There
looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark
revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems
to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected
beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the
thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot
be assimilated.
—Kristeva, 1982, 1
I’ve read the first sentence of the quote
above so many times it has become my mantra. Even though
the words string together in magical ways, I am unsure
of their meaning. I am lost and beset in the abject, object,
subject, “dark revolts of being,” the horror, the violence,
and the edge of abjection (Kristeva, 1). What does Kristeva,
the French philosopher, mean by the abject or abjection?
My Oxford pocket dictionary tells me that abject means
hopeless, miserable, wretched, degraded and despicable—this
does not help. A ten minute Google search of ‘abject and
Kristeva’ reveals that, according to Dino Felluga and Katherine
Cooklin, Kristeva’s abject is the Other that both engenders
identity, and challenges the integrity of identity by confronting
it with its own unstable borders. But this is their interpretation.
What might mine be?
The reason I am embracing the headache
of trying to “get” Kristeva (1982), as if that were possible,
is on the advice of Claudia Ruitenberg, a professor of
Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia.
She informed me, in a reply to an assignment on ‘finding
Self,’ that my work/words connected with the French philosopher.
So here I am steeped in words that are a complete mystery
to me, struggling to piece together the meaning of the
title, let alone the content of the book! Why am I putting
myself through such frustration? Well, I love theory, and
I love the agonizing challenge of interpreting someone
else’s words/thoughts and finding myself or, in this case,
losing myself. Aha!
STOP. ARRÈT.
Maybe I’ve found MY way, byway in.
…Ω… >
“And
the more he strays, the more he finds himself.”(Kristeva, 8)
My elementary and high school experience
told me that I had to have an answer, but what I am coming
to trust is that if I embrace the unknown, the risky, the
uncomfortable, I can depart/arrive at a point where there
is no end, only possibilities. Maybe the answer is that
there is no answer: It is strange to realize that possibility
and yet liberating. If I let go of the idea of ‘getting’
anywhere in particular with her words, maybe I can come
to see that I am already there. There is nowhere to go.
I am sitting where I need to be, but I have just not realized
it yet. If I accept being lost, being where I am meant
to be, perhaps I can relax into Kristeva’s words and let
go of the terrible strain of striving to understand, to
arrive, to accomplish, to win. I can let go of the fear
of incompetence, of failure, of being recognized as what
I fear I am—an academic fraud.
Instead of the self-torment and fear of (mis)interpreting
Kristeva, the frustration of searching for an answer
to the mystery of her words, a space opens for me to
listen, to feel, to go beyond my limitations to a place
where I don’t know exactly if what I am doing/knowing/being
is right but I keep on doing/knowing/being, constantly
changing. That is how I will break barriers. This place
of not knowing, of being lost has as much to tell me
as that of the knowing.
Two sentences, that I quote below, jump
out at me for different reasons and move me in ways that
shakes up what I thought I previously knew.
“I expel myself, I spit myself out,
I abject myself within the same motion through which
“I” claim to establish myself.” (Kristeva, 3)
Nearing the end of my Master’s program,
I am feeling more unsure than when I began. As I moved
through the program, the theories—creating myself, my theories,
only to then reject myself, realizing a state of unknowing,
of uncomfortableness is where I am. A push and pull between
wanting to arrive and not arrive—knowing that I am always
becoming and that therefore the idea of ‘arriving’ is impossible.
My knowledge is always “partial and murky” (Loutzenheiser,
2006) and that I will always be in a state of not knowing,
yet striving still to become known.
At the same time that I accept myself,
Kristeva tells me I must also expel myself. Kristeva challenges
me to see the fear and suffering at the borders of my identity.
Her words invoke my body and force me to confront my fragile
state and the ghosts of self who stink. Kristeva urges
me to listen to those times when I am lost, to “forget
the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary
universe, set off from the one where “I” am—delight and
loss” (12).
“On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination,
of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.
There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers
of my culture.” (Kristeva, 2)
As a queer woman I am always on the edge
of nonexistence, that of the unreal, unacknowledged reality
of my life, my queer identity. Months ago on the (mis)advice
of my father…,
You
should go see a hypnotist. They helped me stop smoking.
But,
Dad, you still smoke?
Yeah,
but I quit for a while.
I finally agreed to try hypnotic therapy.
In our second session, as I lay vulnerable on her couch,
the hypnotist stated that I do not exist, that my identity
as a lover of multiple genders and sexualities is impossible,
that I was ‘sitting on the fence.’ I froze, becoming the
withdrawn little girl I thought I had left behind—abjection
became my safeguard. If I were to acknowledge that woman’s
words, then I annihilate myself—I kill everything I feel
inside.
My
love d
i
e
s…
The
passion that ROARS through my Scorpio body
Becomes
n
u
m
b
To
‘norm’alcy and ‘accept’ance.
I no
longer a
m.
But it is more than that, the very way
I read the world, the lens that gives me a path to myterpret
the surroundings is lost. So instead abjection becomes
my safeguard (Kristeva, 2). I expel her—her ignorant, evil
words, her words of death, of horror, so that “I” may exist.
This little girl is my abject, the being that continues
to exist on the border of self, disrupting my identity
(Kristeva, 4). In Kristeva I have found my abject—the little
girl of my past, my ghost, a reminder of a miserable, wretched
existence in silence. Today I continue to try and break
that silence.
Kristeva argues that the abject “is simply
a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become
alter ego, drops so that “I” does not disappear in it but
finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence”
(9). What if instead I welcome my abject self, and give
her space to be, what then are the possibilities for existence?
If Kristeva is right in that “the abject does not give
up” (15), then I must embrace my abject as part of my subject,
and “recognize [my] kin” and the “want on which any being,
meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva, 5).
This little girl is part of who I am today.
I cannot escape her. She was/is a different part of my
journey, but she was/is part of my subject and has helped
bring me into being. So as I lose myself in Kristeva’s
words, I (re)discover a part of myself and experience “jouissance”
(Kristeva, 9).
References:
Cooklin, K.(2006). Lustmord
in Weimar Germany: The Abject Boundaries of Feminine
Bodies and Representations of Sexualized Murder. In Essays
in Philosophy Journal. October
20, 2006. http://www.humboldt.edu/~essays/cooklin.html
Felluga, D. (2006). Modules on Kristeva:
On the Abject. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.
October, 20, 2006. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.html.
Loutzenheiser, L. (2006). Working alterity:
The impossibility of ethical research with youth. To be
published in: Educational
Studies, 39:4.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror:
An essay on abjection.
New York: Columbia University Press.
