Dictionary Definition
abject adj
1 of the most contemptible kind; "abject
cowardice"; "a low stunt to pull"; "a low-down sneak"; "his
miserable treatment of his family"; "You miserable skunk!"; "a
scummy rabble"; "a scurvy trick" [syn: low, low-down, miserable, scummy, scurvy]
2 most unfortunate or miserable; "the most abject
slaves joined in the revolt"; "abject poverty"
4 showing humiliation or submissiveness; "an
abject apology"
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Pronunciation 1
- , /ˈæbdʒɛkt/, /"
Extensive Definition
The term Abjection literally
means "the state of being cast off." The concept of abject exists
in between the concept of an object
and the concept of the subject,
something alive yet not. In contemporary critical
theory, it is often used to describe the state of
often-marginalized groups, such as people of
color, prostitutes, homosexuals, convicts, poor people and handicapped persons. This
term originated in the works of Julia
Kristeva. Often, the term space of abjection is also used,
referring to a space that abjected things or beings
inhabit.
Following Kristeva's
formulation of abjection in Powers of Horror - An Essay on
Abjection, abjection can be seen as letting go of something we
would still like to keep. In the case of blood, semen, hair and excrement/urine, we recognize these as once
being a part of ourselves, thus these forms of the abject are taken
out of our system while bits of them remain in our selves. When one
encounters blood, excrement, etc. outside of the body, one is
forced to confront what was once a part of oneself, but no longer
is. Dismemberment compels the same kind of heightened reaction when
one confronts the horror of detachment. A dismembered finger or
limb is identified as belonging to one's own body and is 'missed'
while at the same time repulsive to the viewer for no longer being
a part of the whole. Because humans frequently shed skin and blood
etc. there is a higher tolerance to it and we are not as horrified
as we would be in the case of dismemberment, yet most are not
willing to engage with excrement or blood due to its detached
nature. In a way, we exist in abjection: the process of creating
our self (identity) is never-ending. The act of "selfing"
("identifying") ourselves is the only common feature of all
people.
According to Kristeva, since
the abject is situated outside the symbolic
order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic
experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person
would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face
an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having
once been a subject. We encounter other beings daily, and more
often than not they are alive. To confront a corpse of one that we
recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to
confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same
state, our own mortality. This repulsion from death, excrement and
rot constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic
order.
This act is done in the light
of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: un-namely – the mother.
We must abject the maternal, the object which has created us, in
order to construct an identity. This is done on the micro level of
the speaking being, through her subjective dynamics, as well as on
the macro level of society, through "language as a common and
universal law." We use rituals, specifically those of defilement,
in order to maintain clear boundaries between nature and society,
the semiotic and the symbolic. This line of thought begins with
Mary
Douglas' important book, Purity
and Danger, as well as in Kristeva's own
Black Sun.
The concept of abject is often
coupled (and sometimes confused with) the idea of the
uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like", or
foreign, yet familiar. The abject can be uncanny in the sense that
we can recognize aspects in it, despite its being "foreign". An
example, continuing on the one used above, is that of a corpse,
namely the corpse of a loved one. We will recognize that person as
being close to us, but the fact that the person is dead, and "no
longer" the familiar loved one, is what creates a sort of cognitive
dissonance, leading to abjection of the corpse.
The Post-Kristevan Meta-Order of Abjection
In Kristeva’s works, abjection
explains how beings in the cultural symbolic order would be
repulsed, traumatised upon facing an abject entity. In addition to
this system, it has been suggested that abject entities do not just
float outside of the symbolic order but form their own sub-order,
that co-exist alongside the symbolic order, creating a greater
meta-order. In an ideal illustration, a large galaxy would
represent the social cosmos and would contain one central swirling
mass (a microcosm of cultural order), an empty or grayed space
(representative of the abject's distance from social acceptance)
and many, smaller, somewhat-attached masses, the pseudo-order of
the many instances of the abject which are often only related by
their shared location within abject space. All of these revolve
around and are influenced by the force of the gravity (the force of
the human condition) which originates from the central-most point
(the phenomena created by human necessity and nature).
Representation of the
post-Kristeva order of abjection (above)
The abject in fiction
According to Barbara
Creed in
Horror and the Monstrous Feminine a male's relationship with
the mother and other females is complicated by the use of the
feminine in horror and
science
fiction as we are forced to confront it as horrific and abject.
Through an analysis of the film Alien (1979)
and the female roles and representations, Creed explains how
females are often related to the object of horror, be they as the
object of horror or the object of the actual horrors'
desire/hatred. The conclusion is that through monstrous
representations of the female or the Mother, the audience is drawn
into viewing them as abject rather than subject or object. The
aliens themselves from the film in question are often described as
having phallus-like
appendages in the shape of their head and tongue, while maintaining
an almost female form. Their interaction with the human crew takes
on very abject roles as one crew member, a male, is forcibly
impregnated (clearly as a product of rape) with an alien that
eventually rips itself from the male 'womb' in a horrific scene of
blood and gore. The process of a male being impregnated through the
mouth with a creature that gestates -- in a being that has no womb
-- and rips itself free in a shower of blood is one way in which
this film abjectifies female roles.
Abjection is also a major
theme of the 1949 work The
Thief's Journal (Journal du Voleur) by French author Jean Genet. As
a criminal outcast from society, during a fictionalised account of
his wanderings through Europe in the 1930s, he claims to actively
seek abjections as an existentialist form of
'sainthood.'
External links
- Julia Kristeva, "Approaching Abjection". This is an extensive excerpt of (most )chapter one of Kristeva's, "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection".
- Modules on Kristeva II: on the abject
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
abominable, accepting, acquiescent, agreeable, apologetic, arrant, assenting, atrocious, backscratching, base, beggarly, bootlicking, cheesy, complaisant, compliable, compliant, complying, consenting, contemptible, contrite, cowering, crawling, cringing, crouching, crummy, debased, degraded, depraved, despicable, dirty, disgusting, execrable, fawning, flagrant, flattering, footlicking, foul, fulsome, grave, gross, groveling, hangdog, heinous, humble, humble-minded,
humble-spirited, humbled, humblehearted, ingratiating, little, low, low-down, lumpen, mangy, mealymouthed, mean, measly, meek, meek-minded, meek-spirited,
meekhearted,
melted, miserable, monstrous, nefarious, nondissenting, nonresistant, nonresisting, nonresistive, obedient, obeisant, obnoxious, obsequious, odious, on bended knee, paltry, parasitic, passive, penitent, penitential, penitentiary, petty, poky, poor, poor in spirit, prostrate, rank, repentant, reptilian, resigned, scabby, scrubby, scruffy, scummy, scurvy, servile, shabby, sheepish, shoddy, small, sniveling, softened, sponging, squalid, submissive, subservient, supine, sycophantic, timeserving, toadeating, toadying, toadyish, touched, truckling, unassertive, uncomplaining, underfoot, unmentionable, unresistant, unresisting, vile, wretched