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→Purification
=Purification=
Until now, we were dealing with the main modes of avoiding the abject. There are, however, two privileged ways of traversing abjection, of going through it and purifying ourselves of it: religion and art (poetic catharsis): "The various means of ''purifying ''the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion" (''P,'' p. 17). The whole of modern literature and art—from Antonin Artaud to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from Wassily Kandinsky to Mark Rothko—confronts and tries to sublimate the abject; following Rainer Maria Rilke's famous formula "beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror," it weaves a screen that renders the abject not only tolerable but even pleasurable:(19)
On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject. [''P, ''p. 207]
In a detailed analysis, Kristeva presents the work of Céline as a long and tortuous confrontation with the abjectal dimension; this t'''his is what ''JourJour'''''<nowiki/>'''''ney to the End of the Night '''''<nowiki/>'''alludes to; the night is the night of the abject that suspends not only reason but the universe of meaning as such, not only at the level of content (describing the extreme states of dissolution) but also at the level of form (fragmented syntax) and others, as if some prelinguistic pre-linguistic rhythm—"the 'entirely other' of signifiance"—is invading and undermining language:'''
''<nowiki/>'' It is as if Céline's scription could only be justified to the extent that it confronted the "entirely other" of signifiance; as if it could only be by having this "entirely other" exist as such, in order to draw back from it but also in order to go to it as to a fountainhead; as if it could be born only through such a confrontation recalling the religions of ''defile'<nowiki/>'''mentdefilement, abomination, '''''<nowiki/>'''and ''sin''. [''P,'' p. 149] ''<nowiki/>''
Céline carefully walks on the edge of this vortex of ecstatic negativity like the hero of edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelström" (1841), flirting with it but avoiding complete immersion into it, which would mean a descent into madness. Here, of course, Kristeva confronts the big problem. One would have expected that such a confrontation with the abject and its libidinal vortex, allowing it to penetrate our universe of meaning, would have a liberating effect, allowing us to break out of the constraints of symbolic rules and to recharge ourselves with a more primordial libidinal energy; however, as is well-known, Céline turned into a fully pledged fascist, supporting Nazis to their very defeat. So what went wrong? At a general level, Kristeva's reply is to avoid both extremes; not only is the total exclusion of the abject mortifying, cutting us off from the source of our vitality (when the abject is excluded, "the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless an empty castle" [''P,'' p. 49]), but the opposite also holds. every attempt to escape the patriarchal/rational symbolic order and enact a return to the pre-patriarchal feminine rhythm of drives necessarily ends up in anti-Semitic fascism: "Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Célinian anti Semitic fantasy?" (''P,'' p. 180).
