Preparations: about the abject

Existing as nonexistence

Abject bodies do not have claim to ontology.

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. (Kristeva[1] , 1)

Foreclosing the thinkability of the abject, of the unintelligible: possibilities become impossible; existence becomes nonexistent – or simply irrelevant. Normality, then, is rendered an impenetrable mold for the human. Any deviations from that mold simply do not – are not permitted/recognized to – exist as human. The abject body is a tangible, yet unintelligible vessel.

Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. 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. (2)

as a corpse:

The kitschification of the abject: burial and pretty funereal traditions. The abject as death infecting life (4) … a pestilence to the living which is buried, underground, out of sight (abject (in)visibilities): in a kitschified coffin, the abject body (corpse, death, threat of death) cannot infect living bodies. The corpse, pumped with chemicals, dressed and re-personified to be buried in beautiful boxes, is made-up to deny abjection. The abject is death infecting life.

Consider the Body in terms of the aforementioned business of death and death itself, as visualized in the photographs of Sally Mann[2] in the series titled “What Remains.” Here Mann displays the corpse in all its abject reality: a body, which lies upon the earth – and is wholly subject to it. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Mann speculates that death is the “final taboo” – it used to be sex, she says, now it’s death.

(‘Heightening the display of lawful fragility – ambiguity – troubling – queering’: this is written in the margins, in my own handwriting, on page 4 of my text alongside the above discussion of death and the corpse – I have no idea what this means.)

The phobic subject causes fear: defining for the self what is fearful, and what is safe. The abject is unlivable, death – but most frightening, nonexistence:

[…] fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists […] The phobic has no other object than the abject. But what word, “fear” – a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess – no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. (6)

Regulation

The failure to conform to that which is idealized, Normalized, the model/archetypical mold of the Human – it does not exist: we are always already straying from the standard for being – entering into the unlivable zones of the Abject, indicating our borders, or existence and nonexistence. (Intolerable significance v. desire.)

(the heterosexual/normative matrix of intelligibility)

Here, on the contrary, consciousness has not assumed its rights and transformed into signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet unstable territories where an “I” that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying. (11)

The abject is the “hallucination of nothing” (42). Nothing: a no-thing as a (nonexistent, unintelligible) thing?

The abject is “the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality” (Undoing Gender[3] , 30), regulating the boundaries of normality by providing a reference of unacceptable, deviant filth constituting and necessitating societal expulsion. The norm relies on the abject in order to recognize itself: the norm is recognized and made legible only through the recognition of the illegible, abject. Life itself becomes foreclosed by regulations, and presumed certainties.

To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find you to be an impossibility) is to find that you have not yet achieved access to the human, to find yourself speaking only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not, to find that your language is hollow, that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in your favor. (30)

Autonomy comes with its own set of norms that are socially constructed. There are, then, “acceptable” and “devious” ways to be/act as an autonomous subject – one can only be autonomous as far as socialized norms allow. (abject autonomy)

Excretion

(Locating the abject – there should probably be some “excremental passages” along the borders)

The abject is the secretions of the body: mucus, tears, sweat, oil, shit, piss, earwax, odor, semen, saliva, vaginal discharge, puss, and blood – it’s the dead skin cells that fall off our heads as dandruff, the oil in our hair, our clammy skin – our panicked anxiety, our fevers, our fears, our hate, our love, our disgust, our nausea and the vomit our nausea produces. The abject is daily emitted from our pores: this refuse defines what is hygienic the same way the abject defines what is normal.

The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. (Gender Trouble[4] , 182)

The origin of abjection: the body’s synecdochal signification – the abject is established or produced precisely through this expulsion.

Abjection is a discursive process: an embodied discourse. (“… discourses do actually live in bodies. They lodge in bodies; bodies in fact carry discourses as part of their own lifeblood.”[5] )

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[1]Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection” from Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection

[2]See this interview with Sally Mann

[3]Judith Butler, “Beside Oneself” from Undoing Gender

[4]Judith Butler, “Subversive Bodily Acts” from Gender Trouble

[5]Judith Butler, in an interview conducted by Irene Costera Meijer and Beukje Prins: “How Bodies Come to Matter” from Signs, 1998, vol. 23, no. 2