subject – he or she who engages with desire and language) and thus render it consumable. Ultimately, the abject liberates the subject into consciousness. “In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task ... amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless primacy constituted by primal repression” (18).

         When Kristeva states on the same page that “it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order”, I came to wonder whether we can view the abject not simply in terms of material object-hood. For the corpse to provoke feelings of revulsion in every human subject, it must contain within it some quality which “interferes with what is supposed to save [the subject] from death: childhood and science among other things” (4). And yet that which has been rendered abject can return to simple objecthood by means of a process which places the abject within a ritualised context. For a person walking down the street, a dead body is a horror. For a coroner, it is a day’s work. For the economically marginalised, a corpse might be an opportunity for financial gain; this latter context is contained within Kristeva’s formulation of the abject: both the corpse and the graverobber are repulsive figures.

         It is here that I wish to interrogate my own love of the body as a site for transgression in film: violence, horror, the ritual of the cinematic corpse. While it is easy to film actual violence and gain some degree of pleasure from it – witness the popularity of what some have termed “gore porn” on the internet – I myself am far more interested in marks of the abject which have been made aesthetic. The work of Passolini and Michael Haneke comes together at the point at which violence becomes pleasurable, and that moment is the moment at which the body as abject is made visible. In Haneke’s Funny Games, the pleasure of seeing the transgressive is elided as the moments of bodily manipulation (violence) are left offscreen in every instance (except a crucial one involving the viewer’s desire for vengeance to be exacted upon the characters who perpetrate the crimes onscreen). The glossing of violence is a key aesthetic decision, and can be seen as commentary on the 21st-century viewing subject, who thanks to the entry of consumer video has seen and normalised almost everything. Passolini’s 1975 film Salo is more explicit in rendering the abject onscreen, as human flesh is violently manipulated and objectified for the pleasure of the viewing subjects both within and exterior to the film. The fact that the libertines who torture the innocent in Salo engage with their subjects at the moment of their death by technological mediation – first through the  social hierarchy of fascism, and then by means of binoculars and spyglasses. In both films, the process by which the victims of the perpetrators become sources of pleasure for the viewer is one in which the abject is made rational.