26
edits
Changes
→Abject
The underlying conceptual matrix of the notion of the abject is that of a dangerous ground. The abject points towards a domain that is the source of our life-intensity; we draw our energy out of it, but we have to keep it at the right distance. If we exclude it, we lose our vitality, but if we get too close to it, we are swallowed by the self-destructive vortex of madness; this is why abjection does not step out of the symbolic but plays with it from within: "The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them" (''P,'' p. 15).
This abjectal excess can also appear in the guise of an indivisible remainder of the Real which resists the process of idealization/symbolization; in this sense, Kristeva mentions the pagan opponents of Western monotheism who praise the notion of remainder as that which prevents the teleological closure of creation, keeping the movement forever open: "the poet of the ''Atharva Veda ''extols the defiling and regenerating remainder ''(uchista) ''as precondition for all form. 'Upon remainder the name and the form are founded, upon remainder the world is founded Being and non-being, both are in the remainder, death, vigor' "(''P,'' p. 77). (16) The remainder here is the support of the cyclic notion of the universe; it enables the rebirth of the universe. (We find the last traces of this logic even in Kabbalah where the evil in our universe is accounted for as the remainder of the previous universes created and then annihilated by God because he was dissatisfied with the result of his creation; remainder thus grounds repeated creation.) Hegel and Christian monotheism are here easy targets; they allegedly tend to abolish the remainder in a complete sublation of the evil in the good, in a fulfilled teleology that redeems all previous lower stages. (17)
=Disavowal=
