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→Purification
One has to admit that out of such logical oscillations there emerge a few striking words of truth. Such words present us with harsh X-rays of given ''areas ''of social and political experience; they turn into fantasies or deliriums only from the moment when reason attempts to ''globalize, unify, ''or ''totalize. ''Then the crushing anarchy or nihilism of discourse topples over and, as if it were the reverse of that nega tivism, an ''object ''appears—an object of hatred and desire, of threat and aggressivity, of envy and abomination. That object, the Jew, gives thought a focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied. [''P, ''pp. 177–78]
The limitation of Kristeva's theory of the abject resides in the fact that she conceives the symbolic order and abjection as the two extremes between which one has to negotiate a middle way. What she neglects to do is to inquire into ''what the symbolic order itself is in terms of the abject''. The symbolic order is not just always already embedded in the feminine ''hora ''(or what Kristeva in her earlier work referred to as the semiotic), pene trated by the materiality of its immanent libidinal rhythms that distort the purity of the symbolic articulations. If it is here, it had to emerge out of ''hora ''through a violent act of self-differentiation or splitting. Consequently, insofar as we accept Kristeva's term ''abjection ''for this self-differentiation, then we should distinguish between ''hora ''and abjection; abjection points towards the very movement of withdrawal from ''hora, ''which is constitutive of subjectivity. This is why we had to further specify Kristeva's diagnosis: every "unilateral call to return to what [the Judeo-Christian compound] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)" generates fascism (as in Céline's work) not because it regresses from the symbolic but because it obfuscates abjection itself, the primordial repression that gives rise to the symbolic. The dream of such attempts is not to suspend the symbolic but to have the (symbolic) cake and eat it—in other words'', '''to dwell in the '<nowiki/>'' '''symbolic without the price we have to pay for it '''''<nowiki/>'''(primordial repression, the subject's ontological derailment, antagonism, out-of-joint, the violent gap of differentiation from natural substance), the ancient dream of a masculine universe of meaning, which remains harmonically rooted in the maternal substance of ''hora''. In short, what fascism obfuscates (forecloses even) is not the symbolic as such but the gap that separates the symbolic from the real. This is why a figure like that of the Jew is needed; if the gap between the symbolic and the real is not constitutive of the symbolic, if a symbolic at home in the real is possible, then their antagonism has to be caused by a contingent external intruder—and what better candidate for this role than Judaism, with its violent monotheist assertion of the symbolic law and rejection of the earth-bound paganism?'''
''<nowiki/>'' The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate. This is also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: 'The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.' Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/abject, on the fear of which the rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, today in europe the refugee), not embody a refusal to choose? Choose what? A position in class struggle.(20)
This is how anti-Semitism relies on a paranoiac totalization of playing with abjection; the antiSemitic fetish figure of the Jew is the last thing a subject sees just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body.
From here follows another crucial consequence with regard to Kristeva's theoretical edifice: ''hora ''(the semiotic) is not more primordial than the symbolic but strictly a secondary phenomenon, the return of the presymbolic mimicry (echoes, resemblances, imitations) within the field of symbolic differentiality. Roman Jakobson drew attention to the fact that we can discern in our language traces of direct resemblance between signifier and signified (some words signifying vocal phenomena seem to sound like what they signify, sometimes even the external form of a word resembles the form of the signified object, like the word ''locomotive, ''which resembles the old-fashioned steam locomotive with the elevated cabin and chim ney). This, however, in no way undermines the priority and ontological primacy of the differential character of linguistic signifiers (the identity and meaning of a signifier depends on its difference from other signifiers, not on its resemblance to its signified). What we are dealing with in the case of phenomena like these are the secondary mimetic echoes within a field that is already, in its basic constitution, radically different (contin gentcontingent, composed of differential relations). And the same holds for ''hora, ''for the immanent rhythm of pre-symbolic materiality that pervades the symbolic: what happens first is the violent cut of abjection that gives birth to the symbolic, and what Kristeva describes as ''hora ''is a strictly secondary phenomenon of pre-symbolic mimetic echoes within the symbolic field.
=''Moor Eeffoc''=
