26
edits
Changes
m
→Abject
=Abject=
For the borderline to be a mode of hysteria, the line that separates in side from outside is still maintained, but what happens when this line itself vacillates? Recall our unease when we stumble upon a decaying human corpse or, in a more ordinary case, upon an open wound, shit, vomit, brutally tornout nails or eyes, or the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk. What we experience in such situations is not just a disgusting object but something much more radical: the disintegration of the very ontological coordinates that enable me to locate an object into external reality ''out there''. The phenomenological description of such experiences is Kristeva's starting point in her elaboration of the notion of ''abject: ''the reaction of horror, disgust, withdrawal, and ambiguous fascination triggered by objects or occurrences that undermine the clear distinction between subject and object, between ''myself ''and reality ''out there''.(14 ) The abject is definitely external to the subject, but it is also more radically external to the very space within which the subject can distinguish itself from reality ''out there''. Maybe we can apply here Lacan's neologism "extimate": (15) the abject is so thoroughly internal to the subject that this very overintimacy makes it external, uncanny, inadmissible. For this reason, the status of the abject with regard to the pleasure principle is profoundly ambiguous. It is repulsive, provoking horror and disgust, but at the same time it exerts an irresistible fascination and attracts our gaze to its very horror: "One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims— if not its submissive and willing ones" (''P,'' p. 9). Such a mixture of horror and pleasure points towards a domain beyond the pleasure principle, the domain of ''jouissance: ''"One does not know it, one does not desire it, one enjoys in it ''[on en jouit]. ''Violently and painfully. A passion" (''P,'' p. 9).
Is then the abject close to what Lacan calls ''objet petit a, ''the indivisible remainder of the process of symbolic representation that functions as the always already lost object cause of desire? ''Objet petit a ''as the object cause of desire is, in its very excessive nature, an immanent part of the symbolic process, the spectral/eluding embodiment of lack that motivates desire sustained by the (symbolic) law. In contrast to ''objet a, ''which functions within the order of meaning as its constitutive blind spot or stain, the abject "is radically excluded [from the space of symbolic community] and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses" (''P,'' p. 2): "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (''P,'' p. 10). The experience of abjection thus comes before the big distinctions between culture and nature, inside and outside, consciousness and the unconscious, repression and the repressed, and others; abjection does not stand for the immersion into nature, the primordial mother, but for the very violent process of differentiation. It is the vanishing mediator between nature and culture, a culture in becoming, which disappears from view once the subject dwells within culture. The abject is "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules," but not in the sense of the flow of nature undermining all cultural distinctions (''P,'' p. 4); it renders palpable the "fragility of the law," including of the laws of nature, which is why when a culture endeavors to stabilize itself it does so by way of referring to the laws (regular rhythms) of nature (day and night, regular movement of stars and sun, and others) (''P,'' p. 4). The encounter of the abject arouses fear, not so much fear of a particular actual object (snakes, spiders, height), but a much more basic fear of the breakdown of what separates us from external reality; what we fear in an open wound or a dead body is not its ugliness but the blurring of the line between inside and outside.
