Rina Arya (Auth.) - Abjection and Representation - An Exploration of Abjection in The Visual Arts, Film and Literature-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2014)

Abjection and Representation
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Abjection and
Representation
An Exploration of Abjection in
the Visual Arts, Film and Literature
Rina Arya
University of Wolverhampton, UK
© Rina Arya 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-38933-5
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First published 2014 by
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For my dad, Dr Laxman Arya
Suzi Williams
Maya and Anoushka
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Unpacking Abjection 16
2 A Cultural History of Abjection 40
3 Recovering the Sacred: The Abject Body 63
4 Abjection in the Visual Arts 82
5 The Formless 118
6 Abjection and Film 130
7 Abjection in Literature 156
Concluding Remarks 189
Notes 197
Bibliography 210
Index 222
vii
Preface and Acknowledgements
My motivation for writing this book came from teaching criti-

cal theory to art students in a number of universities. Over the
years it became apparent to me that many students were engaged
with certain issues that could be characterized in terms of abjec-
tion. Embodiment, the diseased or broken body, and the provisional
nature of subjectivity were recurring themes. Some of these stu-
dents drew on notions of the body and the bodily to make broadly
metaphysical claims, while others were more interested in depict-
ing and incorporating bodily substances in their artwork. In their
practice they were very explicit about their modus operandi but
this did not translate into the critical exposition of their ideas.
When it came to theorizing about their practice in discussions and
essays, they were unable to talk about their ideas without laps-
ing into a litany of affects and sensations that they claimed were
invoked in their artwork. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay
on Abjection (1980; 1982) was frequently recommended to help stu-
dents formulate or anchor their ideas, and it is still regarded as the
definitive theory on abjection. Featuring on many course booklists,
it is invariably the first reference point for any study on abjec-
tion, irrespective of discipline. Being unfamiliar with the discourse
of psychoanalysis, which is a prerequisite for following Kristeva’s
study, many students floundered and were unable to understand
the theoretical import of abjection and its applications, which led
to different outcomes. In a number of cases students disengaged
with the text. There was also a tendency to use the term ‘abject’
loosely in an adjectival sense to refer to cognate emotions like dis-
gust, or carelessly to associate abjection with anything that was
visceral and of the body. As Nicholas Chare perspicaciously puts
it: ‘The abject is too rapidly and simply equated with piss, shit,
vomit, viscera and corpses’ (Chare, 2011, p. 5). The danger of
this conflation is that the theoretical ramifications of the term are
distorted (not to mention reduced) as abjection starts to be erro-
neously identified with the ‘objects’ that conjure up a sense of
viii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
it or its effects. This runs the risk of ‘abjection’ being conceived

as a shorthand or catch-all term for anything pertaining to the
sensational and gory.
It was the perpetual misuse of the term, or its oversimplification –
as an aversive emotion that makes us retch – as well as the perplex-
ity that students faced when trying to bridge the gap between their
practice and theory, that prompted me to address the concept of
abjection squarely in my own writing on the subject. Powers of Hor-
ror is not greatly accessible, even for those conversant with its fields
of discussion. Within Kristeva’s corpus, however, it should be noted
that it is discernibly different in approach when compared with her
previous work. John Lechte comments how it ‘introduces a marked
“lightening” of style with a more liberal use of the first person and
the more frequent inclusion of personal experience as illustrative of
points being made’ (Lechte, 1990a, p. 6; see also Roudiez, 1982, pp.
vii–viii). That being said, the shift from one historical context to
another without smooth alignment can make it difficult to assim-
ilate the ideas being presented. Furthermore, her poetic style can
be elliptical and, at times, convoluted. However, it is still a tour de
force in post-structuralist thought, and remains pertinent to wide-
ranging scholarship. Within the art world the concept of abjection
became popular in art and art criticism in the early 1990s and has
remained central to art practice, especially given its persisting interest
in the body and trauma. Hal Foster attributes the interest in abjec-
tion in the 1990s to a reaction against consumerism at large and,
in particular, ‘that consumerist version of the constructed subject’
that was simply comprised of ‘so many combinations of signs and
commodities’ (Foster et al., 2011, p. 780). The language of trauma
was a means of reclaiming the body and of reminding people of
the importance of addressing the blood-and-guts core of human-
ity. In the contemporary digital age of post-humanism, where the
machine has supplanted the body in many guises, a return to the
body is still urgent and explains the ongoing interest in the abject
in art.
This book provides a means of access to the study of abjection in
different fields. I will unpack abjection as a concept so as to establish
its pervasiveness in culture, especially in relation to the visual arts,
film and literature. What we soon realize is that the phenomenon of
x Preface and Acknowledgements
abjection precedes its conceptualization; we understand what abjec-

tion feels like – both physiologically and psychologically – but, in
order to have a complete understanding, we need to understand the
theory and not just the phenomenon. A large part of the exploration
in the book is concerned with how abjection has affected society
and culture, and continues to do so in different spheres of existence.
We can use abjection as an explanation and rationalization for laws
and codes that underpin social, legal and cultural orders. Abjection
is at the heart of social and cultural regulations, determines much
of what is permissible or not, and affects us on a social and indi-
vidual level. In many cases, especially when related to the body,
we see that we have already internalized many of the ‘don’ts’ gov-
erning conventions. To account for the sway that abjection holds
involves stepping back and thinking about the reason for its pro-
hibition. After explicating the concept of abjection in its Kristevan
psychoanalytical context, I consider its application in different aca-
demic disciplines in order to look at its currency and perpetual
appeal in the arts and culture (where this is meant in an inclusive
sense, comprehending artworks, films and works of literature). The
applied interpretation of abjection reflects the contemporary inter-
est in abjection in different cultural domains. What started out as a
study to explain the meaning and significance of abjection for visual
arts students has broadened in the writing of this book to provide a
primer for students and academics from the arts and humanities who
are interested in the phenomenon of abjection and its application in
culture.
At various stages and in different ways, many people have helped
me enormously in the process of writing this book, from the read-
ing of draft material to providing ongoing helpful comments. These
include Julie Armstrong, Arthur Bradley, Jeremy Biles, Chris Daly,
David Jasper, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Theresa Sowerby and Calvin
Thomas. The support, in the many forms it took, provided by Minh
Ha Duong, Angela Swan, Lester Meachem, Kunu Gordon, Bob Whit-
more and Sandra Cherry is also deeply appreciated. While working
on this book I have also been engaged in two other related projects
on the theme on abjection – a guest issue for Performance Research
entitled ‘On Abjection’ published in May 2014, and Abject Visions:
Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture, which is forthcoming
with Manchester University Press in 2015. I would like to thank
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
my collaborator and friend on both projects, Nick Chare, for his

continued support including his comments on parts of Chapter 4.
Finally, I would also like to thank the following people who helped
in the development and production of the book: Felicity Plester,
Chris Penfold, Francis Arumugam, Teresa Reynolds, Angela Airey and
Amanda Kay. The cover image of the book was provided by the artist
Roberta Graham and I thank her for her permission to use the image,
her fantastic artwork and interesting conversations about our shared
love of Georges Bataille. Thanks also to Steve Allison for transforming
the image into the wonderful front cover.
This book is dedicated to my dad, Dr Laxman Arya, who remains
the inspiration and guiding light for everything I do, the memory of
my dear friend Suzi Williams, and to my delightful nieces Maya and
Anoushka.
Frontispiece
We are beasts burdened with self-consciousness

Introduction
Kiki Smith’s Pee Body (1992) is a life-sized wax body of a woman

crouching down. The figure, with head down, rests her arms over
her knees. From behind her runs a multitude of yellow trails of beads
that bend and curve round each other, forming a pool. We look at
the woman but are unable to see her face, which is turned away from
us. Is she ashamed at having committed a private and degrading act
in public? Perhaps there is no shame involved, and she is simply at
rest after emptying her full bladder. Her generic body shape, lack of
personalizing features and hidden face minimize her individuality
and she cannot be identified. Any embarrassment that she may feel
is hidden. Or maybe she represents an everyman figure that reflects
our mortal predicament of being trapped in a body of flesh. If this
is so, then her act of degradation becomes a shared act and she is
representative of humanity.
In spite of the naturalness of the activity that is symbolized, the
artwork still causes feelings that vary on a spectrum, from uneasiness
to repulsion. The glistening beads and the dynamism of their pre-
sentation are enticing and add to the ambivalence of our realization
that we are looking at bodily waste. What augments the degree of
disgust we feel is that we are seeing the process of elimination in the
act of leaving the body’s margins, which heightens the viscerality of
the fluid and our feeling of disgust. The subject of the artwork trans-
gresses our moral sensibilities, which are programmed to stave off our
corporeal turmoil and maintain boundaries between public and pri-
vate acts. Being party to such a sight then causes offence because we
do not want to witness something that should be happening behind
1
2 Abjection and Representation
closed doors and, in particular, when it occurs in such an unsavoury

fashion as in the figure squatting on the floor.
Pee Body, like so many of Kiki Smith’s works, evokes a sense of
abjection because of what it represents and how it makes us as view-
ers feel. From a phenomenological perspective we can describe how
the work makes us feel and explain why we are impelled to move
away, but then to look back, setting up a cycle of repulsion and attrac-
tion, fear and intrigue. There are many artworks that can cause such
sensations and can be described thus. Although the phenomenolog-
ical response is the most immediate one when we are confronted by
something that causes abjection, it is inadequate to think of abjec-
tion only in terms of the reactions it elicits. It is important to look
behind the scaffolding of an example to think abstractly about the
concept in question, for it is also an indicator of knowledge about
human behaviour and explains why we react the way we do to our
environment and what forms the basis of social and moral think-
ing. What are the roots of these feelings? And how can we account
for them?
What is abjection?
Abjection is a complex theoretical concept and a pervasive cultural

code. The most pre-eminent formulation of abjection is by the Paris-
based Bulgarian theorist Julia Kristeva who argues in Powers of Horror:
An Essay on Abjection (1982)1 that abjection is a vital and determina-
tive process in the formation of the subject. On a psychic level (in the
sense of psychoanalysis), the experience of abjection both endan-
gers and protects the individual: endangers in that it threatens the
boundaries of the self and also reminds us of our animal origins, and
protects us because we are able to expel the abject through various
means. For Kristeva, abjection originates as a psychic process but it
affects all aspects of social and cultural life. Systems, laws and taboos
work to safeguard societies and communities. Although Kristeva’s
study is recognized as the first point of departure, she was not the
first to theorize about the term. The cultural theorist Georges Bataille
had written about abjection in the 1930s in a number of unpublished
papers, and although Bataille’s philosophy was an obvious precursor
to Kristeva’s notion, ‘it is Kristeva’s use of the term, not Bataille’s,
that has been influential in the recent theorization of this concept
Introduction 3
in relation to contemporary artistic practice’ (Krauss, 1996, p. 91).

This assessment by Rosalind Krauss, which has been echoed by oth-
ers, can be extended beyond art practice since even in other fields,
such as film and literature, Kristeva’s theory of abjection is the main
reference point.
Prior to Bataille’s analysis, the terms ‘abject’ and ‘abjection’ existed
in various languages but had not been used in scholarship. ‘Abjec-
tion’ comes from the Latin abicere, which means ‘to throw away’ or
‘to cast off, away, or out’. In English the term ‘abject’ is listed as an
adjective which has two similar meanings: (1) Extremely unpleasant
and degrading: living in abject poverty. (2) Completely without pride
or dignity: an abject apology (OED, p. 3).2
From the above definitions we see that the terms ‘abject’ and
‘abjection’ can be used in different but related senses to refer to an
operation (to make abject) and a condition (abjection). In the first
sense, ‘abjection’ refers to an impulse or operation to reject that
which disturbs or threatens the stability of the self and is unassim-
ilable. Its first, in the sense of original, manifestation is presented
in the form of the rejection of the mother’s body, a point that is
examined in Chapter 1. Secondly, it refers to the ‘wretched condi-
tion’ (Hopkins, 2000, p. 225) of being in this state, when one has
experienced the abject, or has been rendered abject. Hal Foster iden-
tifies a difference between these two distinct senses – to abject and to
be abject – which he defines in terms of a contradiction:
For her [Kristeva] the operation to abject is fundamental to the

maintenance of subjectivity and society, while the condition to be
abject is subversive of both formations. Is the abject, then, disrup-
tive of subjective and social orders or foundational of them, a crisis
in these orders or a confirmation of them?
(Foster, 1996b, 114, italics added)3
Foster’s observation raises an important question about the com-

plexity of abjection as a concept that conveys the integral and
problematic relationship it has with the subject. While the opera-
tion (of abjection) seeks to stabilize, the condition (of the abject) is
inherently disruptive, meaning that there is a constant tension of
drives. The concept is both constructive (in the formation of iden-
tity and relationship to world) and destructive (in what it does to the
subject).4 The dual aspect of abjection correlates with whether we are

talking about ‘abjection’ as a noun or abjection as an operation or
action. The state of being abject is dangerous to the self and others,
while the operation of abject-ing involves rituals of purity that bring
about social stability. The conundrum can be resolved if we interpret
abjection in terms of duration, or as a process that involves time.
The threat of abjection (of being abject) gives rise to the operation
of expelling the abject and thus restoring stability, albeit for a lim-
ited time. The expelled part does not disappear – it is the perpetual
remainder – and continues to threaten the boundaries of the self,
meaning that its presence disrupts the stability of self and society,
thus activating the need for the operation of abjection.
The theory of abjection
‘Abjection’ describes an experience between a subject and a source of

abjection.5 In the encounter the abject source threatens the subject’s
sense of self, but it cannot be objectified. This is one of the unrelent-
ing features of the abject as identified by Kristeva: it is not a subject,
nor is it an object but it displays features of both. It exists in between
these two states, where it cannot be discretely separated from the
subject (as an object would be able to) and where it lurks object-
like but without becoming an object. The non-object impresses on
the subject’s stability, causing the subject to feel vulnerable because
its boundaries are under threat. The abject hovers ‘at the bound-
ary of what is assimilable, thinkable . . . ’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 18) but
is itself unassimilable, which means that we have to contemplate
its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be
incorporated. It is the ‘other’ that comes from within (so it is part
of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect
our boundaries. We are unable to rid ourselves of it completely and
it continues to haunt our being. The impossibility of entirely rid-
ding ourselves of abjection contributes to the heightened somatic
and symbolic associations that it harbours in the human psyche.
An apt example of an abject non-object is that of a bodily fluid.
Paul Schilder comments on how ‘whatever originates or emanates out
of our body will still remain a part of the body-image. The voice, the
breath, the odour, the faeces, menstrual blood, urine, semen, are still
parts of the body-image even when separated in space from the body’
Introduction 5
(Schilder, 1978, p. 213). In Chapter 1 we see that in Kristeva’s theory

of abjection the maternal body is the primal object of abjection for
the infant and, in embracing and rejecting the mother, the infant
learns to negotiate its own boundaries, thus causing a rupture in the
mother-infant unit. This in-between aspect of the abject, where it is
neither subject nor object, can be used to explain the viewer’s repul-
sion for Smith’s Pee Body. We are unable to be dispassionate about
viewing the emptying of the bladder because the abject non-object
threatens our sense of self and we feel undone by the experience.
The inability to separate entirely the abject from the self, or to
objectify the abject as an object, contributes to the complex rela-
tionship that we have with it, as indicated by the dual emotions
that it invokes in us. We are both repelled by the abject (because
of fear) and yet attracted to it (through our desire). Kristeva con-
veys this sense of the powerful effects of abjection: ‘Unflagging,
like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repul-
sion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 1). Anything that causes abjection, whether visceral, social
and moral, may provoke us into responding in these ways. Abject
things are unable to be ingested or incorporated into the system
but they remain a threat. When they draw near they activate the
gag reflex literally and/or metaphorically, and this feeling can be
alleviated in a number of ways – we can stave off the threat of abjec-
tion, or we can succumb to it, which usually involves the temporary
loss of a sense of self. However, the ambivalent nature of abjec-
tion means that we find it difficult to tear ourselves away from the
experience. Being both compelling and terrifying, we experience con-
flicting feelings that simultaneously draw us in while also moving
us farther away. Fascination pulls the viewer in, while we remain
at arm’s length because of the dangers that the abject exerts. This
dual and ambivalent characteristic of the abject invites a comparison
with the idea of ‘holy’, as expounded by the theologian Rudolf Otto.
Otto describes the numinous (the idea of the holy, which under-
pins religion) as evoking mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto,
1958 [1917]), where tremendum refers to the ability of the numi-
nous to provoke terror and awe. But it also enraptures in spite of
the fear it casts (fascinans) and one is drawn in. If it were not for the
allure, we would not have a relationship with the thing that elicits
overpowering fear.
The dual nature of the abject explains the precarious nature of

‘I’. The borders of the self are neither fixed nor unshakeable. Once
expelled, the ‘other’, or the abject, does not disappear but hovers and
challenges the boundaries of selfhood. The abject is ambivalent; it is
frightening because it has the propensity to shatter the unity of the
self, yet we are also fascinated by it because it takes us to the heart of
our being, defines our identity and makes us feel more alive. Another
related concept that can be compared with the abject is the Kantian
sublime:6
Both, as extreme forms of experience, overwhelm us and tem-

porarily remove our identity, remove the distinction between
subject and object. The sublime in Kant is a moment of excess
which allows the imagination to become aware of its own power
to organize experience, and the abject, in Kristeva’s analysis, is
experienced at its strongest when the subject is thrown back from
its object to the ‘impossibility within’ which constitutes desire,
the basis of the subject’s relationship with all objects. Perception,
as desire, gives the object (the objet a in Lacan’s terminology)
[note omitted] to the subject but the subject, who wants to iden-
tify itself with the object, doesn’t find itself there and, instead,
loses itself. Repugnance, Kristeva declares, keeps the subject from
floundering.
(Cazeaux, 2011, p. 389)
Both the abject and the sublime have dramatic consequences for the
stability of identity and order. One of the main differences between
these realms is the trajectory of experience, where the sublime can
be described as upward, and abjection as the counterpart of this.
The sublime inspires, lifts us up and draws us to experiences about
the wonderment of nature. We seek out the sublime because it rein-
forces the magnitude of the universe and underpins peak encounters.
It may remind us of the insignificance of the individual in the face
of the universe but it is exhilarating nonetheless, even in its ungras-
pability. The same cannot be said for abjection, which instead instils
horror and disgust. Perhaps the differences can be described further
by thinking about our motivations for seeking out these experiences.
The sublime is an aesthetic concern and is a value that is sought
after in artistic endeavours. Both J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David
Introduction 7
Friedrich wanted to encapsulate the forces of nature that have a hum-

bling effect on humans. For some people this may generate feelings
of a spiritual nature because it confirms the vastness and unknowa-
bility of the universe. Abjection does not follow the same path.
Human beings are not generally motivated to seek out abjection, and
wherever possible, they avoid it at all costs.
Social abjection
Fear of the other is central to abjection. Through the course of the

book we learn that the object of the other may be an external force,
but that the fear of this other stems from within and is a deep-rooted
fear of the other-in-the-self that we want to expel. Bodily fluids are a
good example of this – even on the outside of the body they have an
integral relationship with the self – always being tied to body-image
(Schilder, 1978, p. 213). The fear of the other may be displaced on to
individuals and groups in society who are on the fringes and are stig-
matized because their differences are not understood. They are seen
to represent a threat, a fact that legitimizes their exclusion from the
social fabric. In their otherness they are regarded as abject, lowly and
despicable and, to return to etymology, are ‘cast away’ (are outcasts).
Groups who at various times have been so positioned in history (but
no longer necessarily remain there) include women, homosexuals,
ethnic minorities, AIDS sufferers, criminals, the mentally ill and lep-
ers. These groups have all suffered discrimination and have been
rejected by mainstream society because of the alleged threat that they
represent in their status as ‘other’ and ‘abject’, which points to the
social (and not just psychic) dimension of abjection. They were seen
as being dirty and contaminating (in the same vein as bodily waste7 )
and measures were taken to discourage them from being considered
part of mainstream society. Their continued marginality was a way
of warding them off, thereby increasing suspicion about them and
preventing any measures being taken to integrate them within the
mainstream.
In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993) Judith
Butler, following in the footsteps of Foucault, examines the relation-
ship between naming and power. She discusses how the construction
of subjects operates through exclusionary means, where there are
normative sexualities (namely heterosexuality) and abject inverted
versions of this (homosexuality). ‘This exclusionary matrix by which

subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of
a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but
who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.’
Butler states how ‘heterosexuality and homosexuality are mutually
exclusive phenomena, that . . . can only be made to coincide through
rendering the one culturally viable and the other a transient and
imaginary affair’ (Butler, 1993, pp. 3, 111, 112). And in ensuring via-
bility one has to conform with and adopt the designated traits of the
construction in question. There is nothing essentially abject about
homosexuality, for example, but it is defined as abject and is made
abject in order to reduce its threat. These abject positions have an
outcast status and occupy excluded sites that resist the possibility of
cultural articulation. As Butler says,
The abject [note omitted] designates here precisely those ‘unliv-

able’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are neverthe-
less densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of
the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is
required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of
uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s
domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against
which – and by virtue of which – the domain of the subject will
circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.
(Butler, 1993, p.3)
In order for control to be maintained, the excluded need to remain on

the outside of the signifying boundary. Important work in resignifica-
tion needs to be done for homosexuality to be able to gain legitimacy,
viability and affiliation (Butler, 1993, passim). Butler’s insights can be
applied to other variables of identity that have been (or continue
to be) mystified and pathologized, such as ethnicity and race, and
crucially she develops the important idea that in society some bodies
matter and others do not and have to fight for their rights, autonomy
and dignity. Echoing these ideas, Iris Young argues that ‘the repudia-
tion of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or colour is an “expulsion”
followed by a “repulsion” that founds and consolidates culturally
hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation’
(quoted in Salih, 2003, p. 108). Calvin Thomas, in his examination
of the ‘productions of bodies, regimes of visibility, and relations of
Introduction 9
power’ in Male Matters (1996) and also in Masculinity, Psychoanalysis,

Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture,
and Film (2008), argues that:
[o]ne cannot productively address the productions of men’s

bodies . . . without also addressing the production and the
oppression of women’s bodies, feminized bodies, queered
bodies, and raced bodies (disempowered or subordinated
bodies all) – without . . . addressing the various mechanisms of
displacement, projection, and abjection that govern and support
the dominant regimes of the visible.
(Thomas, 2008, p. 6)
Butler’s study signifies the importance of thinking about the social

dimensions of abjection, which involves considering the conse-
quences of abjection within society and explains, without justifying,
the presence of the oppressed and marginalized that are not accorded
the same social rights. The publication of Bodies that Matter helped
initiate further examination of the social aspects of abjection, which
in turn renewed interest in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and its appli-
cation to other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences,
such as politics and cultural studies.8 It is also a reminder that abjec-
tion is not simply an abstract concept that should be discussed only
in academe but, as eloquently stated by Imogen Tyler, ‘[a]bjection has
effects on real bodies; abjection hurts’ (Tyler, 2009, p. 90). Her lat-
est book, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal
Britain (2013) develops this contention.9
The phenomenology of abjection
In Powers of Horror Kristeva takes the reader on a rich intellectual

tour by drawing on different discourses and points of reference from
anthropology, philosophy, religion, linguistics and literature. In the
first chapter, ‘Approaching Abjection’, she opens with a paradig-
matic example of abjection. Drawing on daily life, Kristeva gives an
account of food loathing, which she describes as ‘perhaps the most
elementary and most archaic form of abjection’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 2):
When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of
milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail
paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down,

spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up
the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause fore-
head and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness,
nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the
mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element,
sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimi-
late it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’
who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out,
I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim
to establish myself.
(Kristeva 1982, p. 3)
By employing such a familiar example of skin on milk Kristeva makes

abjection immediately accessible. Her phenomenological investiga-
tion of the abject – which involves conscious experience from the
first-person point of view, and importantly is oriented towards cap-
turing ‘types of experience and their common structure’ rather than
‘examples of specific individuals . . . ’, as Julian Hanich (2009, p. 294)
describes phenomenology – is useful because it accurately captures
the sensory power of abjection. It also draws the reader in because
this is an experience that we can relate to, albeit agonizingly in some
cases. We may not yet know much about the philosophical rami-
fications of abjection but we are able to identify immediately with
the sensation of repulsion and nausea caused by it, because it evokes
childhood memories of food substances that we loathed because of
their smell, texture and taste but were made to eat! In The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin discusses disgust
(which is defined in opposition to pleasure) as a gustatory response
that we have to certain foods. These emotions have evolved for reg-
ulatory purposes to ensure well-being because the disgust we feel for
the food acts as a protective mechanism which ensures ‘the safety
of the organism by inhibiting contact with what is foul, toxic, and
thereby dangerous’ (Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004, p. 1). Certain foods
that are spoilt or toxic elicit the disgust response. The sight and even
smell cause us to recoil from them, making the prospect of tasting
them even more repulsive. Very often, as in Kristeva’s example, the
source causing the repulsion is disproportionate to the negative feel-
ings that it generates: the skin on the surface of milk is ‘harmless,
Introduction 11
thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring’ (Kristeva,

1982, p. 2).
In this example, skin forms on the surface of milk. It is not clear
why this has happened – it could be the result of heat treatment,
or it could be because the milk is starting to go off. Whatever the
explanation, the result is the same – in this process the milk changes
from being homogeneous to having a semi-solid covering. It is this
transition, where the film on the surface is of a different physical
state and consistency to the liquid milk (it is not quite a solid, nor is
it liquid10 ), that causes sensory discomfort, including the gag reflex,
making the milk an object of disgust.
The vividness of the encounter with such gut-wrenching food,
where our eyes see and our lips are about to touch the offending item,
heightens the sensation, once again recalling indelible memories.
Kristeva’s account here and elsewhere in Powers of Horror emphasizes
the lived experience of the body. The body is immediately present
in experience and responds to the filmy milk, which is expressed
in strong reactions that are triggered by particular senses of ‘the eye
seeing’ or the ‘lips touching’ but then subsumes the whole nervous
system, prompting a desire to recoil from the source of disgust. The
phenomenological approach adopted here by Kristeva captures the
sine qua non of abjection; that is, the perceptual rupture that hap-
pens in the process of abjection. We feel contaminated by the milk,
in fact just seeing it is enough to raise one’s gorge. The immediate
sensation is to gag, where the subject retches because they feel the
impulse to vomit. This causes spasms of the inner organs, nausea and
an adrenalin rush, causing in turn greater perspiration. The milk cre-
ates a sense of abjection, and we are not able to get rid of it because
it is abject and not an object, and hence threatens our being. Instead
we momentarily lose a sense of self.
Elizabeth Grosz describes three broad categories of abjection in
Powers of Horror: abjection towards food; towards waste (of the
bodily kind); and towards sexual difference, where all of these occur-
rences involve segregating and determining the clean and proper
boundaries of the body (Grosz, 1994, p. 193). This broad scope
is in keeping with Kristeva’s academic interests, which consist of
the intersection between the disciplines of philosophy, psychoanal-
ysis, linguistics and cultural and literary theory. In turn, the con-
cept of abjection can be applied across fields such as the visual
arts, anthropology, film studies, psychology and literary studies.

Kristeva’s initial discussion of the term is couched in terms of
psychoanalysis, where she claims that abjection is a primary and
primal response to maternal revulsion and challenges more ortho-
dox theories of the formation of the subject. Her theory belongs
to a wider theory of infant development, where the young infant
moves away from the oneness of the maternal body to form its
own identity. The relationship between the drives and appetites of
the body, and language and representation is a central theme of
Kristeva’s work.
The scope of this book is similarly broad in that it considers abjec-
tion in relation to different academic disciplines. The concept of
abjection originates in psychic development but resonates through-
out culture and affects our attitudes towards food choices, the body
and illness, perversion and social outsiders. In its ubiquity, abjection
is indeed ‘a cultural category of uncommon power’ (Jay, 1994, p. 237).
Many treatments of abjection are densely psychoanalytical and do
not move outside of these parameters. While the psychoanalytical
roots of Kristeva’s theory of abjection need to be acknowledged, what
is important is to examine abjection in relation to social and cultural
practices, and one of my main objectives is to examine abjection in
relation to the body in order to look at how humanity’s attitude to
the body, particularly in the Western world, has been to discipline
the body’s natural excesses and appetites under the aegis of civi-
lization. Another intention is for the book to bring to the fore the
significance of Bataille in the study of abjection by exploring his phi-
losophy. He was a key figure in post-structuralist thought and his
work is a touchstone that I return to at select points throughout the
book. His theories of the sacred, which he explored not only in his
non-fiction but also in his erotic novels, brought abjection back into
critical consciousness.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of how abjection is conceived of
as a process in psychoanalysis and how it occurs during the infant’s
formation of subjectivity. In her exposition of the formation of sub-
jectivity, Kristeva reworks established theories, thereby articulating
a more prominent role for the maternal. In her account she iden-
tifies the moment of primal abjection that sets the benchmark for
forthcoming encounters with the abject. Kristeva’s psychoanalytical
account has come under scrutiny for many reasons – mainly because
Introduction 13
of her adherence to patriarchal models – and the plausibility of these

critiques needs to be evaluated in any balanced view of her work.
The final part of Chapter 1 discusses the relationship between
abjection and disgust. Through my research for the book it became
apparent that there is a number of similarities between abjection
and disgust in their respective phenomenology, and the physical
and psychological reactions that they elicit in the subject, both of
which cause a move away from the source of abjection and disgust.
There is also overlap in the types of objects that elicit both abjection
and disgust. The differences between abjection and disgust need to
be ascertained so that a case can be made for the distinctiveness of
abjection and which establishes that it is more than an emotion.
In Chapter 2 we see the pervasiveness of abjection that threatens
cultural systems and the mechanisms that individuals and soci-
eties from different cultural contexts have evolved in seeking to
manage it. Mary Douglas’s anthropological study on pollution and
defilement, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (1966), is used as a framework to discuss the importance of
classification schemes in society. If abjection represents a threat to
the boundary that separates one state from another, how can that
boundary be protected? The range of religious, anthropological and
sociological practices present in societies spanning different eras con-
veys the universality of abjection as a cultural concept that is an
integral part of what it means to be human and the various mea-
sures that have been put in place in order to stave it off. In social
and cultural orders, the boundary separates what is permissible from
what is forbidden (the taboo). Society’s impulse is to exclude the
parts and groups that are undesirable and that pose a threat to order.
Human civilization sought to distance humanity from its animal ori-
gins. A number of Western traditions in religion and philosophical
thought devised dualistic systems of mind and body, where the latter
was subordinated to the order of the former.
Chapter 3 presents the special case of Georges Bataille who strove
actively to embrace the abject in his writings by recovering the sacred
in everyday life. His interpretation of abjection is discussed here. In a
reversal of the processes of civilization discussed in Chapter 2, Bataille
devised a pre-modern worldview where the sacred, which for him was
the ultimate expression of abjection, was immanent and not tran-
scendent. The recovery of the sacred entails the transgression of the
homogeneity of social and economic systems in favour of a resolute

expenditure of excess.
In Powers of Horror Kristeva states that in the growing secularization
of society, art (which I interpret as encompassing the visual arts, film
and literature) replaces religion as the locus of abjection and is where
it is experienced:
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 reli-
gion. Seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience, which
is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies,
appears as the essential component of religiosity. That is perhaps
why it is destined to survive the collapse of the historical forms of
religion.
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 17)
Up until this point the focus of my book has been on the measures
taken and devices used in society and culture to manage and con-
tain the abject, but we now experience a reversal, where we see the
deliberate cultivation of the abject in art, especially from modernism
onwards, which is where my focus lies.11 Artists in their various fields
seek to express the power and instability of abjection and to plumb
the depths of existence by showing us what happens when the self
is shattered by experiences of transgression. Following the shift from
religion to art, in Chapters 4–7 I examine an array of artworks in
their respective fields that are considered to be abject, or that can
be interpreted as such, and consider their formal elements, including
language and their content in the articulation of abjection. Recep-
tion is also a vital aspect here – how do viewers and readers react to
the spectacles with which they engage? How does it affect them both
cognitively and emotionally? How does the work instil feelings of
abjection in the viewer and what are the ethical ramifications of this?
Chapter 4 concentrates on the visual arts, with a special focus on
body art from the 1960s onwards. Abject art gained popularity in
the 1990s with artists turning their attention to the body and its
propensity to fragment. Several noteworthy exhibitions during this
era also popularized abjection and brought it into the public domain.
Body art also enabled the socio-political dimensions of abjection to
Introduction 15
be expressed as artists used their bodies as visual and political plat-

forms on which to articulate their worldviews. Chapter 5 singles out
one of these exhibitions – L’informe: Mode d’emploi (Formless: A User’s
Guide) (1996) – for attention, as it brought Bataille’s concept of the
informe, or the formless, into discussions of avant-garde practice. A
comparison was made between abjection and the formless by several
leading art critics in the 1960s, who believed that the formless was
a concept related to the abject that resonates with the concerns of
contemporary art.
Chapter 6 shifts the focus onto film, where abjection has been pop-
ularized in film theory by the work of Barbara Creed. The primal
moment of abjection, which involves the rejection of the maternal,
is developed in films that problematize metaphors of the mater-
nal. A common entity that is widely discussed in horror is the
monster that is archetypally abject and occupies interstitial states
between different categories, thereby transgressing the idea of a dis-
crete boundary. The penultimate section of the chapter looks at social
abjection where film becomes the forum to explore and reconfigure
marginalized identity positions.
Chapter 7 concerns the expression of abjection in literature, which
informs the latter part of Powers of Horror, especially in the work
of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose writing encapsulates the abject
and is where horror can be articulated, processed and is cathected
in/through language. Abjection in literature entails a type of commu-
nication that differs from the everyday use of language and involves
the element of the ‘poetic’, which disrupts the flow of Symbolic lan-
guage. Rather than casting the net too widely, I have chosen to look
at a single work by each of three writers – Céline’s Journey to the
End of the Night (1932), Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and William
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959). All of these texts convey the horrors
of the abject in their content and themes as well as in their stylistic
nuances. In some instances we are faced with writing that is powerful
and engaging but there is also one part that is unstinting in its horror,
making it difficult and, in some cases, unbearable to read.
1
Unpacking Abjection
In this chapter I want to lay down the foundations for a study of

abjection which will involve examining its psychoanalytical basis as a
theory of the subject in Kristeva’s writing. Subsequent chapters move
away from abjection’s roots in psychoanalysis to look at other fea-
tures of its phenomenology, but it is important to begin by addressing
the trajectory that Kristeva developed for her theory.
The 1970s marked a period of transition in Kristeva’s intellectual
history. From 1974 onwards her work moved away from concentrat-
ing solely on linguistics to encompassing a more psychoanalytical
approach that questioned the stability of the subject and developed
the ensuing relationship that this subject has with language. This
coincided with the completion of her psychoanalytical training in
1979 and is seen in her writing in the 1980s and 1990s, which
‘reflect[ed] her training and practice as a psychoanalyst’ (Oliver,
2002, p. viii). Her writing in the 1970s, including Revolution in Poetic
Language1 (1984), which was developed from her doctoral thesis, is
preoccupied with similar concerns, such as the role of the mater-
nal body in the theory of psychic development and the synergy
between bodily drives and language. Building on Lacanian research
that articulated not only how language is distinctive to humans but
also explored its inextricable relationship with the psyche, Kristeva
further developed the idea of the speaking subject in relation to two
different modalities (and polarities) of language: the semiotic and
the symbolic. Kristeva ‘maintain[ed] that the logic of signification is
already present in the material of the body’ and one of the ultimate
goals of her writing was to bring the ‘speaking body’ with its bodily
16
Unpacking Abjection 17
drives back into philosophical discourse (Oliver, 1999). The ‘subject’s

complex and contradictory relation to and in signification’ remains
Kristeva’s overriding preoccupation where she explores the parallels
between the psychoanalytical and the textual and where the speaking
subject is positioned in a range of discourses (Grosz, 1990, p. 80).
In Kristeva’s corpus, Powers of Horror has been grouped together
with two other works and is identified as the first study in what
Sara Beardsworth described as ‘the trilogy of the 1980s’ (Beardsworth,
2004, p. 2), the others being Tales of Love (1983; English transla-
tion, 1987) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987; English
translation, 1989). Collectively these works discuss three separate but
related aspects of subjectivity: horror, love and melancholy in rela-
tion to psychoanalysis. More commonly though, Powers of Horror
is treated as a standalone work and is the urtext for the study of
abjection.2 It is also her best known work, although Kristeva dis-
agreed with this assessment in an interview, conducted over two
sessions, with John Lechte in 2002/3 where she stated that different
texts appeal to different readers according to their interests and that
Powers of Horror was ‘very much the focus – at least in the press and
the correspondence that I received – of artists’ (Lechte and Margaroni,
2004, p. 154). What is indisputable though is the impact that Powers
of Horror has had on scholarship in a number of fields. Its concerns
reflected a trend in the humanities and social sciences, known as
the ‘affective turn’, which employed theory as a way of understand-
ing bodily experience, affectivity and the emotions. It was interested
in psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and reintro-
duced areas of experience that had previously been overlooked in
theory.
The primal moment of abjection
According to Kristeva, the most ‘primitive’ expression of abjection

occurs in the pre-Oedipal relationship between the infant and the
(figure of the) mother, where the former experiences the latter’s body
as abject.3 The process of feeding is simultaneously a process of mov-
ing towards the breast and suckling, and rejecting and withdrawing
when satiated. This movement of identification and rejection, which
symbolizes a switch between being one with the mother and then
asserting difference, splits the figure of the mother and constitutes
the ambivalence that the mother’s breast and body signifies. This atti-
tude was discussed in the theory of ambivalence, which was devised
by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in which feelings of love and
destruction were displayed towards the primary object, the mother.
The mother is both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and this duality is represented by
the breasts; ‘[t]he good breast – external and internal – becomes the
prototype of all helpful and gratifying objects, the bad breast the pro-
totype of all external and internal persecutory objects’ (Klein, 1952,
p. 200). Kristeva picks up on these two conflicting qualities and uses
them to formulate the basis of her theory.
The oscillation to and from the mother facilitates the process
by which the borders between the infant and mother are estab-
lished. Abjection is the process by which the infant separates from
the mother. The feelings of revulsion and horror, and the action of
expelling the mother, shatter the narcissism and result in feelings of
insurmountable horror. But ‘the child must abject the maternal body
so that the child itself does not become abject by identifying with
the maternal body’ and its pollutants (Oliver, 2003, p. 47). Making
the mother’s body abject is a necessary step for the infant to be able
to establish its own subjectivity, that is, have its own autonomous
identity in the form of proper boundaries ‘in order to be’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 10).4
It is important to remember that ‘abjection is not a stage “passed
through” but a perpetual process that plays a central role within the
project of subjectivity’: ‘abjection is thus always a reminder (and the
irreducible remainder) of this primary repudiation of the maternal’
(Tyler, 2009, p. 80). In later life, experiences of abjection can be traced
back to this elemental scene of maternal abjection – this founding
moment of being – where ‘[t]he abject is the violence of mourning
for an “object” that has always already been lost’ and is thus the
object of primal repression (Kristeva, 1982, p. 15). Kristeva asks:
But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speak-
ing being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject,
repeat. Without one division, one separation, one subject/object
having been constituted (not yet, or no longer yet) . . . The abject
confronts us . . . with our earliest attempts to release the hold of
maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the
autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with
the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as

securing as it is stifling.
(Kristeva, 1982, pp. 12–13)
One of the defining features of abjection is its inability to be elimi-

nated. The experience of abjection is formative, primal and represents
an essential part of subjecthood. Abjection is therefore integral to
our ontological reality and epistemological awareness of what it
means to be human. But paradoxically, although fundamental to
an understanding of human nature, the abject is also hugely dis-
ruptive to the normality of everyday life, which explains why it is
disavowed. It ‘can never be fully obliterated but hovers at the border
of the subject’s identity, threatening apparent unities and stabili-
ties with disruption and possible dissolution’ (Grosz, 1990, p. 87).
As a result, our sense of self is never entirely stable and is under the
threat of invasion. In many respects the ambivalent relationship that
humans have with abjection mirrors the position taken by Freud in
Totem and Taboo (1912–13) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930),
where it is claimed that civilization is founded on the repression of
certain libidinal desires and behaviours, such as incest. Advancing
certain aspects of human behaviour requires the suppression of cer-
tain aspects of being and, for Freud, this necessitated the regulation of
perversity. Freud’s claim that society needs to repress particular libid-
inal impulses as a prerequisite for the stability of the civilized ego is,
prima facie, similar to Kristeva’s belief in the repression of the abject
maternal body as essential for the formation and maintenance of the
subject. But, as observed by Elizabeth Grosz (1990, p. 87), while Freud
argues for a complete banishment of the identified practices from
society, Kristeva does not want to push abjection completely out of
consciousness and recognizes the importance of the allure of abjec-
tion, which seduces the subject and heightens our sensory awareness.
Facing the abject is a part of daily life in the confrontation of our bod-
ily selves and in other areas such as in (making decisions about) food
consumption, sexuality, and so on. In day-to-day life then ‘[t]he sub-
ject must have a certain, if incomplete, mastery of the abject’ (Grosz,
1990, p. 87). Not only are our feelings about the abject ambivalent in
the dual emotions that the abject elicits but also in the extent of the
grip the abject has over us, where we need to be alert to it without
letting it overwhelm us.
The semiotic and the symbolic
In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva puts forward a theory of

the processes of signification that comprises two components: the
semiotic and the symbolic. The normal psychical trajectory in infant
development charts the development from pre-verbalization to the
formation of the speaking subject, a process that is determined by the
interrelationship between the semiotic and symbolic. The semiotic,
which has a very specific meaning for Kristeva,5 is ‘articulated by
flow and marks’ (Kristeva, 1984, p. 40) associated with ‘rhythms or
tones’ that are meaningful parts of language but that do not sig-
nify anything in a referential sense but are the result of bodily drives
(Oliver, 2002, p. xiv). In this initial phase of psychic development
the infant expresses itself through a series of non-verbal (and pre-
symbolic) cues. Sounds such as babbles, cries and coos are familiar
noises that are used to attract attention, often to bodily drives. This
type of signification exists anterior to speech (it is pre-linguistic) and
exists in the ‘semiotic chora’.
Introduced in Plato’s Timaeus, the ‘chora’ is initially referred to
as the ‘receptacle of all becoming’ and is subsequently called space,
where it is conceived of as a field in which the universe may exist
(Zeyl, 2013). In her appropriation of the term, Kristeva exploits the
fluidity of the space that cannot be fixed. In Revolution in Poetic Lan-
guage she argues that ‘[a]lthough the chora can be designated and
regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situ-
ate the chora and, if necessary, lend it to a topology, but one can never
give it axiomatic form’ (Kristeva, 1984, p. 26). In addition, she specif-
ically aligns the space to the maternal where it is used to denote a
psychic space that preceded the formation of subjectivity or personal
identity and reason. It is a receptacle that contains a shared space
of the mother–child dyad and is ‘unnameable, improbable, hybrid,
anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently,
maternally connoted’ (Kristeva, 1980, p. 133). The chora is the place
where the subject is made and negated. ‘In the mother–child dyad,
there are no clear distinctions of subject and object, inner and outer,
“I” and others, but only fluid heterogeneities, rhythmic streamings
of libidinal drives and matter’ (Menninghaus, 2003, p. 370). The
infant experiences the world in rhythms and movements, and regis-
ters vocalizations and tones in its environment which correlate with
bodily drives. Through the various stages of development, the infant

begins to develop borders through the process of rejection and expul-
sion, and wrestles against the ‘mother’s engulfing embrace’ (McAfee,
2004, p. 46). This enables a sense of growing autonomy where distinc-
tions can be made as to what lies outside the self (such as the waste
products of the mother) and the maintenance of a clean and proper
body. This prompts the question: how can the infant reject and expel
something unless it already recognizes boundaries and unless the
thing in question is distinct from the infant’s self? In response to this,
perhaps there are different levels of consciousness. At a very funda-
mental level the infant might reject and expel something, and that
action might thereby bring about a realization, at a higher level of
consciousness, that what is rejected and expelled lies on the other
side of a boundary to the self.
Although we start to reject the mother’s body because we are still in
the semiotic realm, we cannot define this in terms of a subject–abject
relationship because we are not a subject yet: ‘the not-yet-subject
with its not-yet, or no-longer, object maintains “itself” as the abject’
(Oliver, 1993, p. 60). Since ‘the structure of separation is bodily, these
bodily operations prepare us for our entrance into language’ (Oliver,
2002, p. xxi). Kristeva explains that ‘before being like, “I” am not but
do separate, reject, ab-ject’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 13).
The next phase of development involves the ‘becoming of the sub-
ject’, which occurs through the acquisition of the symbolic, which
refers to signification systems that constitute linguistic language. It is
a different mode of communication from the semiotic and is consti-
tuted by verbal language. It designates the structured use of language
in its use of syntax and grammar. With symbolic language the infant
is able to build up subjectivity and mark out its difference, in a
subject–object relationship, from its mother and other things in the
world. This ‘positing’ or positioning is known as the ‘thetic phase’
(Kristeva, 1984, p. 43). Language is the tool that enables things to be
inscribed within a referential system and gives the infant the means
to be able to communicate this sense of loss.
In spite of the linear progression charting the passage from the
semiotic to the symbolic, Kristeva discusses the integral need for
both signifying systems in communication. Without the symbolic
we would only have incomprehensible babble, while without the
semiotic we would not have the need for utterance, and the content
of what is uttered would be meaningless. The combination of the

two modalities emphasizes the different motivations of communi-
cation as well as stressing the idea that ‘[w]e have a bodily need
to communicate’ (Oliver, 2002, p. xv). Kristeva argues that the
co-existence of the two phases is necessary to maintain not only psy-
chic development and fulfilment but also the functioning of social
institutions and, in the aesthetic realm, the functioning of discourses
and texts.
In normal functioning adult communication, the semiotic is rel-
egated in importance but we are always prone to post-thetic com-
munication in our lives; for instance in moments of abjection,
indescribable pain, rage, sheer ecstasy, fear and mental disintegration
(e.g., psychosis). The semiotic is also exercised in creativity. These
states are so intense and in extremis that they often momentarily
obliterate consciousness and take us to a place that is anterior to
linguistic language where we operate ‘below the surface’ of rational
communication. Elaine Scarry comments on the annihilating effect
of physical pain which ‘does not simply resist language but actively
destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior
to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before lan-
guage is learned’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 4). Kristeva maintains that the two
modes are not static and discontinuous entities, but are processes that
are integral to the full range of human communication. They should
be viewed as two elements or components of signification that inter-
act throughout the course of life: the semiotic provides the impetus to
communicate, and the symbolic structures the utterance. The range
of interrelational possibilities that exists between these two modes is
explored further in Chapter 7.
Reworking Lacan
In her theory of abjection Kristeva builds on and modifies established

models of psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian psychoanalytical
theory.6 Her account in particular is a corrective of Lacan’s claims
about the point at which separation occurs in the formation of the
subject, and of the juncture at which language is recognized as oper-
ating, which in Lacan’s development theory is at the Mirror Stage
(and in Freud’s theory, the pre-Oedipal stage ). In Chapter 3 of Pow-
ers of Horror, ‘From Filth to Defilement’, Kristeva challenges Freud’s
perspective in Moses and Monotheism (1939) where he argues that
the murder of the father is integral to the formation of the social.

Kristeva shifts the focus to the maternal and its significance in the
development of the social, where identity is constructed by the exclu-
sion of the abject maternal body. During the time in which Kristeva
was writing, Lacanian theory was widely accepted as a model of
subjectivity in psychoanalysis.
Lacan presents three distinct realms, or orders, of the psyche
(a schema that he came up with in 1953): Real, Symbolic and
Imaginary, which collectively present a way of understanding the
functioning of the human psyche. They are often described as differ-
ent stages, but it is more accurate to see them as realms of experience
that interrelate and interlock. The Imaginary is the visual realm of
images and sense perceptions that are issued from the body’s image.7
In this pre-Oedipal stage the infant’s experience of the world is undif-
ferentiated and the infant exists in oneness with the mother. The
Mirror Stage occurs in the Imaginary realm where the infant (aged
between 6–18 months) catches a glimpse of itself in a mirror, is able
to identify with an image outside of itself and perceives itself in a
unified way, which is based on a misconception because the mirror
presents an ideal ego which does not correspond with the infant’s
actual experience of its body. This is the first time that the infant
has conceived of itself as a unitary entity or subject (as an ‘I’) that is
separate from others (the world of objects), and this momentous rev-
elation is shared with an adult (often a parent) who is present during
this revelation. This marks an important step in the formation of the
ego and the development of the subject. Prior to this, the infant per-
ceives itself as fragmented and interior. The Mirror Stage is a critical
stage in the process of identification, where the image(s) of oneself
becomes translated into the idea of the self, and in particular ‘me’,
thus enabling the transition to the Symbolic realm (which is repre-
sented by the father) of language, law and the order of society. The
infant’s cognitive sense of identification with an image outside of
itself is concomitant with other perceptions: the infant begins to rec-
ognize what it lacks and expresses the trauma of the loss of maternal
oneness, as well as desire, using the newly acquired gift of linguistic
language.
Kristeva transforms Lacan’s model, so that instead of the transition
from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order being the sole method of
structuring thought, we have the distinction between the semiotic
and the symbolic, where the semiotic is equivalent to the pre-Oedipal
and the symbolic is less of an order and more part of an ongoing

process of linguistic signification. She also reconfigures the signifi-
cance of the maternal body that has been sidelined in patriarchal
models of psychoanalysis.
A word about the differences between the relative uses of the term
‘symbolic’ is needed here. Oliver explains how Kristeva is using ‘the
symbolic’ as a ‘technical term that delimits one element of lan-
guage associated with syntax’ (Oliver, 2002, p. xv) rather than in
the broader Lacanian sense where it constitutes the entire realm of
signification, not just language but discourse and culture in general.8
The result of the realization in the Mirror Stage, from the ‘warmth
and oneness’ in the Imaginary into ‘separation and loss’, is consti-
tutive of language, which underpins desire. We speak in order to
address the loss of union that is encountered at this early stage of
development. Throughout human life, language enables us to con-
vey a sense of loss (often understood as lack) that we have from being
separated from our primal state of oneness. In Lacan, ‘language is the
basis of the alienation between the self and the world, and this alien-
ation involves a division between the infinity of our desires, which
are denied by social conventions, and the finitude of our demands
which are allowed by society’ (Turner, 1996, p. 51; see also Lacan,
2001 [1977]).
Another point of difference needs to be noted with respect to the
moment of separation. For Lacan this occurs at the Mirror Stage
where the infant moves from a sense of body-image(s) to a position
outside of itself, where it can experience ‘a form of its totality’ (Lacan,
2001, p. 3). For Kristeva, separation occurs before the Mirror Stage;
in fact abjection is a necessary precondition of it. In Black Sun she
states how ‘[f]or man and for woman the loss of the mother is a bio-
logical and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming
autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condi-
tion of our individuation’ (Kristeva, 1989, pp. 27–28). In the process
of moving towards and then away from the mother, of welcoming
the embrace and rejecting it, the infant is able to build up an under-
standing of its separateness from the mother, however cursory this
understanding may be.
The Real, which is not reality in the sense of what is, is the
undifferentiated realm that is fissured by the act of birth. It exists
in life but resists symbolization. It ‘is perhaps best understood as
that which has not yet been symbolized, remains to be symbolized,

or even resists symbolization’ (Fink, 1996, p. 25). The Real ‘may be
approached, but never grasped: [it is] the umbilical cord of the sym-
bolic’ (Sheridan, 2001, p. x). The Real represents a contrast to the
Symbolic because, unlike the latter, the Real cannot be translated,
represented or made comprehensible through (signifiers in) language.
Terms such as ‘the ineffable’ and ‘unimaginable’ have been used to
describe the Real, which is something that is beyond everyday under-
standing but can be accessed during moments of crisis as traumatic
gaps in the Symbolic order (and intimates Kristeva’s understanding
of the post-thetic). Abjection signifies the frailty of the Symbolic.
In Powers of Horror Kristeva draws a contrast between signifying and
showing, which she sets out in an encounter with death:
The corpse . . . that which has irremediably come a cropper, is

cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who
confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood
and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not
signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalo-
graph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as
in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show
me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 3)
In the two forms of representation that Kristeva presents, one denotes

the presentation of an intermediary in order to signify the represen-
tation while in the other there is no intermediary but the thing itself.
These are given concrete manifestations. When faced with the abyssal
fear of death as present in the corpse, we can bear a signifier that indi-
cates the absence of life, as is present in the flat encephalograph. But
what is unbearable is the tangible presence of death, as found in the
suppurating wound intimating the reality of the corpse. We refuse
these sights in order to continue living and to preserve a sense of the
Lacanian Symbolic realm of law, order and society. Bringing these
sights into view prompts a rupture not only in understanding but
also in signification, which is the point at which meaning falls apart.
This is a glimpse of the Real: that which is ‘without makeup or masks’
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 3). In Chapters 4, 6 and 7, I show how art is often
an unveiling of the Real, where the artist presents images and words
that perforate the boundaries of comfortable understanding, leaving

the viewer/reader contemplating the abyss.
Kristeva challenges Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis on a number
of different grounds. One of the reasons for her revision of Lacanian
theory is the sense of horror and disgust evinced by certain ‘objects’
outside the self. How can we explain these powerful sensations if
not in relation to our former state of the maternal? Repulsion then
issues from the pre-Symbolic state of expulsion and rejection of the
mother. In Kristeva’s theory, separation does not begin during Lacan’s
Symbolic order (or at the Oedipal stage in Freud’s model) but occurs
beforehand (at a pre-Symbolic and pre-Oedipal level) as evidenced in
rituals that involve turning away from the mother’s breast. This is a
pre-linguistic phase, which means that it is both before the infant has
learned to speak and before it has formed its subjectivity. This stage
marks the first experience of abjection. Kristeva argues that separa-
tion, and by extension the formation of the subject, begins with the
infant rejecting the maternal body, which is abject. This is a rework-
ing of both Freud and Lacan’s view, which identifies the mother’s
body as the first or primary object.9 In Kristeva’s account, the Mirror
Stage denotes a further extent of separation but it occurs after the
mother has been abjected.
Another point of difference between Kristeva’s model of psycho-
analytical development and Freudian and Lacanian theory is with
respect to the emotional transitions in subject development. If Lacan
is correct and separation occurs in the Symbolic realm of signification
then, given the pain and loss that endures, why would the infant turn
away from the maternal breast if it represents unadulterated feelings
of joy and security? The fear of castration is the traditional response
offered by both Freud and Lacan to this issue. In Lacan, the desire
for the mother is replaced by the law of the father, where the latter
signifies a loss of wholeness that can be articulated in language, and
language then becomes a response to the trauma of loss. Kristeva’s
account of rejection of the maternal is explained by the infant’s
ambivalence felt in this space, where there is pleasure but also dis-
pleasure and the need to separate. The need to expel the mother, by
turning away and beginning to assert difference, is exactly the spur
needed to continue the process of acquiring language as a tool of
identity. The sense of distance created through the assertion of dif-
ference ensures a more seamless transition to the Symbolic. So it is
the early impetus to withdraw that fuels the momentum actualized

in the Symbolic domain.
Kristeva also revises the prevailing psychoanalytical orthodoxy of
the fearful father of the law. In Tales of Love Kristeva expands the
possibilities of the paternal function and introduces the figure of
a loving father, known as ‘the imaginary father’, who enables the
infant to render its mother abject and enter the Symbolic domain.
Instead of moving to the Symbolic realm filled with fear, as Freud
and Lacan would have it, the infant awaits the love offered by the
father and protection against the ‘emptiness of separation’ (Kristeva,
1987, p. 42). Kristeva states that:
[t]here has been too much stress on the crisis in paternity as cause
of psychotic discontent. Beyond the often fierce but artificial and
incredible tyranny of the Law and the Superego, the crisis in the
paternal function that led to a deficiency of psychic space is in
fact an erosion of the loving father. It is for want of paternal love
that Narcissi, burdened with emptiness, are suffering; eager to be
others, or women, they want to be loved.
(Kristeva, 1987, p. 378)
Abjection: Hovering on the boundaries
In spite of its having been rejected, the abject hovers at the bound-
aries and still operates as a threat to the subject’s boundaries. The
abject holds an enduring power over the subject, threatening it with
collapse. This potential threat exists throughout the course of life
and characterizes our relationship with the outside world. Phenom-
ena that linger on the margins of existence include excrement, vomit
and the corpse, which represents the ultimate threat.10 These phe-
nomena, which are organic, in so far as being of-the-body, are abject
because they transgress the boundary between life and death, with
‘death infecting life’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4).
Abject things cross boundaries, making their states indeterminate
and it is this in-between state that renders the object abject. To
give an example, the corpse is not abject because it stinks or starts
to putrefy but because it is in-between categories, which makes
the putrefaction abject. In the example given in the introduction
of Powers of Horror, in the encounter with skin-topped milk, the
blurring of states is destabilizing: the partitions between inner and

outer or solid and liquid are flimsy. The threat that the milk film
presents means that ‘I’ cannot expel it as it has encroached upon my
being and has caused me to gag, which is a typical reflex activated
by disgust. The ‘other’, that is, the milk film, cannot be objec-
tified because it has shattered my being. In this crossing of the
boundary, the stability of my self is threatened and ‘I’ am not sta-
ble enough to expel it – it is ‘I’ who is expelled (Kristeva, 1982,
p. 4). This example conveys what the abject does to the subject–
object positions that govern our thinking and way of ordering the
world:
Neither subject nor object, the abject makes clear the impossible
and untenable identity of each. If the object secures the subject in
a more or less stable position, the abject signals the fading or disap-
pearance, the absolute mortality and vulnerability of the subject’s
relation to and dependence on the object.
(Grosz, 1992, pp. 197–198)11
The threat it poses to the self as a conscious being means that we

are unable to objectify it, as we could an object. Objectifying some-
thing means that we are able to keep it at arm’s length, to ward it
off and to analyse it in relation to the subject viewing or engaging
with it. In the confrontation of abjection we are in a state beside
ourselves; as the threat increases, the stability of our boundaries
weakens. In this curious state we are not subjects any more because
the boundaries of ourselves have been encroached upon and trans-
gressed, and we are in the grip of a force that only lets go when
we lose a sense of ourselves. The primal state of abjection is worth
recalling here. As young infants, being in a state before language,
we did not have the necessary cognitive and linguistic resources to
separate ourselves from the mother in spite of our rejection of her.
In later life, the grip of this desire and loathing of the maternal takes
hold over us when experiencing abjection and we are temporarily
unable to mark out our autonomous difference, thus leaving us in
this non-subject state. Kristeva clarifies the position as follows: ‘The
abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine . . . The
abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to
I’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1). Winfried Menninghaus asks: ‘What sort of
strange non-object and non-subject is this – one that precedes the

distinction between conscious and unconscious, and always already
must be “cast out” in order that some “speaking subject” can speak
of itself as “I”?’ (Menninghaus, 2003, p. 369). Grosz concludes: ‘The
abject is an impossible object, still part of the subject: an object
the subject strives to expel but which is ineliminable’ (Grosz, 1992,
p. 198). For example, in the presence of ‘a flat encephalograph’, for
example, which Kristeva uses as a signifier of death, we can ‘under-
stand, react, or accept’. However, when faced with something more
visceral, such as a corpse, that cannot be encapsulated in a ‘safe’
signifier because it causes abjection, we are unable to process its
effects in such a measured way. It takes us beyond representation
and we ‘thrust [it] aside in order to live’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3). The
pulverizing force of the abject means that we cannot keep it at a
safe distance and it has the power to violate our boundaries at any
time. In the face of abjection we are not safe and are drawn into a
power dynamic, where we have to fight it off. If it overpowers us
then we lose a sense of self but, because it has violated our selfhood,
we cannot expel it as we would an object, but instead we have to
lose ourselves before we can regain the boundaries of self. To reit-
erate, ‘It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled’ (Kristeva, 1982,
pp. 3–4).
In life we seek experiences which affirm and reaffirm the stabil-
ity of the self. This is part of the instinct of self-preservation. That
notwithstanding, we also crave experiences which dissolve our sense
of self, such as sex, which erode the boundaries separating one’s self
from the other. Our continued fascination with certain art forms,
such as the horror genre, reflects a desire to engage with the abject.
One of the reasons for this is because confrontation with the abject is
cathartic, in that it causes a release of a buildup of tension. Abjection
gives voice to feelings that are often repressed, and confrontation
may engender a sense of release. In a psychoanalytical sense, the
first love ‘object’ is the mother’s body and, although the infant longs
to break the oneness of this relationship in order to become a sub-
ject, it also hankers after this initial union, which was the source
of comfort. The experience of abjection psychically takes us back to
the blurred boundary between the mother and infant in its struggle
for the autonomy of the ego, where attraction notwithstanding, the
mother is rejected as an object of desire.
Against abjection
Kristeva’s theory of abjection has been profoundly influential espe-

cially in application to the visual arts and film where it has been
used to explain the preoccupations of artists and the constructions
of monstrous figures. While some are content to adapt her theory
unquestioningly, there has been increasing criticism from different
quarters about various aspects of her theory. In this section I marshal
some of the most important objections to Kristeva’s theory. Given
the purposes of my book, I do not seek to evaluate these objections in
great detail, nor do I consider whether Kristeva’s theory can address
them. My principal aim here is one of exposition: presenting these
objections as clearly and as forcefully as possible.
Objections can be broadly grouped into two main classes: firstly,
where the legitimacy of Kristeva’s theory of abjection is questioned
and, secondly, where her ideas about the maternal, and by implica-
tion the feminine, have been queried by critics. In the first group,
Kristeva’s theory of abjection has been criticised by art critics, such
as Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, who have claimed
that there is a schism between what Kristeva purports abjection to
be and what she actually does in her theory, which involves reifica-
tion. Chapter 5 outlines the objections that have been levelled at her
theory of abjection.
One serious problem with Kristeva’s theory of abjection is her
claim that the repudiation of the maternal occurs out of feelings
of repulsion that the infant experiences in relation to its mother.
An objection to this view is that infants have a high threshold of dis-
gust and would not be capable of exhibiting such a strong response
of repulsion at such a young age. The experimental psychologist Paul
Rozin and his collaborators have argued that infants need to develop
the capacity for cognitive discrimination before they can experience
disgust. We cannot assume that emotions such as disgust are opera-
tional at birth; the ontogeny of disgust develops only during the first
eight years of life during the process of toilet training, for example
(see Rozin and Fallon, 1987, p. 23; Rozin, Fallon and Augustoni-
Ziskind, 1986; and Rozin, Hammer et al., 1986). Furthermore, infants
need to be trained to understand the levels of disgust that different
body parts and their emissions create.
In the second group of objections, Kristeva’s approach towards
the maternal in her psychoanalytical narrative of abjection has
come under scrutiny, thereby questioning her feminist credentials.

Kristeva’s feminist preoccupations are well documented in writings
about her. John Lechte argues that in fact ‘[t]o the extent that
Kristeva’s name is known outside France, it is usually in connection
with so-called French Feminism’ (Lechte, 1990a, p. xii). Her 1974
work About Chinese Women, following its translation into English, has
been regarded as a strong statement of feminism. Over and above
this particular study she was committed to addressing social inequal-
ity. However, she has also been the target of feminists because of
her controversial use of theory. In the 1980s and 1990s a number
of Anglo-American feminist theorists raised objections to Kristeva
for a number of reasons. Her allegiance to psychoanalysis was the
first obvious criticism. Why would a feminist philosopher choose
to give such credence to theories that had so patently discriminated
against women? Elizabeth Grosz argues that Freudian and Lacanian
approaches theorize about a male body, implying a certain redun-
dancy when thinking about the female body (Grosz, 1994). Elizabeth
Wright discusses how ‘[m]any French and French-inspired feminists
vigorously object to this marginalizing of the feminine. In a variety
of ways they have attempted to read Freud and Lacan so as either
to turn marginality into an advantage or to re-conceptualize the
feminine’ (Wright, 1992, p. xvii). However, although she used estab-
lished patriarchal theories as a platform, she radically reworked the
narrative of psychoanalytical development. Being dissatisfied with
the ‘incomplete’ and erroneous account of infant development that
marginalized the feminine and which overlooked the significance of
the mother as the determinant of individualization, Kristeva intro-
duced the theory of the semiotic as a way of giving credence to
the significance of non-verbal drives and energies in subject forma-
tion as well as the importance of maternal space. Her reworking,
however, raises an immediate problem, and can be outlined as fol-
lows. One could argue that by likening the semiotic to the maternal,
and thereby the feminine and the symbolic to the post-maternal,
Kristeva is essentially pairing up the semiotic with nature and the
symbolic with culture, a move which is highly problematic because
it involves biological essentialism and reinforces stereotypes about
the maternal.12
A fundamental point of contention, which is levelled at her theory
in particular, is Kristeva’s elucidation of abjection as being a rejection
and disparagement of the maternal body. We can take the view that
‘the “object” of abjection is the maternal and not the feminine’

(Reader, 2006, p. 52).13 In other words, the maternal should not be
seen as being equivalent to the feminine and we need to remember
that Kristeva is referring to the former in her theorization. However,
this is still problematic because Kristeva is maintaining that we must
relinquish the mother in order to live, which in blunt terms is equiv-
alent to a premise of matricide. She does not qualify her assessment
as Creed does in the context of film theory where the latter argues
that the maternal is not abject per se, but only because of its con-
figuration within a signifying system. In Creed’s own words: ‘I wish
to re-emphasize that I regard the association of woman’s maternal
and reproductive functions with the abject as a construct of patriar-
chal ideology . . . Woman is not, by her very nature, an abject being’
(Creed, 1993, p. 83). Kristeva fails to justify the attributions she makes
to the maternal.
On balance, one can argue that Kristeva has made headway in chal-
lenging prevailing psychoanalytical traditions by focusing more on
the maternal than is found in Freudian or Lacanian analysis (where
it is viewed as an object). In doing this she thereby reconfigures the
imbalance that was hitherto present by emphasizing the importance
of the maternal in social development. However, although she did
challenge traditional dogmas, she still upheld the rejection of the
maternal, which is problematic for feminism. Also, her introduction
of the semiotic does not alter the fact that it is unable to operate
outside of the Symbolic order, which goes against the aspirations
of many feminists who sought to find a language of the feminine
(see Lechte, 1990a, p. 202) and does not resolve the issue of patriar-
chal ideology. If we support these objections then we can conclude
that her attempt to rework sexual difference was unsuccessful and, in
effect, she ends up reinforcing the Symbolic order of patriarchy.
Several studies have attempted to salvage the significance of abjec-
tion with a view to giving it a different interpretation to Kristeva’s.
One of these pivotal studies is Imogen Tyler’s article ‘Against Abjec-
tion’. Tyler argues for the importance of widening the concept of
abjection beyond Kristevan horizons and the concomitant need
for a ‘critical shift’ of preoccupations that moved away from ‘the
“transgressive potentiality” of “encounters with the abject” to a
consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social
locations’ (Tyler, 2009, p. 78).
Abjection and disgust: Difference without a distinction?
Another concern that has been addressed earlier involves the rela-
tionship between abjection and disgust. During the course of
researching this book it emerged that the term ‘disgust’ cropped
up regularly in accounts of abjection, however the reverse was not
true. The proximity of these two terms needs to be interrogated fur-
ther with a view to enriching the theory of abjection. They have
certain undeniable similarities: they both involve expulsion, they
involve similar reactions and they share many of the same elici-
tors. In terms of its phenomenology, abjection evokes feelings of
disgust, which is described as ‘one of the most violent affections
of the human perceptual system’ that conveys human vitality and
that penetrates the whole nervous system (Menninghaus, 2003, p. 1).
An inextricable connection lies between disgust and our animal
nature; we tend to find things disgusting that are a reminder of
our animal origins. This is a core idea of the work of Rozin and
his collaborators, who interpret our behaviour to separate ourselves
from things that elicit disgust as a more elementary fundamen-
tal need to detach ourselves from our animal condition. Disgust
generates feelings of nausea that prompt our desire to move away
from the source of these feelings, thereby reducing sensory contact
with it. If abjection involves disgust, in that disgust is elicited in
abjection, then it is reasonable to describe them as having simi-
larities. It is also worth noting that outside of scholarship disgust
is widely understood and used, often inappropriately in the sense
of hyperbole, but still remains in common parlance. Abjection, on
the other hand, is not as commonly known, nor as familiar a term
and is often misconstrued, marginalized or ignored completely.14
Further analysis is needed to uncover what the connections are
between these two spheres of experience, which are clearly akin, but
which have not been sufficiently characterized as related phenom-
ena. It needs to be established what (if anything) is distinctive about
abjection. Perhaps there are distinct but similar traits that connect
the two, or could it be that we are making a difference without a
distinction?
Kristeva has certainly attempted to ‘make the concept of abjec-
tion the cornerstone of a comprehensive theory of culture, just as
Freud had done with the concept of repression’ (Menninghaus, 2003,
p. 373). She was cognizant that she was introducing a new concept
and says that in the Western world there is not another concept
that addresses the issues raised by this type of investigation: ‘In this
sense my work picks up on a certain vacuum’ (Lechte and Margaroni,
2004, p. 155). In contrast, although in recent years there have been
studies on disgust, which I discuss later, they have not been consol-
idated into a single theory in the way that abjection has. We cannot
assume that the framing of the terms is in any way significant
and it does not mean that we should assume that they are distinct
phenomena.
In Powers of Horror Kristeva describes disgust as being a ‘symptom’
of the ‘sign’ of abjection: ‘We are no longer within the sphere of
the unconscious but at the limit of primal repression that, neverthe-
less, has discovered an intrinsically corporeal and already signifying
brand, symptom, and sign: repugnance, disgust, abjection’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 11).
It is not clear what the differences between symptom and sign are
as, in some contexts, they may refer to the same thing, but what
Kristeva seems to be suggesting is that there is an interconnection
between the sign and the symptom. The connotations of ‘symptom’
suggest that we could be looking at something physiological and/or
psychological and that, maybe, the relationship between the sign and
symptom is causal, so experiencing the abject then causally leads to a
feeling of disgust. The separation of the two terms is helpful because it
acknowledges that they are not to be used interchangeably, as ‘abjec-
tion’ means something different from ‘disgust’. However, beyond this
brief observation, it is worth investigating their relationship further.
In some of the examples of abjection already given – excrement,
vomit, a corpse, skin on the surface of milk – it is entirely plausi-
ble to discuss them as examples of disgust as well, which may lead to
the finding that there is clearly a definite overlap between the phe-
nomenology of abjection and disgust. But are there any significant
differences? This leads to the ultimate question of what (if anything)
is distinctive about abjection?
References to disgust in the context of abjection by Kristeva and
others who have written about abjection are not matched by ref-
erences to the abject by writers on disgust. From the twentieth
century onwards a number of books in the fields of psychology, aes-
thetics and the philosophy of emotions have been written on the
subject of disgust, which reflects the ‘affective turn’ in the humani-

ties and social sciences. One of the reasons for continued academic
interest in disgust is because it is indeed one of the most elemen-
tary of human emotions that marks the transition from nature
to culture, a fact that explains our ambivalent attitudes towards
our bodies. It has a long historical lineage that involves psycholo-
gists, anthropologists and those interested in human nature. Leading
studies in the literature include Darwin’s work on the elementary
nature of disgust in human evolution, which is often the point of
departure for discussions of disgust, and Freud’s study of disgust
and morality.15 Aurel Kolnai wrote the first full-length treatment of
the phenomenology of disgust in ‘Disgust’ (Der Ekel) (which was
written in 1927).16 This was followed by a number of studies of
disgust in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Sartre’s
Nausea (1938), and in the later part of the century significant book-
length studies in the field including The Anatomy of Disgust (1997)
by William Ian Miller; Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong
Sensation (2003) by Winfried Menninghaus; Hiding from Humanity:
Disgust, Shame and the Law (2004) by Martha Nussbaum; The Mean-
ing of Disgust (2011) by Colin McGinn (2011); Savoring Disgust: The
Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (2011) by Carolyn Korsmeyer and
Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (2011) by Daniel
Kelly. The studies on disgust by Rozin and his collaborators are
notable developments in the field. Building on Darwin’s research,
they argue that disgust involves activating biological processes of
rejection but involves more than an instinctual response to spoiled
or unsavoury food. They also discuss the significance of cultural tra-
ditions and moral systems that shape attitudes to disgust: ‘[d]isgust
plays a special role in the moral domain as a means of socializa-
tion’ (Rozin et al., 2008, p. 763). The academic backgrounds of these
various writers convey the interest and applicability of the subject
in fields as wide-ranging as philology, literature, biology, aesthetics
and law.
These many texts detail the pervasiveness of disgust that affects the
behaviour of individuals and social groups on an aesthetic and moral
level, but what is apparent throughout is how abjection had been
overlooked. In general, the concept of abjection has been neglected
in studies on disgust, which seems odd given that the psychoanalyt-
ical perspective (vis-à-vis Freud and his theories of the repression of
archaic libidinal drives) has been informative for our understanding

of the subject.17 One possible reason for the neglect is the recent shift
of attention in philosophy from the cognitive frameworks of beliefs
to the reactive and more primary and sense-based experience of emo-
tions. This approach is outlined by Carolyn Korsmeyer and Barry
Smith, who employ Paul Griffiths’ theory of the categorization of
emotions in their elucidation of disgust. ‘Griffiths divides emotions
into three categories: quick-response affect programs, higher-order
cognitive emotions, and socially-defined psychological states’ where
the first category picks out our ‘biologically based syndromes that
have evolved to cope with the challenges presented by hostile envi-
ronments’ (Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004, pp. 12–13). The affects in
this category, of which disgust is one, tend to ‘bypass higher, delib-
erate responses’ so even though we know a particular animal is not
harmful we still react with fear and are often unable to overcome this
(Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004, p. 13). The phenomenological accounts
that Kristeva articulates, particularly in the opening chapter of Pow-
ers of Horror, highlight the immediacy of this visceral response that
we have to certain foods, for instance. Her immediate response to
the skin on milk fits with the quick-response affect. What does not
fit, however, is her cognitive mapping of this feeling back to what
she understands to be its primal manifestation. This process of work-
ing backwards and tracing what is so reactive to the point of origin
of such powerful feelings can seem farfetched and contrived. But
equally we could also add that a focus on the sensory-based response
is reductive because it does not give a full picture of the importance
that an emotion such as disgust holds in cultural life. A more plausi-
ble explanation for the neglect of abjection in studies on disgust can
be explained by the still unbridgeable gap between the analytic and
continental traditions in philosophy. Most of the current literature
on philosophy is concerned with issues pertaining to the philoso-
phy of mind and issues that are of a different order to Kristeva’s
objectives.18
Menninghaus’s study is one of the few that mentions abjection.
In his comprehensive study he incorporates abjection into his dis-
cussion on disgust and devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 9) to
abjection, which he describes as being ‘the newest mutation in the
theory of disgust’, in the 1980s (Menninghaus, 2003, p. 365). In this
claim he is using ‘disgust’ as an umbrella term that, amongst other
things, includes ‘abjection’ in its vocabulary and manifestation and

does not suggest that it is a distinct phenomenon.
In their introductory essay to Kolnai’s work on disgust, Carolyn
Korsmeyer and Barry Smith make a brief but noteworthy compar-
ison between Kristeva’s notion of abjection and Kolnai’s notion of
disgust. They argue that the two are ‘different’ and that what distin-
guishes them is that while abjection entails disgust, it also involves
fear, but the reverse is not true (Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004, p. 18).
Although in ‘actual experience’ disgust and fear are often ‘blended
together’, Kolnai emphasises the point, in both of his essays, that
they are structurally different, a fact that is derived from phenomeno-
logical analysis; disgust is orientated towards the particular features
or characteristics of an object (the Sosein) but fear is deeper and is a
reaction to the being (the Dasein) of the object (Korsmeyer and Smith,
pp. 18–19). The fear and threat posed to one’s self-integrity is at stake
in abjection, which causes one to recoil and/or flee. Abjection differs
from disgust in the inextricable relationship that it has with subjec-
tivity. The subject needs to be rid of the abject in order to be. Disgust,
however, does not have the same inextricable relationship with the
subject, and in the presence of something disgusting we do not feel
fear. There are also further differences between the two emotions that
cause different physiological and neurological responses – the two
emotions of disgust and fear affect the heart rate in different ways and
are processed in different areas of the brain (Korsmeyer and Smith,
2004, p. 19). The crucial distinction for this study is that although dis-
gust causes feelings of revulsion because of the characteristics of the
object, it does not induce fear and so we may be able to withstand the
feelings aroused. Abjection, however, is a more serious charge because
it causes existential disruption and affects our stability of self. As we
saw in the skin on milk example the abject causes a rupture in the
sense of self; it ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject’
which needs to be regained after the source of the feelings is removed
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 5). In making this distinction between disgust and
abjection, Kolnai can be seen to be rebutting Griffiths’ categoriza-
tion of emotions and is claiming that abjection is both direct and
immediate as well as being high order and involving the self.
Miller also makes a distinction between disgust and fear: he aligns
disgust with removal (of the offending item) and fear with flight
(Miller, 1997, p. 25). If we are disgusted by something then we wish
to have it removed from our presence. We may even flee the room
to escape the object but this is a different type of flight from what
would occur if we were fleeing to escape something that we actu-
ally feared. There is usually a greater sense of urgency present in
fear-impelled flight; we cannot bear to be in the same room as the
offending item and need to leave as quickly as possible. In the case
of overlap – so ‘fear-imbued disgust’ – we have a supposedly differ-
ent phenomenon: horror from which we cannot escape (Miller, 1997,
p. 26). This is something that we experience when watching a horror
film, for instance, and is discussed further in Chapter 6.
Continuing with this line of thought, abjection, unlike disgust,
involves fear because of the threat to the sense of self, a feature
that is not part of the rhetoric of disgust. This is the mark of differ-
ence between the two concepts. Abjection involves the need for the
self/subject to eradicate that which prevents the subject from being
autonomous. As Hal Foster puts it:
the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I . . . It is a fan-

tasmatic substance not only alien to the subject but intimate with
it – too much so in fact, and this overproximity produces panic in
the subject. In this way the abject touches on the fragility of our
boundaries . . . .
(Foster, 1996a, p. 153)
In contrast, disgust may induce powerful physical and emotional

responses but the self remains intact.
Menninghaus would disagree with the above evaluation that dis-
gust is separate from fear. In his assessment, disgust involves the loss
of self, which is something that invariably involves fear. He states:
‘Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state
of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation in the
face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive struggle, in which
what is in question is, quite literally, whether “to be or not to be” ’
(Menninghaus, 2003, p. 1). On balance, I think that, while it is an
interesting exercise to isolate disgust and fear and to identify their
causes and trajectories, every case of disgust involves aversion, and
aversion is based on fear. This admits of degree but in all cases fear
is always present. We turn away from something that causes disgust
because we do not want to be in contact with it; we fear it and it is
perceived to be dangerous because of its powers to contaminate or

pollute by contact or ingestion. As a result we recoil in fear.
However, this does not solve the apparent lack of difference
between the objects that generate these feelings: are there things
that are abject that are not disgusting? And, conversely are there
things that are disgusting that are not abject? Kolnai and subsequent
theorists such as Menninghaus and Miller divide disgust into two
distinct types: one is preventative (and keeps disgust at bay) while
the other Kolnai (2004, p. 64) describes as ‘satiation-induced dis-
gust’, which entails overindulgence in the consumption of sweet
food, for example, and does not involve abjection (Menninghaus,
2003, pp. 18–20).19 There are other instances of excess, such as a
swarm of maggots teeming with life, that are abject but in this case
it is about the type of object rather than the number that induces
abjection. The way of testing this hypothesis is to consider whether
a single maggot would cause abjection, and indeed it would. To use
another example: we would not think of a ‘swarm’ of kittens over a
queen (i.e. mother cat) as being abject, which confirms the view that
the surfeit of objects is not a sufficient condition of abjection – it is
the type of object that is also critical.20 To return to the earlier exam-
ple of the excessive consumption of food, here we experience disgust
but not abjection. There are no cases where the reverse is true, as
abjection involves the emotion of disgust as part of its manifesta-
tion. This leads me to the conclusion that abjection is a proper subset
of disgust. We have seen in this comparative analysis that abjection
and disgust have the same presentations and phenomenology but
different theoretical roots.
2
A Cultural History of Abjection
Any account of abjection involves discussion of the precarious nature

of the boundary and the disruptive effects that abjection has on it.
In the previous chapter we saw that the maternal body was made
abject by the infant, not because the maternal body was unclean
(although it may have been) but because it challenged boundaries
and threatened identity. The boundary outlines the structure or sys-
tem, which may refer to something particular and concrete such as
one’s body or self, or to an organization, institution or society. Iden-
tity is constituted through a process of abjection resulting in clearly
delineated boundaries between different states: inside and outside,
life and death, and so on. Abjection occurs when the boundary of
the self, to give an example, is under the threat of invasion by, for
instance, ‘things that are decaying and putrefying, that are contami-
nated and contaminating, and are thus associated with impurity and
death – such as corpses; open wounds; crawling, pulsating maggots’
(Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004, p. 2). Identity is established through
the process of negation and rejection, where what lies outside the
boundary is as significant (in its exclusion) as what is contained
within it. Abjection necessitates the erection of the boundaries in the
first place through ‘[t]he logic of prohibition’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 64).
It is through the abjection of the not-me that the boundaries of the
body/self/system in question can be instated.
Threats to the boundary come in different forms and are divided
into those that come from outside (external) and those that are issued
from within (internal). External threats include physical or other
types of violence, that disrupt the equilibrium of the system, causing
40
A Cultural History of Abjection 41
the boundaries to falter through erosion or disintegration. Internal

threats (such as a tumour in the body) come from within and push
outwards, weakening the boundary. External and internal threats can
each bring about a state of abjection, which results in a confusion
of boundaries – we are turned inside out. As the danger increases
in magnitude or draws nearer, fear mounts as the possibility of dis-
solution or collapse becomes more pressing. For this reason ‘[t]hat
which threatens identity must be jettisoned from the borders and
placed outside’ (Oliver, 2003, p. 47). As with disgust, proximity is an
important component of abjection because it requires sensory stimu-
lation to activate perceptual awareness. There is a positive correlation
between the proximity and intensity of disgust. An awareness of a
corpse lying behind a closed door in an adjoining room may cause
anxiety, but it does not compare with the increase in fear caused if
the offending object was in front of our very eyes. That would convey
a very different experience.
Kristeva informs us that the abject ‘does not respect borders, posi-
tions, rules’ and ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva, 1982,
p. 4). But while it does not respect the border, it does not cut itself
off from it: ‘We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambigu-
ity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the
subject from what [threatens] it – on the contrary, abjection acknowl-
edges it to be in perpetual danger’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 9). The abject
then is that which traverses and transgresses; that which endangers
a structure and finds itself on the wrong side of the boundary, often
giving rise to the prohibitions specified by the taboo. The bound-
ary is in place to safeguard systems and functions and to separate
and demarcate different states, such as life and death, and the sacred
and the profane. Without the boundary we risk the threat of slippage
between order and disorder and its corollaries – form/formlessness
and life/death. Slippage from the first to the second term in each pair
causes disruption to the system and the only way of rectifying this
is if the object that causes the disruption is withdrawn completely.
Laws and restrictions are in place in order to protect the boundaries
by using a variety of different means and sanctions, while recogniz-
ing that abjection remains a continual threat that may overpower the
system.
In crossing the boundary, the abject highlights the significance of
its function, but also simultaneously draws attention to its fragility.
What we see in the crossing of the boundary is the subtlety of

transgression. Transgression involves going beyond the boundary,
exceeding its limits and coming face to face with the taboo. But to
transgress is not to destroy or do away with the boundary, but rather
involves the crucial act of establishing the law; it is, as Chris Jenks
points out, ‘a deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation’ (Jenks,
2003, p. 2). This view is echoed by a number of theorists. Pasi Falk
argues that ‘transgression presupposes the existence of boundaries,
of prohibition and order’ (Falk, 1994, p. 86). Paul Hegarty com-
ments on how inextricable law and transgression is: ‘if there were
no transgressions, we would not need law – so law/taboo and trans-
gression are bound up from the start’ (Hegarty, 2000, p. 125). Indeed,
as Hegarty reminds us, quoting from Bataille, transgression ‘does not
deny the taboo, but transcends it and completes it’ (Bataille, 1987, p. 63).
Reversing this claim, we can infer that the taboo is validated by the
possibility of transgression, which affirms its forbidden nature. It has
no appeal or fascination without the prohibitions that fuel it.
In making a distinction between mere anarchy and the double-
sided nature of transgression, Kristeva recognizes the integral impor-
tance of the moral aspects of transgression. She is not interested in
the amoral subject who merely ‘flaunts its disrespect for the law’ for
all it shows is lack of belief in the law. The immoral criminal, on the
other hand, adheres in theory to the law but disavows it in his/her
actions, thus highlighting the fragility of the law (Kristeva, 1982, p.4).
By threatening the boundary, the immoral criminal can be described
as abject.
This chapter focuses on various systems of regulation that have
been used in society and culture and investigates the role of the
boundary in protecting the system from rupture. In the Introduc-
tion two conflicting operations of abjection were discussed, where
it was viewed as being both foundational and disruptive of order.
Here we look at abjection as a process of regulation, where ‘the oper-
ation to abject is fundamental to the maintenance of subjectivity
and society alike’ (Foster, 1996a, p. 114, italics added). Societies have
developed laws and taboos which operate to monitor abjection, to
limit exposure to it, to regulate its effects and to control the way
it is experienced. The focus in Chapter 1 was the individual’s psy-
chic development, where the subject was a ‘clean and proper’ body
that has autonomous boundaries, but it is important to appreciate
that abjection is also part of a collective mentality and is therefore a

concern within society at large.
In Powers of Horror Kristeva undertakes an overview (while main-
taining her ‘rootedness’ to psychical significance), where she surveys
the ramifications of abjection in different aspects of culture. In the
first two chapters she broadly focuses on psychoanalysis before con-
centrating her attention on understanding how the abject is managed
in different cultural systems. In the third, fourth and fifth chapters
(‘From Filth to Defilement’, ‘Semiotics of Biblical Abomination’ and
‘ . . . Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi’) Kristeva examines rites of defilement
from different religious and cultural traditions. In the fourth and
fifth chapters she focuses on biblical purity rites in Judaeo-Christian
practices and the approaches that major anthropologists have taken
in examining traditions of defilement. Kristeva highlights the differ-
ences between what we might want to call the shift from the Old
Testament experience of abjection to that of the New Testament,
which coincides with a move from an understanding of the abject as
something externally defiling to something that is more about moral
transgression and a violation of God’s will as an internal experience.
Abjection is now about the inner battle: ‘For evil, thus displaced into
the subject, will not cease tormenting him from within, no longer
as a polluting or defiling substance, but as the ineradicable repulsion
of his henceforth divided and contradictory being’ (Kristeva, 1982,
p. 116).
When thinking about traditions of defilement, the seminal study
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)
by the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas comes to mind. Indeed,
Kristeva utilizes Douglas’s findings in her study of abjection and
describes her as being ‘fundamental’, which I take to mean her sta-
tus both in the field of anthropology and also in the development
of Kristeva’s ideas about abjection (Kristeva, 1982, p. 65). Douglas’s
detailed structuralist study looks at the role that dirt plays in a host
of different cross-cultural practices to explain how, in spite of the dif-
ference elaborations, our motivations remain the same: to safeguard
society and ward off danger, which she discusses in terms of pollu-
tion. Furthermore, ‘[w]here there is dirt there is system’ (Douglas,
2002, p. 44). By studying the ideas that a people have about dirt (pol-
lution) we can understand more about the systems and structures of
that society. She regarded the physical body as a social symbol of a
‘bounded system [where] its boundaries can represent any boundaries

which become threatened or endangered’ (Williams and Bendelow,
1998, p. 27). The social body then reflects how the physical body is
experienced. Dirt collects in any social or moral system at the bound-
ary because this marks the point of greatest vulnerability. Douglas’s
structuralist system, which discusses the workings of different soci-
eties vis-à-vis dirt and pollution, is examined before moving on to
consider dirt more specifically in relation to the body. The body is a
system, the boundaries of which are constantly under threat and are
protected by taboos. In Powers of Horror Kristeva follows Douglas’s use
of the boundary to regulate order and argues that ‘it is only through
the delimitation of the “clean and proper” body that the symbolic
order, and the acquisition of a sexual and psychical identity within it,
becomes possible’ (Grosz, 1990, p. 86). Maintaining the boundaries
of the Symbolic wards off the reminder of our animal natures and
conveys our desperate attempts to forget this fact. We have ‘a psychic
need to avoid reminders of our animal origins’ (Miller, 1997, p. 6),
and human civilization has been orientated towards deflecting think-
ing away from our origins to focus on achievements that emphasize
the distinctive attributes of humanity. The boundary was used pre-
ventatively as a way of protecting humans from being confronted by
their animal natures.
A preliminary point about context is needed. Throughout the
chapter (and indeed this book) I maintain that abjection is uni-
versally resonant; it is something that is integral to and distinctive
about the experience of being human as opposed to the experience
of being an animal, and is a phenomenon that is experienced cross-
culturally and historically, although the specific sources that cause
abjection vary. In writing and thinking about abjection it is impor-
tant to be culturally sensitive and to recognize the particularities of
practices.
Our ideas of dirt
One of the assumptions of Purity and Danger is that in order for

societies and cultural orders to function, categories are needed that
divide groups off from one another, and these categories need to have
firm boundaries that prevent invasion or violation. A breakdown in
these categories leads to pollution, which is dangerous because it
causes disruption to the order, and punishment is often bestowed

on the perpetrator who has caused the boundaries to be violated.
The boundaries are the most vulnerable points in the system and are
where pollution and dirt are found.
In her investigations of dirt, Douglas explores different cultural sys-
tems and practices (from ‘primitive’ and modern societies) including
her own background (where she writes about dirt in her household)
with a view to ascertaining people’s attitudes towards ‘the unclean’,
and she derives a framework of interpretation that has wide appli-
cation. What is determined is that while our revulsion to what we
regard as unclean may be universal, the objects of abomination vary;
dirt is culturally relative. Something that lies outside conventional
ordering structures is ‘dirty’, impure and capable of polluting because
it is out of place and so causes confusion and disruption to the social
(and even cosmic) order. Dirt has to be gotten rid of in order to pre-
serve social order. ‘What is clean in relation to one thing may be
unclean in relation to another, and vice versa. The idiom of pollution
lends itself to a complex algebra which takes into account the vari-
ables in each context’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 10). For this reason, what
is marginal is avoided and regarded as dangerous because it is on the
outskirts of the system. Rites and rituals function to bring about the
separation between entities (sexes, classes, castes, religions, etc.) that
should not feature together in a system, thus preventing defilement;
and to cleanse and purify if contamination has occurred. One of
the most elaborate systems of division, which is mentioned by both
Douglas and Kristeva, is the Indian hierarchical caste system that
works along religious and social lines and ranks castes according to
their relative purity or impurity, which is reflected in socio-economic
positioning and the rules of conduct between the different castes.1
In Purity and Danger we learn that our fear of dirt is not merely
a reaction to abhorrence, lack of cleanliness or health, but is also
a deep-rooted need for structure and thereby a concomitant need
to manage our environment in order to bring this about. Douglas
starts from the claim that ‘everyone universally finds dirt offensive’
(Douglas, 2002, pp. xvii–xviii) and, as an additional claim, informs
us that ‘ . . . dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as
absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder . . . our ideas about
disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoid-
ing dirt’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 2). The variation in cultural practices is
also evidence that we cannot talk about substances or objects as being

intrinsically dirty. This may come as a surprise because our revulsion
towards things that we classify as dirty feels as if it is instinctively
deep-rooted – x should be avoided because x is dirty, and no further
questions need to be asked. If asked to rationalize our feelings about
x then we may cite our fear of contamination and its consequences
of illness or disease. Our growing understanding of the science of
pathogens since the nineteenth century has meant that we can frame
our perceptions of what is dirty in the sense of what is disease-laden.
‘So much has it transformed our lives that it is difficult to think of
dirt except in the context of pathogenicity’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 44).
Douglas explains that nothing is dirty in itself, but things become
dirty in their (mis)placement and the fear that is associated with dirt
is actually a more deep-rooted anathema to something being out of
place. Cleaning, then, is as much about order as it is about hygiene.
When we are thinking of what is dirty we are often drawn to the con-
tents of the body as examples. Faeces, urine and mucus commonly
provoke feelings of disgust and we may be inclined to designate them
as dirty en masse. However, in their respective places in the body – in
the bowel, bladder, and in nasal passages, they would not be thought
of as being dirty.
Notwithstanding scientific understanding, we can talk about dirt
as being an affront to order and this is certainly what it signifies
in relation to prescribed symbolic systems. ‘Eliminating [dirt then]
is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the
environment’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 2), thereby removing the offend-
ing material. Douglas uses the two terms ‘ambiguity’ and ‘anomaly’
to categorize that which does not fit into a system, where ‘ambiguity’
means having more than one meaning or having an indeterminate
form, and ‘anomaly’ is an exception to a category. If something is
ambiguous or anomalous then it does not fit or belong to a partic-
ular system of classification and is deemed ‘dirty’ as a result. This
ascription of dirtiness may be accompanied by other evaluative feel-
ings about the lowliness of the object, for example, leading to the
ascription of it as unhygienic.2 These two terms, ‘ambiguous’ and
‘anomalous’, also describe the status of the abject, which is often in
between two states and/or boundaries and cannot be neatly classi-
fied except in relation to the above terms which convey its outsider
status.
In Chapter 3 of her study, Douglas discusses the classification sys-

tems that are present in the book of Leviticus, which details Jewish
laws compiled by Moses. The classification of food in different dietary
laws underpins religious practices. The laws, which gave instructions
about how to manage uncleanliness in health and food prepara-
tion, were intended to guide people to be more righteous and to
enact rituals according to God’s wishes.3 Douglas focuses on the food
laws in Chapter 11 in the book of Leviticus which prescribe rituals,
the separation of categories made between animals that are holy in
the sense of whole and complete (kosher) and unholy, which means
unclean and unacceptable for consumption.4 The laws extended
beyond food to the preparer. By consuming (and in some cases han-
dling) unclean food, a person has made herself unclean. In addition,
in religious law there are prescriptions about food preparation and
the consumption of certain foods only on certain days. Equating
cleanliness with holiness has been adopted in a number of different
cultural traditions, where cleanliness is linked with righteous living
(to godliness, as the proverb goes) while ‘dirt was symbolically linked
with sin’ (Mellor and Shilling, 1997, p. 44). It is interesting how in
religious food laws (not exclusively in Judaism) that ‘those bodily
secretions – blood and milk – associated with the maternal body are
the most strictly regulated by cultural and religious rituals’ (Oliver,
2003, p. 48).
In determining what is suitable or not for consumption, the book
of Leviticus takes up the classification scheme used in the six-day cre-
ation story in Genesis to assess the relationship between the form
and function of animal life. Douglas’s analysis examines the classi-
fication scheme that was laid out in Genesis and develops what is
distinct about each of the three classes: the division of the world into
the earth, the waters and the firmament. Each of these entities found
in these places, described respectively as flesh, fish and fowl has an
appropriate mode of locomotion. From this it is concluded that any
class of creature that is ‘not equipped for the right kind of locomo-
tion in its element is contrary to holiness’ and hence are classified
as ‘abominable’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 69), meaning that they are not
clean, in the sense of being ‘proper to its class’ (p. xiv) or fitting. Their
in-between and anomalous nature renders them unstable because
they do not fit into a prescribed classification. The following ani-
mals are acceptable in that they are appropriate to their given habitat
whether sea, land or air: fish that swim, birds that fly and four-legged
animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves. There are also
borderline cases, such as pigs and camels that adhere to one or more
characteristics of the allotted group but not all. Pigs are hoofed but
do not chew the cud, and camels have the converse characteristics.
Given that what is taken to be meat is from animals like sheep and
cattle that both chew the cud and are cloven-hoofed, displaying only
one but not both of these characteristics relegates an animal to being
a borderline case, and hence unacceptable. Douglas points out that
‘this failure to conform to the two necessary criteria for defining cat-
tle is the only reason given in the Old Testament for avoiding the pig;
nothing whatever is said about its dirty scavenging habits’ (Douglas,
2002, p. 68). Her observation reiterates the basis of selection, which
is about biological and behavioural features and not public health
policy. Further features may indeed accentuate the unclean status of
the animal but decisions were made according to fit. Any creature
that ‘creeps, crawls or swarms upon the earth’, such as the snake or
worm, does not belong to any category because of its indeterminate
movement and inability to be classified within the categories of earth,
air or water. Hence it belongs to the realm of death (Douglas, 2002,
p. 70). Another despised group is that of hybrids because of their cat-
egorical ambiguity raised by being a part of two categories: ‘You shall
keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different
kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall
there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff’
(Leviticus 19.19 RSV).
In the book of Leviticus we have a complex but consistent system
that evaluates the status of creatures in the animal kingdom and con-
veys the intrinsic relationship between defilement and order. If dirt is
to be defined in relation to systems then it makes sense that the mis-
placement of an item in a system that is foreign to it creates a sense
of dirtiness. We find food remnants on clothing, hair on the palms
of hands and, to use an example by Douglas (2002, p. 44), shoes on
a dining table, dirty because of the incongruity of the relationship –
we do not expect to see the former on the latter and the unfamiliar
grouping causes offence to our sense of hygiene and order. In The
Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals Darwin discusses the
emotion of disgust in relation to food and gives the following exam-
ple: ‘A smear of soup on a man’s beard looks disgusting, though there
is of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself. I presume that this

follows from the strong association in our minds between the sight
of food, however circumstanced, and the idea of eating it’ (Darwin,
2009, p. 201). It is the out-of-placeness that contributes to the pollut-
ing force of the soup, which on the man’s beard looks dirty. We look
at food with the prospect of consuming it, or at least of finding it
palatable. The placement of food on a beard renders it filthy and trig-
gers our disgust reflex, and as a result it puts us off eating the soup
because we think it is contaminated.
In some instances it is not just the placement but also the action
of expulsion from the body that can cause offence. Consider the
psychologist Gordon Allport’s experiments about the sense of body
self where he examines how, once across a boundary, bodily fluid
becomes alien and foreign to us:
Think first of swallowing the saliva in your mouth, or do so. Then

imagine expectorating it into a tumbler and drinking it! What
seemed natural and ‘mine’ suddenly becomes disgusting and alien.
Or picture yourself sucking blood from a prick in your finger; then
imagine sucking blood from a bandage around your finger! What
I perceive as separate from my body becomes, in the twinkling of
an eye, cold and foreign.
(Allport, 1955, p. 43, in Miller, 1997, p. 97)
While in the expected place of the mouth (and not on the surface or
outside of the body) saliva is thought to be acceptable and is not dirty.
In fact, it is more than acceptable as it is essential to the physiologi-
cal process of mastication. The same goes for other bodily substances
‘[s]aliva in the mouth, snot in the nose, blood in veins, feces in the
colon, urine in the bladder are basically not present, being safely
where they belong as long as attention is not called to them’ (Miller,
1997, p. 97). What is more, to add to these, they have variegated
functions that are essential to normal organic functioning. However,
once outside their loci they become dangerous – as Douglas reminds
us, what lies on the margins is dangerous because of its proximity to
the boundary: ‘[a]ny structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins’
(Douglas, 2002, p.150). A positive correlation between proximity to
the boundary and the intensity of aversion holds, so that the closer
something lies to the boundary, the greater the threat it poses. Once
separated from their naturalized location and on the other side of the
boundary, these once benign substances become foreign and danger-
ous to us, being reminders of death. These substances become what
Allport calls ‘not-me’ – the ego-alien – and cause revulsion (1955,
p. 43). Their lingering and visceral presence on the outside of the
body instils a sense of revulsion in the beholder and blurs the clean
boundary that separates what is inner from what is outer. Paul Rozin
and April Fallon ask: ‘At what point in the process of ejecting saliva
or chewed food does the object become ego-alien? For example, if the
tongue is extended, with chewed food on it, is it acceptable to return
the food to the mouth, or has it passed into the outside world?’ (Rozin
and Fallon, 1987, p. 26).
Various criticisms have been made of Douglas’s structuralist anal-
ysis including Miller’s injunction about the problematic of fit.
In explicit classification systems, such as in food prohibitions, rules
about what does not ‘fit’ can readily be identified.5 In other realms,
the idea of ‘fit’ becomes more difficult. Miller argues that in the case
of excrement we have something that is not anomalous since ‘it is a
necessary condition of living’. He continues:
[i]t is not that things don’t fit; it is that they fit right at the bottom
of the conceptual grid. Yet this doesn’t explain everything either,
for not all lowness is polluting, as long as it knows its place and
behaves. And that is precisely it: the low by virtue of being low are
always a risk to threaten and misbehave, to harm and contaminate
the high who know they are high because the low are there to
provide the necessary contrast.6
(Miller, 1997, p. 45)
In asking ‘What exactly is dirt?’, Kolnai regards dirt being defined

as something that is located in an improper place as inaccurate and
unpersuasive.7 His explanation is as follows: ‘For should I find pre-
cious stones scattered in a peat bog, I would not say that the peat
[was] “filthy with diamonds”, but much rather that I had found
diamonds in a heap of dirt’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 55). Equally, it is
too simplistic to adduce that dirt signals danger or is disease-laden
because ‘[we] would not, after all, shrink away from a hand that
has been dipped into, say, cholera germs as from one which were
merely dirty’ (p. 55). Given these blind alleys, how are we able to
come to a fuller and more encompassing definition of dirt? Kolnai
proposes that ‘[d]irt is, to an extent, simply the presence, the non-
obliteration, of traces of life’. It is present in the ‘[h]ands [that]
become dirty through manual activity, underclothes through being
worn. And there is often sweat that plays an agglutinating role in
the formation of dirt.’ Elsewhere he states that ‘[t]here exists here a
substantial connection with feces . . . and also with grease and sweat’
(Kolnai, 2004, pp. 55–56). These examples show that dirt reveals
‘an unmistakable intentional relation to life, and to life’s ebbs and
flows’ (Kolnai, 2004, p. 56). What is meant by this is a trace, how-
ever small, of the organic, is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for describing something as dirty. In revaluating what is dirt(y) we
do not have to discount Douglas’s views about dirt – that which
is out of place – as incorrect but further qualifications are needed,
such as the intervention of the organic, in order to articulate a more
detailed, fuller picture. This certainly fits with the previous exam-
ples. In the biblical classification of food, animal life is subject to
more scrupulous ordering when determining what is permissible as
food, whilst vegetable life is not discussed, and in other cases is less
open to scrutiny (see n. 4 of this chapter). The smear of soup on a
man’s beard is more disgusting than if the smear were on his col-
lar or tie. To give a more visceral example, marks made on the door
of a public lavatory in ink may be viewed disdainfully because they
deface public property but it is far less disturbing than stains of excre-
ment, or blood, which would cause a deeper sense of revulsion and
disgust. Again, it is the presence of the organic that contributes to
disgust.
The body as regulatory system
Prior to the twentieth century, Western philosophical tradition8 had

reinforced a dualistic view of human beings, which assumes the
presence of two classes of opposing forces that are framed dichoto-
mously in a mutually exclusive relationship. The separation of mind
and body, culture and nature, reason and emotion date back to
Plato’s writings in the Phaedo, and, following on from this, the
Christian tradition. It was explored centrally in Descartes’s mind–
body problem, where the body (res extensa) was subordinated to the
primacy of the mind (res cogitans). Other dualistic positions which
conveyed the manner in which ‘people could come to experience
their “lived bodies” ’ (Mellor and Shilling, 1997, p. 10) included the
Nietzschean principles of the Apollonian and the Dionysian9 and the

Durkheimian homo duplex.10 What these positions have in common
are the differences of treatment accorded to the mind and the body,
where the body as the seat of emotions and appetites was treated
with disdain and was marginalized in favour of the rationality of
the mind. There has been a long history in classical Greek philos-
ophy and the Christian era that deemed the body to be the locus of
desire, corruption and mortality, and that it had to be subjected to
disciplinary practices and regimes as a way of bringing it under con-
trol. The goal of asceticism was about liberating the soul from the
body through methods of abstinence and self-mutilation. The irony
is that in their pursuit of religious ecstasy, Christian mystics often
employed methods that frequently involved immersion in the bod-
ily. Flagellation was a common practice and was intended to break
the will of the body. There are other accounts of bodily mortification
and self-induced suffering, including the severe regime of starvation
carried out by the mystic Catherine of Siena who once drank a bowl
of pus to reproach herself for feeling physical revulsion when tend-
ing to the sick and performed this action to demonstrate her humility
and piety.
In the above accounts of the body, discussion centred on ways of
bringing it under control but its lesser importance to the mind meant
that it began to be overlooked in favour of other concerns. Prevail-
ing attitudes thus led to a neglect of thinking about the body as a
material subject in epistemological terms until the twentieth cen-
tury when attention turned to the body in its own right as being
suitable for sociological analysis. From the 1980s onwards, sociolo-
gists, cultural theorists and philosophers started to think about the
hitherto neglected subject of the symbolic significance of the body
as an object of meaning in history, culture and politics. From then
on, research started to emerge in the field that is known as sociol-
ogy of the body that began to think about the body as central to the
construction of meaning in the world. Landmark texts in this area,
which included Bryan Turner’s The Body and Society: Explorations in
Social Theory (1984) and Chris Shilling’s The Body and Social Theory
(1993), engaged with the problems of how to represent the body – an
entity that is so unstable and so fraught by contradiction.11 We are at
once a body but we also have a body, and this problematizes how we
think about the body, whether as subject, object, both or neither. The
human body is many things: ‘both “thou” and “it” – at once a distinc-
tive, animate, socially aware subject and an object painted, broken,
adored, abused, and examined’ (Grimes, 1982, p. 80). Bryan Turner
encapsulates the complexity of identifying an entity that is both one
and many things that often contradict each other: ‘[t]he body is at
once the most solid, the most elusive, illusory, concrete, metaphor-
ical, ever present and ever distant thing – a site, an instrument, an
environment, a singularity and a multiplicity’ (Turner, 1996, p. 43).
Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows contend that, rather than
thinking about the body as an object of inquiry, it should be regarded
as a sociological and historical phenomenon (in Mellor and Shilling,
1997, p. 5; see also Featherstone and Burrows, 1995). A similar idea
is explored by Turner who talks about the emergence of the ‘somatic
society’, which refers to ‘a society in which our major political and
moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human
body’ (Turner, 1996, p. 6). In this line of thinking the body becomes
elevated as a subject of study and the locus of discourses of iden-
tity, power and resistance. The sociology of the body also anticipated
the ‘affective turn’ that started to address a post-structuralist (and
post-Cartesian) turn to a non-reductive materialism of the body that
refused to define the body in terms of its biological and physical real-
ity and focused on psychical drives, emotions and the affective life as
avenues for exploring corporeality.
Various theorists – as diverse as Lyotard, Deleuze, Irigaray and
Kristeva – have examined social and other processes and practices
that have demonstrated ways in which the body is managed and con-
trolled by the individual, society and even the state. These practices
evolve over time and can be observed empirically. There has been a
general trend since medievalism to curtail the anarchism of the body
and to ‘civilize’ human identity as part of the project of modernism.
In Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes presented his ideas about social
contract theory, which evolved to avoid the evil of civil war. Hobbes
argued that life without government would be disorderly and in a
state of nature where everyone would have a right to everything in
the world. This would lead to a ‘war of all against all’ (2008, p. xviii).
Hobbes describes the bleakness of such an environment:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit

thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth;
no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported

by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and
removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of
the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no
society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of vio-
lent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.
(Hobbes, 2008, p. 84)
In order to avoid living in this state of nature and to ensure that

civil society is preserved, we have to forego certain freedoms. The
tension between the natural dispositions of humans and the needs
of society was addressed by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents
(1930) and Totem and Taboo (1912–13). Like Hobbes, Freud believed
that for civilization to exist and flourish it was necessary to suppress
pre-Oedipal impulses and other uninhibited drives and behaviours.12
He stated how ‘civilized man has traded in a portion of his chances
of happiness for a certain measure of security’ (Freud, 2004 [1930],
p. 65). But while Hobbes advocated the need for external author-
ity, Freud thought this untenable and suggested that regulation
be brought about through an internal mechanism for suppressing
socially undesirable urges, which he developed in his theories of
psychoanalysis.
In The Civilizing Process (1939; English translation, 1978 and
1982),13 Norbert Elias, building on the work of Freud, examined the
interplay between biological and social factors and traced the long-
term historical development of ‘the sociogenesis and psychogenesis
of modern European culture’.14 The civilizing process, which was an
ongoing process, corresponded to the learned behaviour of changing
conceptions of shame and embarrassment in relation to the body,
which were not about the ‘personal preoccupations of individuals
with their own bodies’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 151). William Ian Miller
comments on how:
[c]ivilization raised our sensitivities to disgust so as to make dis-

gust a key component of our social control and psychic order,
with the consequence that ‘it became socially and psychically
very difficult for civilized people to talk about disgusting things
without having the excuse of either childhood, adolescence, or

transgressive joking’.
(Miller, 1997, p. 5)
Metaphorically, the body went from being open and collective to

being closed and individualized. In his investigations, Elias stud-
ied manner books and etiquette from the late Middle Ages to the
Victorian period as a way of understanding social values and con-
duct in particular societies and the relationships between individuals
and societies in Western Europe (he examined comparative cases) and
found common practices emerging in particular social groups.15
In the Middle Ages the body as a fleshy entity was central to com-
munication in a mode described as ‘[c]arnal knowing’ (Mellor and
Shilling, 1997, p. 23, italics removed).16 Mikhail Bakhtin developed
the concept of the carnivalesque in his study of Rabelais’ fiction, in
particular Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532–64) to encapsulate the
tendencies of the medieval body. For Bakhtin (1984 [1965]) the car-
nivalesque is both the description of a historical phenomenon and a
literary approach. The tradition of carnival was an affront to official
culture in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. It abolished the
boundaries between hitherto separate domains and disrupted hierar-
chies, thereby bringing about an inversion of the established order
of things. During these occasions, the body as a ‘locus of transgres-
sion’ (Fraser and Greco, 2005, p. 69) was subject to a variety of ritual
practices that involved sensuality, carnality and the merger of the
individual in the collective. Bakhtin described the medieval carniva-
lesque body as grotesque, one that transgressed its own limits and did
not respect the surface and boundaries of the body, preferring instead
to explore the depths through the orifices:
The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the
outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters
the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself
goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on
the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and
offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the
phallus, the potbelly, the nose.
(Bakhtin, 1984, p. 26)
During the carnival the ‘open’ body became the point of exchange
between people, and they would express themselves in acts of trans-
gression and excess, through activities such as swearing, laughing,
feasting, copulating, excreting, and in general taking pleasure in vio-
lating limits that reigned in normalcy. But even outside of carnival,
medieval culture was still preoccupied with the body. People felt more
at liberty to express their bodily needs, such as the functions of eat-
ing, spitting, defecating or blowing one’s nose, without exercising
what we would now understand as decorum. They were also more
volatile, expressive and sensuous. But over time behaviour that was
once accepted as normal became more strictly controlled and disci-
plined on social grounds, and tighter controls were placed on what
was acceptable bodily expression. Consider the following as an exam-
ple of a prescription that was used by Elias in his observations of the
civilizing process: ‘ “Don’t spit over the table, spit under the table”.
Compare this with the later prescription “Please use the spittoon.”
Still later one could find in public transport vehicles the laconic pre-
scription: “spitting prohibited”. Finally, the custom of spitting itself
has largely vanished’ (Elias, 2005, p. 96). As we move into post-
medievalism ‘with the development of court societies [that achieved
central significance] in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century
Europe’ (Williams and Bendelow, 1998, p. 39) and then onto modern
bourgeois society, the threshold of what was deemed to be accept-
able altered. Individuals started to exercise more self-restraint, and
changes in conduct included stricter regulations about the display
of bodily functions. Spatial categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ were
also enforced and affected what was regarded as acceptable behaviour
in society. The range of bodily expressions was constrained with the
‘distant’ senses of sight and hearing reigning. The body became more
‘closed’, individualized and guarded, and the self was experienced as
an enclosed individual that was separated from others. These changes
marked the development of the modern subject:
The firmer, more comprehensive and uniform restraint of the

affects characteristic of this civilizational shift, together with
increased internal compulsions . . . these are what is experienced as
the capsule, the invisible wall dividing the ‘inner world’ of the
individual from the ‘external world’ . . . the subject of cognition
from its object, the ‘ego’ from the ‘other’, the ‘individual’ from
‘society’.
(Elias, 1978, p. 258)
In general, following the rise of the modern nation state and

the social and economic ramifications that this involved, society
became more shaped by forces of rationalization, which entailed
the need to exert greater self-control over human drives and
emotions.17 In The Society of Individuals (1939–87)18 Elias wrote: ‘The
advance of the division of functions and of civilization at certain
stages . . . is . . . increasingly accompanied by the feeling in individuals
that in order to maintain their positions in the human network they
must allow their true nature to wither. They feel constantly impelled
by the social structure to violate their “inner truth” ’ (Elias, 2001,
pp. 30, 57).
Implicit in Elias’s study was the understanding that civilized bodies
were unfinished in both a social and biological sense, thus acknowl-
edging the relativity and continuity of civilization as a process. While
‘civilization’ has become a heavily scrutinized term because of its
imperialist overtones, the processes of social refinement and regu-
lation are still at work in society both in social codes and unspoken
notions about conduct and behaviour. Disgust is still a watchword in
human culture.19
The leaking body
The discomfort that the natural body with its seepages and flows
continues to instil in our socialized and cultural understanding of
the body is of continuing academic interest and conveys the con-
flict between our organic bodies, which operate according to the
laws of nature, and our desired cultural projections of the body.
The physical body is socially mediated (Douglas, 1970) and in its
unrelenting materiality it is also ‘the primary site of the abject’
(Foster, 1996a, p. 149). In Chapter 1 we discussed the need to
establish boundaries in order to form subjectivity. This meant reject-
ing the maternal body and, by extension, any remnants of nature.
Kristeva states that ‘[t]he body must bear no trace of its debt to
nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic’
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 102). Writers from different academic disciplines

have explored the ambivalence of the natural body. Bataille makes
a distinction between the human before the intervention of civi-
lization as a process of bodily management and the human in the
modern age:
We are far away from the savages who hung the skull of their
ancestors on greasy poles during enormous festivals, who rammed
the tibia of their fathers into pig-mouths the moment the slit-
throat pigs vomited waves of blood . . . [In contemporary society]
the play of man and his own decomposition continues in the most
desultory conditions, without the former ever having the courage
to confront the latter. It seems we shall never be able to stand in
face of the grandiose image of a decomposition whose risk, inter-
vening with each breath, is nevertheless the very sense of a life
that we prefer, we do not know why, to that of another whose
respiration might survive us. Of this image, we only know the neg-
ative form, the soaps, the toothbrushes, and all the pharmaceutical
products whose accumulation allows us to painfully escape, each
day, from filth and death.
(Bataille, Œuvres complètes, 1970–88, vol. 1, pp. 272–273
in Menninghaus, 2002, p. 348 )
In Written on the Body (1992) Jeanette Winterson describes the body

as a cavern of decay:
Let me penetrate you. I am the archaeologist of tombs. I would

devote my life to marking your passageways, the entrances and
exits of that impressive mausoleum, your body. How tight are the
secrets are the funnels and wells of youth and health. A wriggling
finger can hardly detect the start of an ante-chamber, much less
push through to the wide aqueous halls that hide womb, gut and
brain.
In the old or ill, the nostrils flare, the eye sockets make deep pools
of request. The mouth slackens, the teeth fall from their first line of
defence. Even the ears enlarge like trumpets. The body is making
way for worms.
(Winterson, 1992, p. 119)
A comparable account is by Colin McGinn who reinforces the revul-

sion that we have at our irreducible physicality and the practices that
we undertake to cleanse the body:
The living body is a rich repository – a factory – of dischargeable

disgust materials. On a daily, even hourly, basis we must man-
age and contain the polluting substances generated by our own
organic existence, as the body leaks and expels its natural prod-
ucts. The body spews forth its organic materials, what it needs
to flourish and survive – and meanwhile we recoil. These vital
substances are the objects of our steady revulsion, biologically
necessary as they are. Semen, say, without which human life is
impossible, is regarded with distaste, or even outright disgust –
as if there were something wrong with the stuff. Why should we
be revolted by something so harmless and so vital to life? Isn’t
semen something to savor and celebrate? Much the same can
be said of menstrual blood, another source of intense taboo and
revulsion. We seem as disgusted by the body in the full flight of
life, squeezing and pumping, as we are by its quiet dissolution in
death.
(McGinn, 2011, p.19)
The paradoxical attitude to the body is apparent in McGinn’s

account – we despise the body when it is at its most vital but also
in the complete absence of life. He contends that we are divided
between ourselves where we applaud and celebrate the aspects of
human life that reveal our sophistication as a species and yet are
metaphorically uncomfortable in our own skins. He is building on
Ernest Becker’s dualistic notion of the physical and symbolic worlds
as expounded in The Denial of Death where the latter claims that
we construct a symbolic world of meaning as a way to counteract
the physical world of death, which is self-sustaining (Becker, 2011
[1973]). McGinn states that we cannot accept the materiality of the
body in its limits and mortality, which is precisely the body that
makes possible all the achievements that we want to celebrate. This
is one of the great ironies of human life. In its natural state the
organic body cannot be trusted to remain intact and whole and is
instead prone to secretion, excretion, breakdown, decay and ulti-
mately death. In spite of the continual turbulence of the body and
the routines and rituals that we undertake to keep ourselves free from
its exudations and outpourings, which include labours of washing,
dressing and grooming, we feel repelled by the forces of our corpo-
real roots. Kristeva outlines the relentlessness of bodily regimes: the
body ‘extricates itself’ from ‘the border of my condition as a living
being’ and ‘Such wastes drops so that I might live, until, from loss
to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the
limit – cadere, cadaver’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3). The corpse is the ulti-
mate abject thing: the negation that is contained within the body
and is its ultimate destiny. To recognize the death that lurks within
and makes itself known in the process of life itself is ‘to accept the
rejection which is the abject’ (Piper, 2003, p. 104).
It is important to note that in these accounts it is not the diseased
body that is despised but the healthy and flowing body that is feared
and scrutinized.20 Within the body-system, which is the most ubiq-
uitous symbolic system, we as socially conscious adults21 embark on
extensive processes to monitor our bodily activities and to ensure that
the boundaries between our inner viscera and outer selves (which
should be recognized as two-way, namely from outside-in and from
inside-out) remain as separate as possible, with the skin operating
as a literal and metaphorical covering that mediates between these
two aspects of the body. Its partial permeability means that there is
an exchange between inner and outer. Echoing Douglas, the body
boundaries need to be protected as they are constantly under threat.
The points of greatest vulnerability are the orifices, which elicit the
highest level of disgust and, ironically, since they are also eroge-
nous zones, also the greatest level of desire. Bodily waste products,
from the most odorous and offensive to our sensibilities (for exam-
ple excrement) to the less indecorous (for instance nail clippings),
potentially threaten the inviolability of the body’s boundaries but
also help establish the boundary itself as well as thus reinforcing the
distinction between internal and external. These traces of abjection
are both ‘me’ and ‘not me’ and threaten the stability of the bod-
ily boundaries and the sense of self. Ritualistic practices involving
health and hygiene are used to maintain a sense of the social propri-
ety of the body and to prevent it from becoming seen in terms of its
animal nature, which is the primal fear at the root of body-abjection.
In recent literature on disgust, much has been discussed about bod-
ily fluids as indicators and components of the instability of the body.
Bodily fluids (especially other people’s) represent danger because they

are boundless and are seen to be carriers of dirt and infection. They
remind us of our animality – the fact that we are decaying and that
once life has been taken away our bodies will putrefy.22 For this
reason they, particularly sexual fluids such as semen and menstrual
blood, are the subject of taboos. The mere sight of these substances
makes us contemplate the insides of our bodies, a journey which
starts with the specific fluid, continues with disease and illness and
ends with death.23 Bodily fluids cannot be homogenized in their ‘dis-
gust quotient’ as certain fluids may cause a greater sense of unease
because of their ability to be controlled and their polluting proper-
ties – mucus is more acrid and ghastly to think about than tears,
which is largely because the transparency and odourlessness of tears
can be translated into poetic terms and seen as purifying without
being polluting.24 But the overriding feature is the out-of-placeness;
in the body they are essential to normal physiological functioning,
but out of the body they signal something else, often carrying the
threat of disease and vulnerability. In fact even by ‘issuing forth’ in
the orifice or boundary, bodily fluids ‘have traversed the boundary of
the body’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 150). As Kristeva remarked, when speak-
ing about a corpse, within the desired and prescribed parameters the
meaning can be controlled but outside of it, it takes hold of us –
‘seen without God and outside of science, [it] is the utmost of abjec-
tion’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). Being neither human nor non-human, the
corpse epitomizes the horror that abjection gives rise to. Its ambigu-
ous status and guaranteed putrefaction means that as living subjects
we need to escape from its treachery, which we do so in the form of
appropriate funerary rituals, either by burial or cremation.
Outside of the body, bodily fluids, and indeed any other body
parts, cannot be wholly separated from us, and are reminders of our
inability to extricate ourselves from our organic being. As discussed
earlier, we cannot view these fluids and substances dispassionately or
treat them as we would objects. Elizabeth Grosz remarks that ‘[n]o
part of the body is divested of all psychical interest without severe
psychical repercussions’ and that ‘[t]here is still something of the sub-
ject bound up with them’; they are abject and inspire disgust and
desire (Grosz, 1994, p. 81).25 When thinking about the level of dis-
gust there is also a positive correlation between the amount of bodily
fluid generated and the degree of pollution caused. Going back to
Allport’s experiment, it becomes apparent that disgust increases with

increased activity of expectoration so that as more and more spit is
expelled into the tumbler, the proposition of drinking it becomes
increasingly uninviting. This is because as the volume increases so
does the mounting threat of abjection – we fear that our insides are
being turned inside out. In Chapter 4 I look at a range of artworks
that, not being content to work with the external representation of
the body, seeks to move beyond it to explore the body’s inner work-
ings by eliciting pain responses and working with the materiality of
viscera. In contemporary art we see artists who elicit responses of dis-
gust in order to educate, provoke and challenge assumptions about
the body and society.
In the earlier accounts from Elias and others, we see the efforts that
the individual and society have made to control and curtail the nat-
ural flow of the body, in spite of our understanding that the body is
necessary for the sustenance of life. The expulsion of waste is often a
sign of the organic equilibrium of the body, and yet dwelling on such
subjects causes many to resort either to a clinical a-sensory treatment
or to the other extreme of sensory overload, which creates feelings
of nausea and repulsion. Such reactions can be traced back to our
elemental fear of the unstable body that defined the pre-abject stage
of development when the infant is intimately bound to the somatic
maternal body. The infant can only progress to the Symbolic once the
maternal has been abjected and the body is ‘clean’ and bounded (has
clearly differentiated limits). Such a body becomes the social norm
for what is permissible in ‘civilized’ society – ‘The subject must dis-
avow part of itself in order to gain a stable self, and this form of
refusal marks whatever identity it acquires as provisional, and open
to breakdown and instability’ (Grosz, 1990, p. 86). It also conveys the
conflicting impulses of the Symbolic, which is about the delineation
of identity, order and stability, and the semiotic, which strives to dis-
rupt this. The perpetual need to rid ourselves of our corporeal traces is
part of the unspoken agreement that exists between socialized adults,
and this explains the paradoxical nature of the duality of glory and
shame that McGinn identifies as the strange position of humanity
that, on the one hand, can celebrate its achievements while, on the
other hand, is disgusted by its origins.
3
Recovering the Sacred:
The Abject Body
In the rituals of pre-modern societies that Douglas discusses in Purity

and Danger, the sacred was an integral part of community and society.
The ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ are terms in religious, anthropological
and cultural discourse that are used to organize reality into differ-
ent realms of experience, where it is understood that the realms are
separate and only come into contact with one another during ritu-
alized activities. Rituals are regulatory mechanisms that control the
experiences of the profane and the sacred, where the profane is the
everyday realm of working life and the sacred is the realm of a dif-
ferent order. The sacred involves the disruption and dislocation of
the spatio-temporal boundaries of the everyday, which opens up a
qualitatively different experience of being.
There needs to be a division between these two realms because the
everyday needs to be protected from the contagion of the sacred, the
threat of which would cause violent disruption to the regulation of
normal working life. Taboos ensure that the normality of everyday
life can take place. Furthermore, the impurity of the sacred needs
to be contained because it pollutes anyone who comes into contact
with it. In pre-modern religions, the sacred was divided between its
pure (holy) and impure (defiled) natures, but what contributed to its
ambivalence was the ‘impossibility to provide clear-cut analytical dis-
tinctions between sacred/profane or impure/pure sacred’ (Richman,
2002, p. 126).
The relationship between the two realms or domains of the sacred
and the profane is mediated by ritualized actions, which permit the
crossover from one to the other during prescribed activities such as
63
festivals or sacrifices. Ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep

(1960 [1909]) studied the transitions that occurred in specialized rit-
uals known as rites of passage, which marked life-changing events in
the course of one’s life, and he systematized the transformations into
three main stages. These rites are essentially purification rituals where
the defiling element is singled out and isolated from the community
through the required stages, which in chronological order are: separa-
tion (where the individual makes a break from the group with which
they were previously affiliated, and which may involve a physical
extrication from society), transition (which is the liminal stage), and
aggregation (where the individual is bestowed with a new identity or
status, and is integrated back into the community). The liminal stage
is especially pertinent here. Being in the transitional state, conveyed
by the phrase ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1969, p. 177), the indi-
vidual has a precarious and ambiguous status because it is neither
one thing nor the other and the danger that the individual is in and
which they present to others has to be controlled by ritual.1 They are,
in effect, in a state of transgression.
In modern society the ritualistic divisions between the sacred and
profane do not hold because the sacred is no longer immanent and
is not conceived of as a ubiquitous aspect of society. The alienation
of the sacred in modern life is an ongoing subject in the work of
Georges Bataille in his writings on sacred sociology in the 1930s and
more specifically in texts such as Eroticism (1987 [1957]) and The-
ory of Religion (1992b [1973]) where he discusses the integral role of
the sacred in understanding the fundamentals of human community.
In a review essay of 1949 Bataille comments on how ‘the sacred’s
demise in the modern world is not the inevitable consequence of
heightened rationality but signals a pandemic fear of confrontation
with suppressed horrors’ (Richman, 2002, p. 168). The fear that turns
away from the sacred is also the same fear that banishes the abject.
Kristeva’s advancement of the theory of abjection can be viewed as a
parallel project to Bataille’s study of the sacred.
Recovering the sacred
In Chapter 2 a positive correlation was identified between the sup-

pression of bodily impulses and the advancement of civilization.
This corresponded with the dualist attitude to human nature, which
Recovering the Sacred: The Abject Body 65
hypothesized a split between mind and body. The mind was elevated
while the body was regarded as low and corrupt. Body manage-
ment rituals became more advanced through the centuries as humans
strove to move away from their animal origins. In spite of this, there
were resurgences of bodily-centred expressions, such as the revival of
the carnivalesque and the Dionysian in modern life, which conveyed
the sociological importance of the exuberance of the body as an
expression of the sacred.2 In Western philosophy, post-structuralism
reconsiders the corporeal as an area of critical expression that is fun-
damental to human identity. Kristeva’s notion of the speaking body
in the formation of subjectivity is an example of this. Bataille’s philos-
ophy is of great importance here because he reconfigured the body by
reversing the processes of civilization so that the body was returned
to its base roots, and, in so doing, both recovered the sacred in society
and confronted the abject in all its horror. The full force of his project
is seen in his literary work (which is discussed in Chapter 7). For the
purposes of this chapter I outline his philosophy of culture and look
at the relationship between the sacred and the abject that underpin
his thinking. In his understanding of the sacred, Bataille was greatly
influenced by Émile Durkheim’s insights in The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (1912) but, unlike Durkheim, he did not take the sacred
and the profane to be mutually incompatible realms of experience
but instead thought that the sacred was experienced in the profane
through transgression (Richardson, 1998, p. 39).
Bataille was an idiosyncratic thinker and writer who cannot be
confined to any one discipline; in fact to do that would both mis-
represent his ‘fluid’ thinking and reduce the richness of his ideas. His
writings can be subdivided into numerous disciplinary categories that
include literature, philosophy, art history, anthropology, economics,
and (a)theology, amongst others. He did not propose robust philo-
sophical systems but tended to have certain organizing notions that
underpinned his ideas and which were used across different contexts
(Hegarty, 2000, p. 32). One of these recurring notions is the ‘general
economy’, which emerged in the essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’
(1933) and was subsequently developed in the first three volumes of
The Accursed Share and in Eroticism (Hegarty, 2000, p. 32). In this text
Bataille presents a radical revision of our conventional understand-
ing of economics and devises an economy of excess that celebrates
the exuberance of expenditure. Echoing thinkers like Max Weber, he
argues that capitalism and other models based on acquisition and

accumulation have destroyed humanity’s notion of community by
stressing the values of instrumentality, productivity and the rational
management of the body, where humans are seen as a means to an
end in their social functions. These ideas constitute the profane realm
in society, which is about the rational and quantifiable, and which
ejects the abject and safeguards society through systematization –
examples of which have been discussed in the previous chapter.
The overriding concerns in such systems, which Bataille describes
as the ‘restricted economy’ and which constituted the foundations
of Western economic systems, are profitability, utility, preservation
and conservation, which ensure what is seemingly best for the indi-
vidual and the social in all spheres of life. Bataille reflects Freud’s
ideas about civilized society, which discuss how both the political
organization of society and social institutions, such as religion and
the law, work collectively to repress libidinal impulses and to keep
society working functionally (Williams and Bendelow, 1998; see also
Freud, 1963 [1908]). Such an economy is ‘homogeneous’, which is
a term used by Bataille in his essay ‘The Psychological Structure of
Fascism’ (1933–34) to convey a working order that is mechanical and
quantifiable:
Homogeneity signifies here the commensurability of elements and

the awareness of this commensurability: human relations are sus-
tained by a reduction to fixed rules based on the consciousness
of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations; in
principle, all violence is excluded from this course of existence.
Production is the basis of a social homogeneity [note omitted].

Homogeneous society is productive society, namely, useful society.
Every useless element is excluded, not from all of society, but from
its homogeneous part. In this part, each element must be useful to
another without the homogeneous activity ever being able to attain
the form of activity valid in itself . . . .
(Bataille, 1985, pp. 137–138)
Opposed to the ‘restricted economy’, Bataille presents the ‘gen-

eral economy’ which is geared towards goals contrary to those just
outlined, namely unproductive expenditure (what is described as
dépense), waste, loss and excess, and where an individual is seen as

an end in itself. He specifies more fully the values in this category in
the following way:
The second part [of consumption] is represented by so-called

unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the con-
struction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, per-
verse sexuality (i.e., deflected from genital finality) – all these
represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have
no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve the
use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unpro-
ductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of
consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.
(Bataille, 1985, p. 118)
In unproductive expenditure, individuals or societies do not think

about future goals from a utilitarian perspective but are instead
focused on pleasure and excess through expending without return.
Bataille’s central thesis from The Accursed Share (La Part Maudite)
(vol. 1, 1967) claims that the ‘general economy’ is actually a cos-
mological model. Pasi Falk explains this thesis in the following way:
‘The principle of excess, waste or expenditure (dépense) is the uni-
versal law which manifests itself in nature both as wasteful solar
radiation (only a fraction of which hits the earth and is transformed
into construction/production) . . . ’ (Falk, 1994, p. 96). Likewise, in the
‘general economy’ the dépense refers to the part that cannot be pre-
served and is instead wasted or destroyed (as in the potlatch ritual).3
In its excesses it transgresses the limits of the profane, thus opening
us up to an experience of the sacred. The sacred refers to that which
cannot be assimilated into the homogeneous ‘restricted economy’,
which is bound by taboos, and is characteristically heterogeneous.
It involves the embrace of the ‘heterological’, which Bataille describes
as the science of what is completely other (Bataille, 1985, pp. 96–102,
142). In his essay, ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. De Sade’, this other part
that cannot be incorporated into the system is described as ‘das ganz
Anderes’ (p. 94) – ‘the foreign body’. The things that are expelled or
rejected by homogeneous society are wasteful because they cannot
be incorporated into the system. In their ‘otherness’ they exist on
the margins and are regarded as being sacred. The sacred is a force
which disrupts the profane and involves that which is beyond util-
ity, which is why it lies beyond the homogeneous. Examples of these
liminal entities include:
the waste products of the human body and certain analogous mat-
ter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words,
or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious
processes such as dreams or neuroses; the numerous elements or
social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate:
mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, differ-
ent types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the
rule . . . .
(Bataille, 1985, pp. 94, 142)
These forbidden components are regarded as dangerous to the social

make-up because of the threat they pose to homogeneity which is
indispensable to the formation of a sacred community.
Ordinarily we are separated from others in nature and have what
Bataille describes as a discontinuous existence (Bataille, 1987, pp.
12–14).4 The human differs from the animal because she has come
to know herself as a subject which stands apart from objects in the
profane world. In the ‘real order’ (i.e. of everyday living) we have
ordered the universe in terms of utility, which means that entities,
including natural beings, are seen as tools, as objects, and hence
are subjugated to humans’ desires. This order constitutes the realm
of work where we view things in respect to their utility and where
work helps maintain society. However, this outlook leads to a state
of discontinuity where we are individuated and separated from other
beings and ‘the flow of all that is’ (Bataille 1992b: 29). We come to
experience the world in the profane realm as fragmented and we
yearn for the experience of the sacred in which we are continuous
with all that there is. This is where we can move beyond our iso-
lated states and embrace the other in a ‘moment of communal unity’
(Richman, 2002, p. 162), which constitutes a ‘prodigious efferves-
cence of life’ (Bataille, 1992b, p. 52). We strive for ‘communication’,
which is a technical term to describe the situation of being sus-
pended in a state beyond oneself and momentarily united with the
other through the experience of death, at the limit of nothingness.
As Bataille states: ‘ “Communication” cannot proceed from one full

and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose sep-
arate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death
and nothingness; the moral summit is the moment of risk taking . . . ’
(Bataille 1992a: 19). In Durkheimian terms, the individual moves
from a state of individuality to a collective identity that is effer-
vescent and becomes the founding moment of the sacred. Intimacy
can be brought about in various ways, such as through sacrifice and
eroticism, both of which return the object or entity to its original
state of being.
The sacrifice, as an offering to gods, involved an experience of the
sacred, where the community was brought together through a ritual
act of violence that displaced imminent conflict and momentarily
bound together the community in a sacred instant. Bataille com-
ments that sacrifice does not necessarily require the death of the
victim but the utility that is attached to the victim: ‘The thing –
only the thing – is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim.
Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the
victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unin-
telligible caprice’ (Bataille 1992b: 43). In the collective crime ‘[t]he
role of the sacrificial victim is to mediate the collectivity’s encounter
with the menacing forces segregated by religion as sacred’ (Richman,
2002, p. 168). A more quotidian example of the sacred is experi-
enced in eroticism. Differentiated from procreation (which involves
a ‘productive’ goal) and distinctive to human nature, eroticism is
‘a form of expenditure which goes beyond use-value: it does not
conserve energy but discharges it, consuming it in the act of using
it and thereby destroying it’ (Botting and Wilson, 1997, p. 13). It
involves opening oneself up to an experience of the sense of a loss
of self (la petite mort) and involves transgressing the boundaries of
an other to experience momentary unity. It ‘is assenting to life up
to the point of death’ (Bataille, 1987, p. 11). As Bataille says, ‘the
unity of the domain of eroticism open[s] to us through a conscious
refusal to limit ourselves within our individual personalities’ (Bataille,
1987, p. 24). Eroticism also involves embracing the abject by over-
coming the disgust that we have not only for our own bodily fluids
but also for those of others.5 Menninghaus cites an excellent exam-
ple from Freud, which is worth mentioning here. In Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality (1905; reprinted in Freud’s Complete Works 7)

Freud discusses the tension that exists between sexual desire and
repulsion:
A man who will kiss a pretty girl’s lips passionately, may perhaps
be disgusted at the idea of using her teeth-brush [sic], though there
are no grounds for supposing that his own oral cavity, for which he
feels no disgust, is cleaner than the girl’s. Here, then, our attention
is drawn to the factor of disgust, which interferes with the libidinal
overvaluation of the sexual object but can in turn be overridden
by libido.
(Menninghaus, 2003, p. 232)
Bataille argues that ‘abject elements, even ones that have been
denied, play the determining role of agents of erotic attraction, and
this example makes clear that the value of such elements rests on the
possibility – always latent – of transforming repulsion into attraction’
(Menninghaus, 2003, p. 349).6 From this we learn that the heterolog-
ical is the wholly other that is both repulsive and attractive (often
because it is prohibited) and that repulsion needs to be overcome in
order to achieve union.
The transition from discontinuous to continuous existence
involves rupturing homogeneous existence. This rupture can be
described in various ways: as a tear, laceration, ‘force or shock’
(Bataille, 1985, p. 143). The rupture destabilizes the hitherto self-
contained boundaries of the subject and object – the subject loses a
sense of self and the object cannot be objectified as such. In this state,
where self and object are beside themselves, we attain a momentary
sense of union.
Some of the characteristics of the sacred listed earlier, like its for-
bidden (and forbidding) nature, which means that it lurks on the
margins of things rather than being incorporated into the main-
stream of society, and also the rupture that it brings to identity
anticipates Kristeva’s theorization of abjection. Bataille argued that
one of the reasons that the sacred has been marginalized in mod-
ern life is because it is feared as it opens us up to an experience of
death and involves the loss of self. And while the sacred is fundamen-
tal to human existence, people prefer the stability of profane, which
is secure and stable. Similarly, abjection also hovers at the edges of
existence, and is either kept at a distance in the course of life and

purified by various means, including religion, or confronted during
peak or aesthetic experiences.
Bataille on the abject
In Powers of Horror Kristeva singles out Bataille on a number of

occasions. She chooses to focus on the work of Céline as an exemplar
of abjection in literature, but claims that he was ‘only one pos-
sible example among others of the abject’ in a list that included
Bataille, who ‘could have guided . . . [her] . . . descent into the hell
of naming, that is to say of signifiable identity’ (Kristeva, 1982,
p. 207). She acknowledges the contribution that Bataille makes to
the study of abjection and claims that, while many anthropologists7
have explored the connections between prohibition and the abject,
Bataille is a special case as he ‘remains the only one . . . who has
linked the production of the abject to the weakness of that prohibition,
which, in other respects, necessarily constitutes each social order’
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 64). According to Bataille, abjection is ‘the inabil-
ity to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding’
(‘L’Abjection et les formes misérables’, Œuvres complètes, vol. II, 1934,
p. 217; see also Kristeva, 1982, pp. 56, 64, 213, n. 10).
Bataille’s interest in abjection is found in articles he wrote in the
1920s for Documents where he attempted to subvert ‘the “sublimat-
ing” tendencies at work among the cultural avant-garde’ (Lotringer,
1999, p. 3). Rosalind Krauss (1996, p. 90) states that ‘abjection
was a term employed by Bataille in a group of unpublished texts
from the mid-to-late 1930s under the title ‘L’Abjection et les formes
misérables’ in Essais de sociologie. Denis Hollier comments how ‘all
the pages Bataille wrote under the heading of abjection were left
unfinished; they were textual failures, published posthumously (they
appear in the second volume of his collected work, all of which are
posthumous texts)’ (Foster et al., 1994, p. 4). In spite of the impor-
tance that was given to his ideas of abjection, and especially given
the influence they exerted on Kristeva’s theory, ‘L’Abjection et les
formes misérables’ (1934) remains untranslated. Bataille’s thoughts
about abjection were developed against a backdrop of fascism, rev-
olutionary ideologies and the growing class divisions of society in
the interwar years, all of which are reflected in his formulation of
the concept. The main difference between Kristeva and Bataille’s

respective definitions of abjection is the significance Kristeva gave to
psychoanalysis in her reading.8 For Kristeva, abjection involves the
return of the repressed as every instance of abjection originates from
this primal experience. Bataille’s understanding of abjection does not
involve psychoanalysis and is rooted in the socio-political where it
accounts for the dynamic of rejection and exclusion in relation to
the socially disenfranchised. Bataille understands abjection to be the
absolute exclusion of abject things. He discusses how underprivi-
leged groups of society, the labouring classes, and other marginalized
groups are rejected as being excremental and as existing on the out-
skirts of society (see Richman, 2002, pp. 124–126). This interpretation
of abjection would later be developed in Butler’s study of abjection.
As aptly summarized by Thomas, ‘Abjection, for Butler, is the way the
dominant order excrementalizes its dispossessed; it is, as she writes
in Gender Trouble, the “mode by which others become shit” ’ (Butler,
quoted in Thomas, 2008, p. xii).
Bataille contends that the condition in which these groups find
themselves in is explained by the deprivation that they suffer.
The cycle of exploitation that keeps the working classes down
and excluded as abject by the middle classes continues through-
out history, and so the working classes remain abject. Keith Reader
argues that ‘[w]ell before Kristeva . . . Bataille perceived the importance
of bodily accretions and secretions in [the] process [of abjection]’
(Reader, 2006, p. 57). Reader also makes an important distinction
between Kristevan and Bataillean abjection where the latter often
entails, especially in his novels, the destruction of subjectivity while
the former argues that the destruction of the self is followed by its
reconstitution.
Botting and Wilson argue that in his essay, ‘The Use Value of
D. A. F. De Sade’, Bataille reconceptualizes the Marquis by severing
him from his literary affiliations and interpreting his work from the
standpoint of socio-political economy (Botting and Wilson, 1997,
p. 5). In this essay Bataille pursued his interest in the ‘economic
questions of consumption and expenditure according to an axis of
[the two human impulses of] appropriation and excretion’ (Botting
and Wilson, 1997, pp. 19–20; see also Bataille 1985, p. 94). Stable
homogeneous systems are always under the threat of disequilibrium
because of heterological forces that disrupt the balance. He uses a
graphic example from De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) to

illustrate the instability of the body that is perpetually in the process
of emptying itself: ‘Verneuil makes someone shit, he eats the turd,
and then he demands that someone eats his. The one who eats his
shit vomits; he devours her puke’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 95).
The heterological element, which could be bodily waste or a corpse,
threatens the body proper with invasion and needs to be regulated.
Bataille’s description of it as ‘a foreign body’ conveys the social fears
that its presence elicits. Bataille’s social commentary in this text high-
lights the plight of the social other, who is similarly treated with
suspicion and contempt. They are in effect the other who is excreted
from the body proper and is rendered ‘shit’. In the class struggle,
Bataille exposes the exploitation that is at the heart of society where,
in wanting to keep apart from the abject poor, the rich perpetuate
the cycle of exploitation that keeps the poor down: ‘The rich man
consumes the poor man’s losses, creating for him a category of degra-
dation and abjection that leads to slavery’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 125). The
rich are terrified of the polluting properties of the wretched workers
and do everything in their power to separate themselves:
. . . the masters, who act as if they were the expression of soci-

ety itself, are preoccupied – more seriously than with any other
concern – with showing that they do not in any way share the
abjection of the men they employ. The end of the workers’ activity
is to produce in order to live, but the bosses’ activity is to pro-
duce in order to condemn the working producers to a hideous
degradation . . . .
(Bataille, 1985, pp. 125–126)
The poor, caught in this cycle of exploitation, are unable to escape

their wretchedness and remain abject. It is also worth emphasiz-
ing that, as mentioned earlier, ‘the heterological’ refers to anything
that is wholly other that cannot be assimilated into the makeup of
society and which exists only on the peripheries. Although most
studies focus on socio-economically and/or politically disadvantaged
groups, ‘the very summit of that same society is also separated out as
untouchable, as kings and popes are precipitated out of the top of the
homogeneous structure to form that very exception of which the rule
is the product, but from which the sovereign himself is exempt’ (Bois
and Krauss, 1997, p. 246). In his power the king, pope or equivalent
figure has to be set apart from ordinary people lest he comes into
direct contact and pollutes them.
If we take abjection as an isolated concept in Bataille’s oeuvre then
it is fair to argue that it was not an overriding concern of his. He
does not use the term very much nor does he develop it into an
elaborate theory in the way that Kristeva does. Abjection is consid-
ered in terms of a dynamic of rejection and expulsion. However,
if we consider abjection as a concept within a larger theory of the
sacred then we can make the case that it was integral because it
contributed to the understanding of his worldview. I am inclined to
take the latter approach, especially given what I described earlier as
Bataille’s resistance to categorization and his tendency to work with
different ideas simultaneously. Given this, it is perhaps more sen-
sible to pair Bataille’s concept of the sacred with Kristeva’s idea of
abjection. Indeed, in her development of the concept, Kristeva was
influenced by Bataille’s thought in general, and not simply by his
description of abjection. As we saw earlier, Bataille’s sacred involves
an embrace of the other and constitutes a shattering of the ontol-
ogy of subject and object, both of which are aspects that feature
in Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Bataille and Kristeva harbour dif-
ferent attitudes to abjection. Bataille believes that one of the ways
of salvaging the unique meaning of human life is to embrace wil-
fully the sacred (and the abject other). In Bataille’s writing there is
commensurability between the sacred and the abject; abject things
are sacred in that they are heterological. He acknowledges the hor-
ror and other negative emotions that prevent people from engaging
with the wholly other but also concedes that the dividends of such
confrontation are immense. In On Nietzsche (1992a; [1945]) he argues
that Christianity was founded on an act of abject violence:
The killing of Christ injures the being of God.
It looks as if creatures couldn’t communicate with their Creator

except through a wound that lacerates integrity . . .
If human beings had kept their own integrity and hadn’t sinned,
God on the one hand and human beings on the other would have
preserved in their respective isolation. A night of death wherein
Creator and creatures bled together and lacerated each other and
on all sides, were challenged at the extreme limits of shame: that
is what was required for their communion.
(Bataille, 1992a, p. 18)
For Bataille the basis of sacred community is founded on acts of

transgression where the order of the profane is shattered. The ‘sacred
causes a sense of rupture when the excluded element that is forbidden
by the taboo, is brought into focus’ (Richardson, 1998, p. 51, italics
removed). Transgression involves the overcoming of the boundary,
which often refers to the limit of the self; in the cojoining of two
lovers this constitutes the laceration of the body and the sense of self.
In erotic attraction the abject elements of the others’ bodies ‘have the
determining role in erotic attraction’ and repulsion is transformed
into attraction (‘En effet la vie humaine . . . ’ [‘In Practice, Human
Life . . . ’] Bataille OC II, 163, quoted in Hegarty, 2000, p. 64). In the
notion of community, the sacrifice of a scapegoat was thought to be
the moment of communion. The sacred was essential to the suste-
nance and maintenance of community and society. Having said that,
order could only be maintained through the expulsion of all that
was undesirable, such as dirt and death. Bataille, the philosopher of
transgression, directed his writing towards recovering the sacred in
contemporary life. He viewed the displacement of the sacred nega-
tively as being detrimental to our primary needs. In Theory of Religion
he describes what this entails:
Man is the being that has lost, and even rejected, that which
he obscurely is, a vague intimacy. Consciousness could not have
become clear in the course of time if it had not turned away from
its awkward contents, but clear consciousness is itself looking for
what it has itself lost, and what it must lose again as it draws near
to it. Of course what it has lost is not outside it; consciousness
turns away from the obscure intimacy of consciousness itself. Reli-
gion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, comes down
to the effort of clear consciousness which wants to be a complete
self-consciousness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness of
intimacy is possible only at a level where consciousness is no
longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is, at
the level where clarity, which is the effect of the operation, is no

longer given.
(Bataille, 1992b, pp. 56–57)
The intimacy that Bataille is referring to is the sacred, and par-

ticularly the immanence of the sacred in everyday life. Instead of
purifying the sacred (Bataille) or abject (Kristeva), as we have seen
occurs in the practices of religious and cultural traditions, Bataille
beckons it and lets it overwhelm us to the point of jouissance, a
shattering of limits. For such a long time religious rituals and other
social practices imposed sanctions forbidding the abject and keeping
its destructive powers away from society and the individual. Bataille
unpicks this in his death of God philosophy that exposes the horror
that was ‘masked’ by Christianity and ‘which humanity must now
confront alone, if it can confront it at all’ (Lechte, 1990a, p. 17).
Earlier I showed how Bataille’s interpretation of abjection was about
the exclusion and subjugation of what was deemed to be ‘waste’.
But there is also another aspect of abjection which is about wilful
transgression; ‘the liberation of humans from the condition of ser-
vility through subversive acts of abjective transgression’ (Biles, 2014,
p. 114). Particularly in his novels we see his embrace of sacred hor-
ror which ‘respond to a need to open the wound even more, to look
horror full in the face and recognize one’s identity within the realm
of transgression’ (Richardson 1994: 64).
Kristeva is much more neutral in her attitude to the forbidden in
her study on abjection. Her account is more descriptive of the anthro-
pological and religious practices that she observed in her study.
Bataille, on the other hand, is more prescriptive about the sacred.
He does not simply comment on it but underscores its importance
in society. His activism is conveyed by the allegiances he had in
his life, especially his role in the Collège de Sociologie (which ran
from 1937–39). In Powers of Horror Kristeva discusses how, within
the course of daily life, measures have been taken to control and
purify the abject. The realm of art represents a different sphere of
activity, where those who are inclined to unveil the truths hidden
behind public facades choose to be agitated by primal horror. But
this is the choice of a select few and does not reflect the decision
of the majority to keep abjection as far as possible from entering
their lives.
Base materialism
One of the ways that Bataille proposed that the sacred could be
returned to immanence was if the human being was desublimated
from its quasi-divine status and recaptured its unrelenting material-
ity as a flesh-and-blood entity. We have reached an impasse where
the human has forgotten who or what it is, and thinks in terms of
what it would like to be. This attitude is summed up as follows:
Man willingly imagines himself to be like the god Neptune, stilling

his own waves, with majesty; nevertheless, the bellowing waves
of the viscera, in more or less incessant inflation and upheaval,
brusquely put an end to his dignity.
(Bataille, 1985, p. 22)
This required a shift of thinking and involved rejecting narratives

that sought to escape from the truth of our mortal condition. One of
these narratives is about the profane world of work, which negates
nature through labour and the subsequent goals of work and pro-
duction. In the sacred we are reminded of our material natures and
proximity to death. This switch was conveyed in Bataille’s ‘the-
ory’ of base materialism, which is presented in ‘Base Materialism
and Gnosticism’ in Documents issue 1 (1930; see also Bataille, 1985,
pp. 45–52), in which the human was defined by its origins in nature
rather than by its aspirations in culture. In base materialism, reality
was configured in terms of its materiality and immanence and there
was a levelling out of the human with the animal. In his account of
base materialism Bataille shifted the axis found in Freud’s Civilization
and its Discontents (1930). Being raised off the ground, and developing
from the horizontal axis (walking on all fours) to the vertical (walking
on two feet), does not alter the fact that we are still rooted in materi-
ality, are governed by bodily drives and are incapable of transcending
this condition. Michael Richardson summarized the central tenet of
base materialism as follows:
It is thus an error to think in terms of any elevation from

the material depths to the heights of the spirit. Any separation
made between mind and body is based upon a false dichotomy.
Our nature is fundamentally that of an animal, dependent upon
animal needs, even as we define ourselves in contradistinction to

animals.
(Richardson, 1998, p. 12, italics removed)
Contrary to cultural endeavours that sought to develop human civ-

ilization away from its origins in the body, Bataille sought to return
the human to its true origins by underscoring its centrality in life.
Bataille defined base materialism as that which is ‘external and
foreign to ideal human aspirations’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 51). Base mate-
rialism was an anti-aesthetic that focused on the active workings of
base matter that disrupted the lofty principles of materiality in a
modernist sense and focused on what is degraded and masked by
social taboos. Bataille’s materialist body was radical and represented
a rupture in prevailing dualistic thinking in which the body had been
regulated to a subordinate position in relation to the mind.
In his reconfiguration of the human body, Bataille reorients our
understanding of the body to emphasize our brute and irreducible
materialism. Many of his observations are recorded in both text and
pictorial form in his (co-edited) idiosyncratic arts journal Documents,
which ran from 1929 to the early 1930s and which is discussed
further in Chapter 5. One of his analyses concerned the mouth:
he argued that in this reversal of fortunes the mouth should not
simply be thought of as the organ of speech and language that
separates us from animals, but as the organ of consumption and vio-
lence. In a Bakhtinian sense it is also the point of exchange and
incorporation between the individual and the world through the
principle of orality.9 By reversing its function Bataille is shifting the
interpretation of the mouth as the originator of language, and, by
implication, meaning, and is restoring its original use as the instiga-
tor of community. ‘Eating is the origin of community, where festivals
are celebrations of belonging and membership through a sharing of
food. The sharing of bread or com(pan)ionship is the basis of the
social’ (Turner, 1996, p. xiii). Bataille also emphasizes the animalistic
aspects of the human mouth, how it communicates violent emotion
such as anger or disgust. In extreme cases:
human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: rage makes

men grind their teeth, while terror and atrocious suffering turn the
mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy
to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head

while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth
becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column,
in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution
of animals.
(Bataille, 1985, p. 59; Bouche, Mouth, in Documents,
issue 5, 1930)
An example of base materialism par excellence is Bataille’s contribu-

tion, Le Gros Orteil (The Big Toe) (in Documents, issue 6, 1929), which
consists of photographs of magnified toes. Bataille is highlighting
a body part that is often ignored because of its ignoble nature. Big
toes are kept covered and hidden. They are regarded as unsightly and
are often overlooked. They are, however, incredibly important to our
‘base’ natures and are integral for maintaining balance and for aiding
motion. We are told that the big toe is also one of the most ‘human’
parts of the human body ‘in the sense that no other element of this
toe is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthro-
poid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, or gibbon)’ (Bataille, 1985,
p. 20). Something as mundane and yet so little known as the big toe
takes on epic proportions in Boiffard’s photographs that accompany
Bataille’s contribution. The big toe starts to appear unfamiliar and
even uncanny:
Blind, but tranquil and strangely despising his obscure baseness, a

given person, ready to call to mind the grandeurs of human his-
tory, as when his glance ascends a monument testifying to the
grandeur of his nation, is stopped in mid-flight by an atrocious
pain in his big toe because, though the most noble of animals, he
nevertheless has corns on his feet; in other words, he has feet, and
these feet independently lead an ignoble life.
Corns on the feet differ from headaches and toothaches by their
baseness, and they are only laughable because of an ignominy
explicable by the mud in which feet are found.
(Bataille, 1985, p. 22)
In ‘Mouth’ and ‘The Big Toe’ Bataille was shifting the emphasis onto
parts of the human body and nature that have been overlooked but
are what he regarded as fundamental aspects of the human con-

dition. By isolating these body parts, both for textual analysis and
in the accompanying photographs, Bataille was degrading the body
and was emphasizing its fragility in fragmentation. In a sense he was
arguing for the embrace of the abject nature of the human and was
questioning the regimes that we have in our daily lives that involve
escaping from the horror of nature. He describes the insurmountable
fear that the human has, which manifests itself in a series of actions
and attitudes that shun the body’s frailty:
What then is the essential meaning of our horror of nature? Not

wanting to depend on anything, abandoning the place of our car-
nal birth, revolting intimately against the fact of dying, generally
mistrusting the body, that is, having a deep mistrust of what is
accidental, natural, perishable – this appears to be for each one of
us the sense of the movement that leads us to represent man inde-
pendently of filth, of the sexual functions and of death . . . The line
of development from taboos on incest or menstrual blood to the
religions of purity and of the soul’s immortality is quite clear: it
is always a matter of denying the human being’s dependence on
the natural given, of setting our dignity, our spiritual nature, our
detachment, against animal avidity.
(Bataille, in Richardson, 1998. p. 91)
The initiative to strip the human of its closed form can be viewed as
part of his project of the formless, which was about undoing form
and is detailed in Chapter 5. Bataille rejected the general tendencies
within Western philosophy to classify and catalogue form, processes
that involved the imposition of ‘a mathematical frock coat’ (Bataille,
1985, p. 31). By dispensing with the rigidity of form, Bataille was able
to release matter and ‘to reduce everything to the same “low” level’
(Richardson, 1994, p. 52).
Transgressing the boundary
In Chapter 2 we learned about the importance of the boundary in

a number of classificatory systems. The boundary was in place as
a separatist rite to ensure that opposing states were kept apart and
their passage was monitored and regulated. There was a great deal of
variation in these systems and in ritual practices. Some, such as the

Judaic food laws, are part of religious laws that were passed down
through generations. Others, such as the Hindu caste system, are
part of a supposedly predestined hierarchy that people are born into.
As well as the macrocosmic systems that govern nations and cultures,
we also addressed individual systems that are concerned with the sta-
bility of the body boundaries that were clean and dry (freed from
dirt). The process of human civilization, which is a narrative that
supports historical, psychological and sociological thinking, involved
the gradual refinement of the human being in its behaviour. This cor-
responded to a move away from one’s animal roots to embrace an
existence that is lived in spite of the failing body. This is the point
that McGinn and others claim we have reached in the twenty-first
century, where the corporeal has become relegated once again.
Where Bataille differs is in his recovery of the ‘lost’ sacred, which
occurs through acts of transgression where the boundary is crossed.
The sacred has experienced a shift of emphasis in Western history,
where its significance in modern life has become problematized
largely due to debates about secularism. By ‘reversing’ philosophical
theories of the nature of the human and the development of Western
economic systems, Bataille reconfigures the human-as-animal in their
material destinies and invites encounters of the sacred in everyday
life. In so doing he is beckoning the abject to operate as a reminder
of the meaning of human life.
4
Abjection in the Visual Arts
The concept of abjection, which provoked new ways of thinking

about art and aesthetics, came into prominence in the visual arts in
the late twentieth century, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, with
‘[t]he postmodernist return to the body’ (Ross, 2003, p. 281). In these
manifestations, the body was not necessarily featured as ‘a whole,
integrated entity but as something evoked by corporeal fragments
and physical residues’ (Hopkins, 2000, p. 225). It was also subject to a
number of processes that involved dislocation, evisceration and other
ways of breaking up its unity and revealing its relentless materialism
and uncontrollability. There were a number of significant exhibitions
which brought abjection to the forefront of aesthetic considerations
in the late twentieth century. These included Abject Art: Repulsion
and Desire in American Art at the Whitney Museum (of American Art)
(New York, 1993), which was the first formal identification of abject
art; Rites of Passage: Art for the End of a Century at the Tate (London,
1995); and L’informe: Mode d’emploi (Formless: A User’s Guide) at the
Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1996).
Artists working in a variety of media, including painting and draw-
ing, installation, video and performance art (including body art),
began to think about novel ways of portraying and presenting the
human body that challenged the reductive dualisms of mind and
body, ideal and base, and human and bestial, where hitherto the first
member of each pair had predominated. This called for a response
to the degraded nature of humanity, which meant thinking about
the sensory and visceral aspects of materiality and refocusing atten-
tion on the bodily. One of the most influential figures on abjection
82
Abjection in the Visual Arts 83
in the visual arts was Georges Bataille, who in his theory of base
materialism, as introduced in the previous chapter, addressed the
abject origins of our humanity.1 His theory of base materialism was
pivotal to his thinking. In his novels and critical writings Bataille
transgressed social taboos and, in doing so, exposed the underside
of life. Transgression was the mechanism by which abjection was
brought about and, as we have seen in Chapter 2, this entailed cross-
ing the boundaries of normalcy and propriety to go beyond what is
socially acceptable in order to explore the unregulated and excessive
behaviour of humanity.
One of the central purposes of the visual arts (and also of liter-
ature, as we see in Chapter 7) from modernism onwards has been
to explore sights that are normally hidden from view in everyday
life, the exposure of which was regarded by some as distasteful. Con-
sider Manet’s Olympia (1863), which was considered scandalous when
it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. In today’s contempo-
rary Western world, the depiction of a naked and sexually possessed
woman would not be deemed to be controversial, but in its day
the painting was viewed as transgressing the tastes of polite soci-
ety because it depicted the sordid side of modern life. The nakedness
of Olympia was reinforced by the placement of her hand over her
pudendum, which added to the outrage evoked by this work. What
is regarded as transgressive is relative to culture and society, but it is
clear that the impulse to transgress is deep-seated within humanity,
particularly for the artist whose raison d’être is in truth-telling, an act
that often necessitates transgressing the boundaries of convention.
Kristeva argues for the eccentricity – in the sense of being outside
the mainstream (ex-centric) – of the artist who probes the depths of
reality:
We live in a society which is both ultra-conformist – that is

perhaps what people will say of our century: that we are hyper-
bourgeois, hyper-conformist, we cocoon, are afraid of sex, and so
on – and where at the same time, as a consequence of this, there
is a great deal of exclusion, both mental and social. I think this
desire for eccentricity manifested by the artists on show does stem
from the concern that is at the heart of sacred rites – to take into
account that which is marginal to a structure, dirty: ‘I am going
to concentrate on this dirtiness so as to find a representation of it,
and when I have found a representation for this eccentricity, it is

a form of harmony.’
(Penwarden, 1995, p. 24)
A recurring theme in abject art is transgression. Boundaries that

should be respected are crossed over, causing a feeling of anxiety.
In the body this happens when what lies inside the body, such as
fluids and viscera, comes to the surface, or when what is meant to
remain private, such as genitalia, is put on show. Subjects that are
deemed to be taboo in certain cultures, such as incest, sexual vio-
lence and death, are explored in explicit ways. Other boundaries that
are not respected are social boundaries; what is regarded as socially
conventional or proprietous is compromised and viewers are made
to see sights that unhinge and disturb their equanimity. The level of
discomfort is increased precisely because these activities are taking
place in public spaces in the presence of others, making the possibil-
ity of flight for the individual difficult. The public nature of what is
normally private is of paramount importance. Whether in the private
confines of home life or in reveries, people think about and explore
ideas and activities that may involve abjection. Away from the gaze of
others we feel secure in entertaining these thoughts. The shift to the
public arena dismantles the security that we had in private and is dis-
arming partly because we do not know how we might react to certain
spectacles. Being visible to others adds to our self-consciousness; in
its unmistakably public nature ‘we cannot so easily keep our thoughts
and blushed embarrassment to ourselves, unlike in the darkness of
the theatre or cinema, or the privacy of reading’ (Rosenthal, 1998,
p. 10). Moreover, the nature of the work and what it asks of us mean
that the boundaries of viewing are annihilated and we are taken into
the space of the artist – and ultimately to abjection.
The body as the locus of abjection
When we think about abject art it is important not to think of it as

being an art movement with a specific history and style (genre or
medium) but as a collective term that responds to the issues of abjec-
tion. Historically, it can be situated in a genealogy that reverses the
tenets of modernism, in particular Clement Greenberg’s late formal-
ist criticism, and is characterized by an emphasis on the overturning
of the visual in favour of the other senses, especially the tactile and
the olfactory; and the preference given to the horizontal over the
vertical axis. In keeping with this, it can also be viewed as a process
of desublimation and as an ‘assault on the totalizing and homog-
enizing notions of identity, system, and order’ (Taylor, 1993, p. 60).
We can make a distinction between content – which is what the work
is about – and process, which concerns what is brought about, the
effects of the work and the effect that it has on the viewer. When
thinking about abjection as process we are referring to the effect that
it has on the stability of subjectivity. If abjection signifies a crisis in
establishing and maintaining the borders between the object and the
subject, then by drawing our attention to ‘something which changes
or endangers a structure’, the artist is invoking and evoking a state of
abjection (Kristeva, in Penwarden, 1995, p. 24).
What can be described as abject art involves the body being
undone and taken apart. This is often conveyed by flesh, in partic-
ular viscera, bodily fluids and wounds. The presence of a naked body
of flesh causes feelings of vulnerability because it is a reminder of
our animal nature. Going back to one of the general principles of
Kristeva’s theory, the abject is what lies outside or beyond the defined
boundary, and, in this case, the boundaries of the body. It refers to the
processes of expulsion (excretion, crying, ejaculation) and the bodily
fluids and substances that are secreted during these processes (includ-
ing blood, saliva, semen, urine and excrement). Although these fluids
are of the body, once they are outside the body they threaten its
intactness with violation; are dangerous because of their potential
to contaminate; and put subjectivity in crisis; hence are viewed
as abject. As discussed in Chapter 2, functions and processes that
involve bodily fluids and the uncontrollable aspects of the body are
regarded as being private in a social sense; something which should
be kept away from the public gaze. ‘We disavow our excretory bodies
because they are signs of disorder, reminders of the body’s ambiguous
limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its ultimate death . . . ’
(Covino, 2004, p. 17).
In abjection we move from an understanding of the external repre-
sentation of the body, which prevailed before the twentieth century,
to a preoccupation with embodiment, the condition of both being
and having a body. Bryan Turner defines what is distinct about
embodiment as follows: ‘[t]he concept of the “body” suggests a reified
object of analysis, whereas “embodiment” more adequately captures

the notions of making and doing the work of bodies – of becoming
a body in social space’ (Turner, 1996, p. xiii). Social conventions dic-
tate that we are generally privy only to the external and outer bodies
of other people in our dealings with them. This ‘public’ aspect of
the body, as discussed in Chapter 2, concerns what is on the outside,
while what lies inside the envelope of skin is veiled from the public
gaze. In fact, it is not wide of the mark to say that we are encouraged
to think of body-image as consisting of only the external. When we
do conceive of the body in terms of inner and outer, the insides of the
body are not meant to be shared with others. The distrust of the body
we harbour also applies to rituals of care; we mop up after our leaky
insides but prefer not to dwell on them. Elaine Scarry (1985) discusses
how the relationship between inner and outer can also be mediated
in the discourse of pain. When we are feeling physically well the body
can be said to be in a state of equilibrium. This sense of balance can be
disrupted with the onset of pain, or after overindulgence, for exam-
ple. When this occurs we become aware of our innards and thereby
of our condition as an embodied being.
Embodiment became a popular subject in the visual arts in the
twentieth century as artists started to explore ‘the phenomenol-
ogy of how people experienced the “lived body” ’ (Turner 1992,
in Mellor and Shilling, 1997, p. 5) and was explored through the
following overlapping categories: the corporeal fragment, the precar-
ious boundary between the outer and inner, and the use of abject
materials (such as bodily fluids, excrement, dirt, dead animals and
putrefying food substances) that caused a feeling of abjection. The
corporeal fragment was typically an incomplete body, a body part,
or body parts fused together in novel ways. In its fleshiness it drew
attention to the whole of the body, thus becoming a signifier of
the whole body, but also noted the palpable absence of the rest of
the body. The second category explored the fragile boundary that
separates two states from commingling. Artists would often employ
various methods to rupture the outer so that the inner would come
seeping through, thus blurring the boundaries and giving rise to an
experience of abjection. The abject body was Dionysian because it
did not display clear limits separating itself from an other; it posed
the threat of contamination and was formless. The use of bodily flu-
ids was often employed experimentally to confuse the boundaries
between different states. Being neither solid nor liquid, the visqueux
(to use a Sartrean term2 ) exerted a rending force that confounded the
viewer who witnessed the body being taken apart.
One artist who is preoccupied with embodiment is Kiki Smith. She
creates sculptures that portray human corporeality (often through
the excretory function), the loss of self, decay and the abject state of
the body that is drawn into a cycle of replenishment and decay. They
‘are not the kind of bodies and objects we are accustomed to, not the
finished, polished desiring machines produced by modern technol-
ogy or reproduced on glossy paper or celluloid’ (Isaak, 1995, p. 10).
Nor are they objective studies typical of the ‘anatomo-clinical gaze’
(Taylor, 1993, p. 65). Christine Ross offers the descriptor ‘skinned’
with reference to the Virgin Mary (1993), but the term is more widely
applicable for describing the general appearance of Smith’s works. She
adds that Smith’s works ‘are constantly being defined by a corporeal-
ity that is in a state of ruin’ (Ross, 2003, pp. 285–286). Another phrase
that comes to mind when thinking about Smith’s work, as articu-
lated by Catherine Lampert, is the ‘strongly visceral and unnerving
presence’ like the presence of death, which conveys the remnants
of what remains – the flayed skin, bare bones and hardened clumps
of viscera. In the absent presence of life, ‘[m]any works have a reli-
gious and relic-like strangeness’ (Lampert, in Smith 1995, p. 6). What
makes Smith’s work one of the most apt examples of abjection is that
she exposes the vulnerability of the subject that is in a state of corpo-
real turmoil. This manifests itself in the overflow of substances, such
as bodily fluids. McGinn observes that ‘bodily waste is at its most
appalling when in the very act of leaving the body’s interior – as
with the dangling turd, the running nose, and spurting blood . . . The
closer to breathing life the material is the worse it seems’ (McGinn,
2011, p. 103). Smith features bodies in the process of excretion of
some kind. And so, not only are we forced to confront excreta but
also the bodily function. Pee Body (1992), which was discussed in
the Introduction, depicts a nude female figure that is in the act of
urinating, leaving behind a deliquescent trail of yellow beads that
glisten. A flood of red beads issues from the vagina of the menstruat-
ing standing nude in Train (1993), and Tail (1992) presents a similar
figure crawling on all fours with a long trail of excrement behind her.
One of her most graphic presentations of the fluidity of bodies
is Untitled (1990), which features a naked couple that are vertically
suspended and have bodily fluids trickling down their bodies – the
woman has milk falling from her nipples and the man has semen
running down his legs. There are other ‘bodies’ that are not ren-
dered whole, but in parts, which Ross describes as having ‘been torn
off from the trunk as though following a catastrophe’ (Ross, 2003,
p. 285). In all these representations the viewer is drawn to the connec-
tion between the body and its waste products. The flow of substances
from the body conveys the cycle of life. Smith does not separate
the waste from the body because to do so would be to objectify
waste. Instead, she leaves it to linger in its viscerality, sometimes
on the edges of the body so we are unable to banish it from view.
It becomes the point of contestation, where the boundaries of the
self cannot be delineated and where the intactness of the body is
under threat by what has been expelled. As Kristeva says, ‘[f]ecal mat-
ter signifies . . . what never ceases to separate from a body in a state
of permanent loss in order to become autonomous, distinct from the
mixtures, alterations, and decay that run through it’ (Kristeva, 1982,
p. 108). The body ‘is always in process – just emerging from, or on the
verge of slipping back into, inchoate matter’ (Isaak, 1995, p. 13). The
placement and position of the figures that are crouching down and
lying down add weight to this reading. Her figures are depersonalized
and symbolize the universality of the human condition: ‘statues of
saints, sinners, and mortals do what mortals do – curl up against the
cold, crawl on all fours, defecate, lactate, ejaculate, urinate’ (Isaak,
1995, pp. 9–10).
The emphasis on the bodily and the questions about identity
that abjection gives rise to mean that abjection is still a pervasive
theme in contemporary art today. What follows is an account of the
development of the undoing of the body in Western art from the
body-as-entity to the body-as-fragment.
From the body to the bodily: Representation of the body

in Western art history
Arguably the most important subject in the history of Western art

is the human figure. Prior to the twentieth century the body was
depicted in terms of a subject or as an external form. Whether clothed
or nude, the emphasis was on external representation and attempts
were not made to render the body-as-flesh except in still life painting.
A notable example of this is Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655), where

the dead carcass is elevated to the status of a human figure in its artic-
ulation for the purpose of conveying spiritual continuity between the
human and the beast. The focus on the outward form of the body
led to a tendency to idealize the body as reflecting the doctrine of
imago dei, where beauty displaced any sense of the erotic and created
the tradition of the nude that has dominated Western art history for
centuries. When bodies were considered erotic, the emphasis was on
the carnal and naked aspects, but without a mention of the mor-
tal or decaying nature of the flesh. The Renaissance revolutionized
the way the body was conceived in visual representation. Dissections
of the body made it possible to depict the body anatomically, as
seen in the studies of Leonardo Da Vinci and Vitruvius. However,
the interest in the inner was confined to the study of dead bodies
and the connection between the living body and its innards had
not been broached until the twentieth century. Another revolution-
ary aspect of the Renaissance was the formulation of the concept of
the grotesque, which shared many commonalities with abjection,
including the resistance of form and coherent identity (Connelly,
2003, p. 2).
The term ‘grotesque’, from ‘grotto’ which is in turn from the
Italian word grotta, ‘first appeared in the mid-sixteenth century to
describe the fantastical figures decorating a Roman villa’ (Connelly,
2003, pp. 5, 20). Used in aesthetics to challenge notions of classical
beauty, it described images and entities that exhibited the following
characteristics: the combination of incongruous parts, the decompo-
sition of reality, the metamorphosis of one reality into another and
the disproportionality of form. In the combination of different parts
or transformation from one into another, the grotesque, like abjec-
tion, involved disrespecting the boundary and ‘is defined by what
it does to boundaries, transgressing, merging, overflowing, destabiliz-
ing them . . . ’ (Connelly, 2003, p. 4). This contrasts with the beautiful,
which maintains clear and discrete boundaries (Burke, in Connelly,
2003, p. 4).
By definition, the grotesque is abject. The combination of different
parts or realities present in some grotesque beings and objects makes
their nature difficult to ascertain because they do not belong to one
identity-category and are heterogeneous. In their composite states
they are what Mary Douglas would describe as ambiguous (in that
they are neither one thing nor another) and anomalous (because
they do not fit in any one category). There are a number of mon-
sters in different mythological traditions that are grotesque, such as
the centaur (body of a horse and torso of a man) and the sphinx
(body of a lion and head of a woman). These creatures do not always
bring about harm but are generally feared because of their unpre-
dictable and unstable natures; they defy social conventions and often
belong to a different order of being in a fantastical, mythological,
science-fiction or supernatural realm. Donna Haraway describes them
as being ‘boundary creatures’ in order to refer to the proximity that
a grotesque creature has to the boundary (Haraway, 1991, p. 2 in
Connelly, 2003, p. 4).
The grotesque was a visual strategy and aesthetic that enabled the
body to be reconfigured in interesting and inventive ways, where the
normal structure of the human form became the site of experimen-
tation and exaggeration, threatening the stability of form. One of
the most influential studies of the grotesque on visual culture was
Bakhtin’s interpretation of the grotesque body, where the body was
in the continual act of becoming:
It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, cre-

ated, and builds and creates another body . . . Thus the artistic
logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and
impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences
(sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the
body’s limited space or into the body’s depths.
(Bakhtin, 1984, pp. 317–318)
The concept of the grotesque occurred in twentieth century art in

new idioms of the body, which involved reconfiguring the body from
inside out in its abject and base state. Bataille’s concept of base mate-
rialism was highly influential for artists who wanted to distort the
innate tranquillity of the nude that had persisted throughout cen-
turies of art history. Now bodies were presented not as static entities
that could be preserved by representation, but as bodies that were
instead prone to breakdown, fragmentation and dissolution, whereby
the body part was used to explore questions of identity, sexuality and
death. In its fragmented state, ‘lacking its customary wholeness and
unity’, the body tested our own sense of stability. ‘This [was] not the
healthy normal body, intact and functioning, but the body as dam-
aged and sundered; it accordingly prompt[ed] the shudder we feel
when the body is otherwise falling to pieces’ (McGinn, 2011, p. 16).
This is portrayed in the nightmarish visions of Hans Bellmer who is
best known for his constructions of life-size pubescent female dolls –
Die Puppe – that were dismembered and distorted in various ways and
then photographed.3
Influenced by the realistic life-size doll Olympia in Jacques
Offenbach’s final opera The Tales of Hoffmann (1819–80), Bellmer con-
structed his first doll in 1933, which consisted of a moulded torso, a
mask-like head and a pair of legs.4 A few years later (in 1935) he made
a second doll, which was less naturalistic, more deformed but also
more mobile. He kept the head from the first doll and then added
four legs, four breasts, three pelvises, an upper torso and a spherical
belly (Taylor, 2000, p. 73). These various body parts were used inter-
changeably in assemblages, and the movable ball joints at different
points across the body meant that Bellmer could be inventive and
increase the grotesqueness of the doll as well as explore the ‘fluid-
ity between internal and external properties’ (Semff and Spira, 2006,
p. 10). There are a number of photographs featuring two pairs of legs
arranged around the belly. In these works Bellmer is using privative
measures – where one pair of legs stands in place of arms. In spite of
the numerous, albeit disarticulated, parts, a sense of wholeness can-
not be achieved and the dolls are in a state of mutant metamorphosis.
Hal Foster comments on how Bellmer ‘manipulates the [dolls] exces-
sively [and] photograph[s them] in different positions, [where] each
new version is a “construction as dismemberment” that simultane-
ously signifies castration (in the disconnection of body parts) and
its fetishistic defense (in the multiplication of these parts as phallic
substitutes)’ (Foster, 1991, p. 87).
Bellmer stages elaborate backdrops in his photographs of the dolls,
which include deserted locations in woods, the dolls being suspended
from a ceiling, draped on a bed, or in a forest with Bellmer emerging
from behind a tree. All these scenes are deeply disturbing and convey
the sinister, paedophilic and violent quality of his images that are
suggestive of rape scenes.5 In other examples, Bellmer reduces the doll
to a series of stumps, which look like bulbous, tumorous growths. He
also adjoins random body parts in incongruous combinations, which
adds to the ambivalence of the body.
In addition to the photographs of the dolls, Bellmer also produced

numerous drawings, etchings and books, all of which were orien-
tated towards his ‘quest for a “monstrous dictionary” dedicated to
the ambivalence of the body’ (Semff and Spira, 2006, p. 10). His work
can be explained by a lifelong motivation to liberate himself from
the dictates of ‘adult’ behaviour and from certain constraining pow-
ers in his life, such as his overpowering father and prevailing fascist
ideals (Taylor, 2000, pp. 4–5),6 as well as an overwhelming need to
release his instincts and explore his perverted misogyny.7 Couched in
terms of abjection, his work can be read as a re-enactment of mater-
nal abjection where we are surrounded by bulbous maternal forms –
a breast, a spherical belly – that we loathe but cannot annihilate.
Like Bataille, he was also directly parodying the classical tradition of
the nude, and fashions instead an aberrant and corrupt materiality.
While Bellmer’s work was regarded as degenerate and antithetical to
the ideals of human strength and power in Nazi Germany, his ideol-
ogy was in sympathy with the Surrealist spirit of exploring irrational
desires and the incongruous pairing of different realities, a feature
that originated in the tradition of the grotesque.
Bellmer was intrigued by the gifts of childhood including imagina-
tion and play and wanted to recreate them as ‘a pre-Oedipal moment
before castration’ (Foster, 1991, p. 87). However, through the eyes of a
grown man, his images instead conjure up psychosexual disturbance
and the nightmarish. His erotomania for his pubescent dolls may be
regarded by many as distasteful, as was his need to articulate poly-
morphous perversity.8 Bellmer corrupts the innocence of childhood
toys with the existential fear of death. The crisis of subjectivity artic-
ulated in his dolls was actualized in world events in the collapse of
Western civilization.
After the Second World War the body became a popular subject
in sculpture, both in figurative and abstract form. In painting, how-
ever, other concerns largely prevailed. For instance, the New York
School explored the gestural potential of materiality. Artists such
as Wilhelm de Kooning maintained a strong interest in the human
form, but they were largely in a minority. Another exception was
Francis Bacon, who rehabilitated figurative form (in his use of the
figural9 ) and moved beyond the closed form to look at the leaking
body, where the innards spill out of orifices or holes in the body
into the foreground. Bacon stood out for many reasons, his intensely
personal aesthetic for one, and his obsession with the human sub-
ject being another. Bacon was loosely associated with the School of
London (although this affiliation was more social than professional),
but he did share their overriding interest in the subject of the human
body. Bacon’s representations of the human form are also relevant
to a study on abjection primarily because of his concern with the
fleshy body. With an almost religious vehemence, Bacon spoke of
his nihilism, a belief that nothing matters in a metaphysical sense
(see Arya, 2012). However, as an individual, he greatly invested in
this world, and as an artist, he was intent on conveying the beauty
and pain of mortal flesh. He was not interested in figures per se and
sought to paint bodies and body parts.
There are a number of reasons why Bacon’s work can be described
as abject. The most evident of these is his unconventional delineation
of the human body, where the boundaries between the structure of
the body and the matter that makes up the body are in tension, thus
causing the contents of the body to spill over into the foreground, as
in his Portrait of John Edwards (1988). Michel Leiris (1988, p. 13) uses
the term ‘liquefaction’ to refer to this process of turbulence. What
is confusing is that the overspilled material is, in many cases, more
opaque than the actual body, which further obfuscates the bound-
aries of the body between inner and outer. In Portrait of John Edwards
the overspill flows into a pool, which extends back to the front leg
of the chair, thus doubling up as the shadow of the chair. Another
boundary that is blurred in Bacon’s figures is that between human
and animal. Bacon merged the human with the animal in order to
explore the extremes of human psychology, and as a further com-
ment on the godless state of the world.10 When experiencing extreme
pain and suffering, the human resorts to the position of the animal to
express torment. This often takes the form of a cry or scream, expres-
sions that can be found on the three figures in Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944). Dawn Ades observes how the
figure in the central panel, bearing gritted teeth, and the figure in
the right-hand panel, with open mouth, vent frustration that seems
to stem from their inverted positions in the genital region. The dis-
placement of mouth or teeth to the genital area contributes to the
bestiality of the imagery (Ades, 1985, p. 16).11 By merging the human
and animal in these forms, Bacon conveys the desperate nature of
these creatures and uses these figures to represent the dysfunctional
nature of humanity. Their bestial outlets provide channels for the

ravening appetites of the figures, which are insatiable and destructive.
In his study on Bacon, Deleuze describes the Baconian body as a
body without organs (Deleuze, 2003, pp. 44–45).12 The body without
organs (a term coined by Antonin Artaud in his radio play, To Have
Done With the Judgement of God (1947)), does not, within this con-
text, mean that the body is literally without organs but rather that
the structure of the organs is irregular, chaotic even, and, following
on from that, that the organs do not operate functionally. This ren-
ders the body more malleable and prone to dissolution. In fact, the
force of his figures causes them to want to exit their bodies through
any available aperture or orifice, whether through the mouth or the
anus. The spasmodic or paroxysmal potential of the body often man-
ifests itself as a force that cannot be contained and where the body
attempts to escape through one of its orifices into the outside world.
In Figure at a Washbasin (1976), the figure clings ‘to the oval of the
washbasin, its hands clutching the faucets, the body-Figure exerts an
intense motionless effort upon itself in order to escape down the
blackness of the drain’ (Deleuze, 2003, p. 15). In some examples,
such as in Portrait of John Edwards discussed earlier, the body exits
the human form via a different point, such as through the right foot.
Martin Jay regards Bacon’s figures as ‘solitary abjects [that] bear wit-
ness to a society bereft of the basic ritual forms necessary to mediate
cultural production: hysteria became the most authentic bourgeois
equivalent to the carnivalesque’ (Jay, 1994, p. 240). The absence of
ritual forms is conveyed in Bacon’s use of recognizable symbols of
religious traditions, such as the Crucifixion which Bacon was inter-
ested in partly because of its mythic power in harbouring collective
sensibilities and which provided an outlet of catharsis and purgation.
In Bacon’s crucifixions, the symbol is transformed to fit with a god-
less world and so, instead of being cathartic it takes us to the ultimate
scene of the Real: the gamy worm-like corpse on the cross.13
Bacon’s work has influenced artists significantly since the twen-
tieth century. He approached the human body via the flesh rather
than the external figurative form. In his explorations, the body was
prone to dissolution, fragmentation and distortion, and he conveyed
in powerful terms what it feels like to be a body rather than simply
having a body.
Body art and abjection
Body artists of the 1960s and 1970s used their bodies as a medium
of expression.14 The artist’s body was disclosed as a valid art material
in its own right, ‘as the “content” of the work, but also as canvas,
brush, frame and platform’ (Warr, in Warr and Jones, 2000, p. 11).
The body also became the tool of experimentation for artists to
explore philosophical and political notions about identity, gender,
sexuality and community, and by which they could question social
strictures imposed on art and society. Extreme actions, often of a
sadomasochistic kind, were employed to push the body and mind
beyond the pain barrier in an effort to explore human endurance
and the boundaries of the self. Pain became a symbol of the rupture
of social homogeneity and of rethinking identity and social mores.
‘[R]itualized pain had a purifying effect: such work was necessary “in
order to reach an anaesthetized society” ’ (Goldberg, 1999, p. 165).
This was an art of the limit and its equivalents – the limen, the thresh-
old and the margin. Body/performance art negotiated the precarious
boundaries between opposing states: subject and object; human and
machine; male and female; life and death; health and disease; and
natural and artificial, and in so doing it gave rise to an experience of
the abject.
Artists put their bodies in potentially dangerous situations by
embracing the abject. Piercing, cutting, ingesting and expelling were
commonly used methods (in the 1960s and 70s) of rupturing per-
sonal and social homogeneity and of distorting the normal parame-
ters of bodily expression and sensation, which often left the artist in a
state of stupor or ecstasy at which point they were able to escape from
their culturally determined body to a state of abjection and anarchy.
Body artists were preoccupied with the scatological and used nor-
mal bodily functions like urination in their performances in order
to shock their viewers and to draw attention to the parts of the
body that had been neglected in visual representation.15 Locked in
what psychoanalysts would call a state of infantile regression, some
artists, such as Paul McCarthy, experimented with the materiality
of bodily fluids mimetically (often using the body as a paintbrush)
where blood, semen and excrement were symbolized by ketchup,
mayonnaise and chocolate, respectively.
Gina Pane’s Nourriture/Actualités télévisées/Feu (Food/News Televi-

sion/Fire, 1971) conveys the different pressures that body artists
inflicted on themselves for their art. In this work Pane subjected
her body to a series of brutal activities, including consuming half a
pound of rotten mince, while watching television in an intentionally
uncomfortable position. She then put out fires which were burning
on sand with her bare feet until the pain forced her to stop. In these
actions she is polluting her body, opening it up to infection (by eating
uncooked meat and blistering her feet) and is violating norms about
the sanctity of the body by deliberately putting her body in a state
of risk. Another example of extreme action is by the artist Chris Bur-
den. In Shoot (1971), Burden asked an assistant to shoot him in his
left arm where the intention was that his arm would not be injured.
This however was not the outcome and flesh was torn from his arm.
A year later in Deadman (1972) Burden carried out a death-defying act
in which he lay in a canvas bag in the middle of a busy Los Angeles
boulevard. This work was halted by the police who arrested him for
endangering his own and others’ lives.
One of the main questions that needs to be addressed, with ref-
erence to these and other examples, involves possible explanations
for such extreme behaviour. Why did these artists subject them-
selves and often others to danger and violence? Some artists brought
about abjection in order to comment on ‘civilization’ and society,
where their artwork incorporated social critiques about a host of
different topics, including cultural ‘traumas’ and consumerist soci-
ety. Their artwork was a provocation that may have been politically
motivated: to make visible the plights of disenfranchised groups in
society, thus promoting their identity politics. Body art was a new
form that enabled artists to reinvent aesthetics. Kristeva argued that
‘pictorial signs, images, have become banalised by the history of
art . . . they have lost their sensorial and instinctual force, as if they
were no longer able to speak of corporeal experience . . . ’ (Kristeva,
in Penwarden, 1995, p. 25). Body art enabled artists to move away
from the exhausted representational space of the canvas and to dis-
cover their bodies through the economy of sensation. The turn to
the body-as-canvas signalled a new and exciting aesthetic. The sado-
masochistic urge to cut, open and rupture their bodies and to act
in unregulated ways enabled them to explore new spaces and sen-
sations, and in doing so, to articulate their identity and issues on
their own critical terms, instead of being spoken for by others. Abjec-
tion provided ‘a powerful means of transgression and reinvention’
(Connelly, 2003, p. 10) for artists who had been denied autonomy to
speak for themselves and whose identity had been construed in terms
of otherness.
In the process of recovery, these artists often turned to the very
site of repulsion that they embodied – their gender, sexuality, race,
disability – as a way of destabilizing Western notions of otherness.
Some used their art to critique US society in general with its empha-
sis on consumer culture. In mapping out new spaces of articulation,
they were able to turn to their bodies to reconfigure subjectivity and
meaning. In the terrain of feminism, for example, the shift in inter-
pretation of the gendered body took the following form: ‘Within
a patriarchal system, th[e] space of the feminine [was] defined as
“terrifying, monstrous . . . mad, unconscious, improper, unclean, non-
sensical, oriental, profane” ’ (Jardine, 1985, pp. 72–73, in Jones, 1993,
p. 33), and female artists in the past ‘were forced to deny the presence
of sexual/gendered imagery in their work if they wanted to be taken
seriously’ (Jones, 1993, p. 35). But now they were able to use pre-
cisely these aspects in order to reframe their positions. Many women
used their mark of ‘defilement’ – menstrual blood – as a symbol of
empowerment and feminism. And so we have a transformation of
meaning: menstrual blood was marginalized in religious ritual tradi-
tions because of its alleged polluting properties, which meant that
women were made to undergo specific rites of purity, but in the
context of avant-garde practices the vagina and associated menses
become foregrounded, and blood becomes a symbol of power.16 One
of the ultimate expressions of female autonomy is Shigeko Kubota’s
Vagina Painting (1965) where ‘the artist attached a paintbrush to her
crotch and indecorously squatted over the canvas in a parody of
Pollock’s painterly gesture’. In her performance she ‘[activates] the
vagina as a source of inscription and language, [thus] inverting the
Western cultural designation of female genitalia as a site of “lack”
(lack of the phallus) and the place where language breaks down’
(Warr and Jones, 2000, pp. 24, 63). In Menstruation Bathroom from
the installation Womanhouse17 (1972) Judy Chicago, who only a year
before had waved the Red Flag of female solidarity, now presented
viewers with another uncensored portrayal. In her installation we
see a white, clean and deodorized bathroom, covered with a veil of
gauze, in which boxes of feminine hygiene products are stacked on a

shelf. The neat and sanitized presentation of the paraphernalia can-
not mask the bloodied sanitary towels that overflow the waste bin,
and the saturated tampons that lie on the floor. The overpowering
sight and stench of the blood, red against white, cannot be covered
up and conveys ‘a threshold where “nature” confronts “culture” ’
(Jardine, 1985, p. 89, in Jones, 1993, p. 34), thereby disturbing iden-
tity, system and order. Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975) is
another bold instantiation of womanhood, this time moving beyond
menstrual blood to focus on vulvic spaces. Standing before an audi-
ence, Schneemann discards a book in her hands before unravelling a
scroll from her vagina and reading it. This represented the ultimate
expression of écriture féminine.18
Many who were affected by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s used
their bodies as a platform for examining desire, risk and loss, much
to the chagrin of US right-wing conservatives. This public platform
was an important way of giving visibility to a taboo illness that
was fraught with prejudice. The public’s irrational fears about the
threat of disease and of contamination were ramped up in upfront
portrayals of desire and wounded bodies. Thomas discusses how
issues pertaining to the body, such as the examination of bodily flu-
ids, ‘take on a different valence in the age of AIDS (not that AIDS
is a “gay disease,” but it is undeniably a concern of gay politics)’
(Thomas, 1996, pp. 196–197). Robert Gober created installations that
consisted of fragmentary male body parts resembling ‘plumbing fix-
tures’ (Hopkins, 2000, p. 226), playing up the erotic nature of holes,
that were mysteriously scattered in anonymous hotel-like rooms.
He drew attention to neglected and transitory spaces that are over-
looked in the construction of identity, which could be an allusion
to the socially abject and disenfranchised who often exist on the
peripheries of social structures. Simon Taylor has commented on the
symbolism of these body parts and suggested that they ‘invoke the
abject through the sense of horror they elicit in the viewer, a hor-
ror related to the fear of dismemberment and death’ and how ‘[t]he
dismembered limb in [his] work is, among other things, a metaphor
of the pathology of homophobia’ (Taylor, 1993, pp. 72, 75). Another
reading suggests that Gober transforms ‘Surrealist fetishes of hetero-
sexual desire into enigmatic tokens of homosexual mourning and
melancholy’ (Foster et al., 2011, p. 689).
Another artist who explores similar themes is Ron Athey, whose

work is characterized by extreme actions, often of a sadomasochistic
nature that involve piercing and cutting himself and allowing blood
to spurt out of his body. Drawing on rituals that have religious ori-
gins, Athey’s work questions preconceived ideas about masculinity
and bodily expression, which is made urgent given his HIV-positive
status.
The theme of the deformed, diseased or dying body was a popular
theme in performance art and more generally in art since the turn of
the twentieth century. Jo Spence’s ‘photo-therapy’ works are particu-
larly poignant.19 After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982,
Spence began a series of self-portraits in a project that was called
The Picture of Health, where she sought to regain ownership of her
body rather than having it subordinated to medical practitioners.
This involved documenting her course of treatment and deflecting
the medical gaze to the personal, where she shares with the viewer
a cancer patient’s experiences of treatment as she undergoes a par-
tial mastectomy. She identified her motivations as a need to explain
‘my experience as a patient and the contradictions between ways
in which the medical profession controls women’s bodies and the
“imaginary bodies” we inhabit as women’ (Spence, 1986, p. 156).
In doing so, Spence is confronting the viewer with sights that are
marginalized in polite society and are confined to anonymous (and
depersonalized) medical photographs that are used for the purposes
of advancing knowledge. In one photo she stands bare-chested before
a mammogram and slots her breast into the frame. But it is not
simply the cancer that is unsightly but her middle-aged and over-
sized body, which represents a challenge to the viewer who is more
accustomed to viewing idealized bodies. Since the twentieth century
we have become more accustomed to viewing different conceptions
of the body that depart from classical norms. But this portrayal of
the grotesque is particularly stark because it is configured by the
author: Spence refuses to be marginalized because of her illness and
turns her body into a spectacle for mass viewing and a site for
testimony. Unlike the self-inflicted injuries to which Burden, Pane
and Marina Abramović subjected their bodies in their performances,
here Spence is revealing the ravages of an abnormally function-
ing body, a sight that is more alarming because of its unmediated
realism.
Whether politics was a motivating force of action or not, perfor-

mances (on stage or in the public domain) forced people to think
about human psychology – violence, fear, danger and a host of other
emotions. For civilizations like the ancient Greeks, the cathartic ben-
efits offered by tragic drama were thought to be socially beneficial.
Rosie Goldberg states that the ritualized pain experienced in per-
formances had a purifying effect on an anaesthetized society and
awakened its perception and sensation (Goldberg, 1999, p. 165). Peo-
ple would emerge from the performance feeling uplifted and purged,
which would make them more productive and wholesome. But one
could argue that catharsis was only achieved in the cases of ritualized
violence, whereas real violence, in the sense of the actual infliction
of violence, as present in Burden’s Shoot, for example, takes us over
this threshold and becomes unequivocally horror-inducing. Antonin
Artaud’s revolutionary notion of the ‘theatre of cruelty’ revived the
significance of the cathartic potential of theatre and offers a frame-
work of analysis here. In The Theatre and Its Double (2013 [1938])
Artaud argued for the importance of a revival of a mode of theatre
that transformed the conservatism of erstwhile modes of theatre and
one that instead lifted viewers beyond a conception of comfortable
and complacent living, and energized them through a fuller under-
standing of reality and community. He shared parallel concerns with
Bataille, namely the belief in the social significance of transgression
that would facilitate sacred community, and in the need for potential
wounding to bring this about. Indeed Artaud – inspired by the legacy
of the potential relationship of theatre, religion and ritual explored
by Friedrich Nietzsche – describes his desire ‘to rediscover an idea
of sacred theater’ (Artaud, 1988, p. 276, in Fortier, 2002, p. 55) that
brought about catharsis.
Artaud’s conception of the theatre of cruelty can be used to explain
the radicalism of performance art that employed physical and meta-
physical violence to reconfigure representational practices. It is also a
useful framework by which to interpret certain works. The following
two examples exemplify Artaud’s idea of total theatre, which encom-
passed the combination of multiple forms of media. The first example
is the performances of the 1960s group the Viennese Actionists,
who were influenced by pagan and early Christian rites and who
staged spectacles that involved ritualized sacrifice and torture in
order to attain abreaction and catharsis.20 In Chapter 2 we saw how
religious ritual was used to safeguard the sacred from everyday life.
The Actionists, in particular Hermann Nitsch, reversed this princi-
ple to unleash the force of the sacred where the artist was elevated
to the role of shaman. In Orgies Mysteries Theatre (OMT) he staged a
number of performances that involved mock-violence and carried out
sacrificial rites using dead animals and humans. Doused in blood and
eviscerated, the mimetic violence was reminiscent of the Dionysian
rites of the bacchanal.
Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) conveys the Dionysian
sense of abandonment and sensuality of the ‘celebration of flesh as
material’ (Schneemann, 1997, in Warr and Jones, p. 60). Eight male
and female partially clothed performers, covered in blood, writhed in
ecstasy as they grappled with one another and played with other vis-
ceral substances, such as raw chicken, sausages and wet paint, against
a soundtrack of street noises and ambient lighting. As time went
on, the individual boundaries of the participants gave way to a ‘col-
lective effervescence’,21 where the sum is greater than its parts, and
this manifested itself in a stream of pulsating bodies. It is interesting
that, unlike many of the examples considered, no pain or mutilation
was involved here and the state of abjection was brought about by
the contagious desire caused by the sensory exchange (particularly
touch) of visceral substances. Schneemann used the blood of meat
carcasses to cover the performer’s bodies. This generated a sense of
primal violence in the group and broke social taboos. Such expres-
sions of frenzy can be explained by contact, bringing about a sensual
solidarity. On an immediate level they are a reaction to the liberation
of the body experienced during the work, which is cathartic to the
viewer.
Abject viewing
For many of the artworks discussed in this chapter it is difficult for

us to speak about their affective qualities, both in the articulation
of what we are witnessing and also how we are to process it. They
may cause feelings in the viewer of fear, horror and disgust, all of
which make critical detachment impossible.22 When caught up in
viewing art that arouses violent disgust, it is easy to feel that what we
are viewing involves the annihilation of limits and that fear accom-
panies this loss of control. However, to return to a point raised in
Chapter 2, rather than being a complete violation, transgression is

an overstepping or trespassing of the boundary in order to reinscribe
it and hence heighten the fear of the taboo.
The dynamics of viewing are specific to the medium or form in
question, so while the viewing of a painting may share similar charac-
teristics to experiencing performance art, there are certain differences
that distinguish them. Using Lacanian theory, Foster evaluates the
role that the screen (as a viewing platform) plays in mediating view-
ing. Humans are able to ‘manipulate and moderate the gaze’ and the
screen ‘allows the subject, at the point of the picture, to behold the
object, at the point of light. Otherwise it would be impossible, for
to see without this screen would be to be blinded by the gaze or
touched by the real’ (Foster, 1996b, p. 109). In recent contemporary
art, Foster argues, the need to ‘pacify the gaze’ has been resisted and
the Real is evoked, which causes dislocation and fear in the viewer.
In speaking about the effects that Bacon’s works have on viewers,
Ernst van Alphen describes the sensations caused by using the lan-
guage of violence and pain. Bacon causes us injury; we feel ‘dragged
along by [his] work’ which causes a ‘sense of paralysis’ (van Alphen,
1992, p. 9). The strenuous terms applied in van Alphen’s analysis
can be used more widely to convey how art that brings about abjec-
tion can make us feel. It has an invasive effect in that it does not
merely affect us intellectually, or on the surface, but causes a turmoil
of sensation that affects us emotionally and psychologically. Another
feature that these artworks have in common is the aesthetic motiva-
tion to bring about abjection.23 Sometimes this occurs immediately,
in that we are confronted with abjection, while ordinarily what hap-
pens is that abjection occurs throughout the process of viewing and
we feel the dual feelings of revulsion yet fascination as the narrative
continues. So we may look away, if only momentarily, only to feel
compelled to look again.
Many of the performance works described earlier were also live and
involved the audience in an immediate and often direct way making
detachment more difficult to sustain. This becomes especially prob-
lematic when the artist inflicts violence either on themselves or on
others. Consider Gina Pane’s Lait Chaud (Hot Milk, 1972). Dressed
entirely in white and facing away from the audience, Pane begins
to alternate between cutting herself with a razor blade and bounc-
ing a tennis ball against a wall. She starts by cutting her back before
moving the blade to the face, which results in mounting tension

and pleas to stop by viewers, ‘No, no, not the face, no!’ (Pane, in
Warr and Jones, 2000, p. 121). After cutting her face she picks up a
video camera and starts filming the audience, lingering on the aghast
expressions on some faces that are frozen with shock. This process
conveys the intimacy between artist and viewer in performance art;
we are implicated in the performance in various ways through audi-
ence participation or, in this case, where we have the gaze turned on
ourselves. The boundary then separating the audience from the artist
is not safeguarded and instead the audience is tested to see how far
it can be pushed. By directing the camera at the audience, Pane was
subjecting viewers to acts of violation and was making them culpable
for the actions. In this example we are made to watch a sequence of
gruesome acts that increase in their level of violence. We are com-
pelled to witness both the operation of abjection to which the artist
subjects her body, as well as the abject condition of the artist, which
is brought about by her actions.
Watching Pane cutting her face induces a sense of abjection –
generating anything from anxiety to the physical feeling of needing
to vomit. Her actions are now more shocking than her self-harming
other parts of her body because of the social and cultural status of
a face, which is a signifier of individuality. In the West it is also a
part of the body that is always exposed, so cutting it open adds to
the vulnerability of the action. The viewer’s reactions and reflections
become the subject of the work and the duration of the performance
traces the movement of the abject: at the beginning we are faced with
an ‘ordinary’ body which becomes abject (which abjects itself) in the
performance and viewers bear testimony to that transition. By ensur-
ing a physical separation between herself and the audience, Pane is
playing a cruel trick; she is reinforcing her autonomy, which gives
her the right to cut herself but, by then turning the camera on us,
she is making us culpable for her actions.
Other artists used recording equipment such as video cameras as
a way of including the audience in the performance. During the
performance there is a shift of focal point: subject becomes object
and, as in the above example, we go from victim to torturer as the
camera moves on to us as we collude in Pane’s self-mutilation. The
demands that artists place on the viewers here brings us to the ques-
tion of the roles undertaken by the audience in performance practice.
The dynamic of viewing is problematized: we cannot talk about dis-

crete subjects or objects but only degrees of activity and passivity.
At one end of the scale, the viewers assume the role of a passive
viewer. However, their level of attention is more involved than the
way in which we casually watch a television programme or look at
the view through a window. The intense actions that occur cause the
viewer to maintain a stance of attentive viewing, which may or may
not spur on action. Some performances demand more of the viewer,
whereby they become involved in a verbal exchange or dialogue with
the artist – who acts as interlocutor (Goldberg, 1999, p. 153) – which
influences the series of actions that follows.
In Abramović’s Rhythm O (1974) audience participation is invited
and in some ways could be seen to be obligatory. This is conveyed
in the written instruction issued, which reads ‘There are seventy-two
objects on the table that can be used on me as desired. I am the object’
(Warr and Jones, 2000, p. 125), and by the matching silence of the
artist. The audience is forced to become the maker, the instigator of
action who determines the course of events.24 Abramović stands by
a table and passively offers herself to viewers. The objects vary from
those that could be used as weapons – including a gun, a bullet, a saw
and knives – to others that are seemingly innocuous, such as lipstick,
bread and newspaper, but which could nonetheless be used to objec-
tify the body further. Miller points out that ‘[t]he set of self-violating
actions is smaller than that of actions that would disgust and offend if
done by another’ (Miller, 1997, p. 51). So the impact of allowing oth-
ers to violate her while she remains passive in the face of this adds to
the impact of the action. The performance lasted for six hours, and
by the end ‘all her clothes had been sliced off her body with razor
blades, she had been cut, painted, cleaned, decorated, crowned with
thorns and had had the loaded gun pressed against her head’ (Warr
and Jones, 2000, p. 125).
At the outset Abramović transformed herself from being the agent
and author of her performance into completely submitting to the
participants. Furthermore, by renouncing her subjectivity, Abramović
had turned herself into a thing, and the array of objects available
invited the participants to explore her as a plaything.
The artist is relegated to object-status and becomes other to her-
self. Without group participation the objectives cannot be achieved
and the performance does not occur. While the individuals in the
audience were not obliged to participate, there was an expectation

for them to take part. Those who chose not to participate directly
were involved in witnessing the actions that occurred and thereby
contributed to the mob mentality which increased during the perfor-
mance. At the beginning of the performance, the audience mentality
was individualistic but, as actions were carried out, the tension expe-
rienced by individuals increased and sentiments became collectively
experienced by the group, thus causing a blurring of boundaries
between the individual and the group. This explains the scattering
of the audience at the end of Abramović’s performance; for exam-
ple, when she got up and walked towards the audience to signal
the end of the performance, the audience just walked off. The emo-
tional build-up of violence caused by the brutality of the actions,
especially the fight that broke out between someone who levelled
the gun to her head and another member of the audience who took
the gun away, generated an atmosphere of great uneasiness in the
audience which, fearing a riot, exited at the end of the performance.
In another work, Incision (1978), she was attacked by a performer who
was planted in the audience. Abramović was aware that she was going
to be subjected to a karate kick but was not sure when this would
occur. The audience’s ignorance about the course of events was unset-
tling and provoked questions about the function of viewing. Exercises
like this are as much about human psychology as artistic action in
that they test the urges and limits of human behaviour (prompting
the question, ‘How far will you go?’) and echo psychological studies
of the 1970s, such as the Milgram experiment.25
In live performances, the interaction between the artist and the
audience is more intimate and immediate, and what we are seeing is
a blurring between art and life. The staging of performance works is
arguably less hierarchical than theatre viewing, where the audience is
often confined to designated seating areas that are apart from the cen-
tral stage. Here the artist can dictate the position of the audience and
impose some separation, if desired. In Warm Milk Pane turns the cam-
era squarely on her audience, thus intruding into our personal space
and transgressing our right to privacy. But it is not unusual to have
the audience encircling the artist, which limits their privacy and adds
to the intensity of the actions. The abjection that often results from
the actions of the artist, in which the participants may be involved,
causes a sense of recoil in the viewer, especially as leaking and
wounded bodies are brought into social visibility. At the beginning of

the performance the artist is usually clothed, unscathed, not in pain
and invulnerable, but the actions carried out break down their barri-
ers and render them abject. The process of making abject in a literal
sense takes us beyond social conventionality and tests the limits of
acceptability, often prompting ethical dilemmas in the viewers. It also
addresses the issue about the relationship between art and reality.
In the early years of performance art there was an element of unpre-
dictability about what could happen in the performance, in that the
audience was often unaware of what might occur during the perfor-
mance, and in extreme cases the body was poised between safety and
danger, life and death. Greater familiarity with the art form has, with-
out eliminating spontaneity, increased awareness of the expectations
of what might happen, or at least the types of action that might be
seen. In the case of certain artists, such as Franko B, blood-letting is a
typical occurrence and fans of his work anticipate this as part of his
routine. The need to see and experience the wounding of the body
in different outlets addresses a deeper need in the audience about
the stakes of art. This is addressed by Foster in his statement about
how contemporary art has effected ‘a general shift in conceptions of
the real: from the real understood as an effect of representation to the real
understood as an event of trauma’ (Foster, 1996b, p. 106). Performance
art from the 1960s onwards redefined the boundaries of the aesthetic
so that representation becomes real. What happens to the body dur-
ing the course of actions in the performance is traumatic (involving
the loss and recuperation of self) because it is wounding, and this in
turn becomes traumatic for the viewer who is accustomed to seeing a
different type of aesthetic representation.26
Not all performance art is live and there are many cases where
artists have opted to use representational (and not actual) violence
or injury. Increasingly, in the 1980s and 1990s, performance artists
started to use video installation works and other technologies, to
mediate the body and the bodily through technological simula-
tions, which opened up questions of representation. This became
part of the move to ‘the “technologization” of the self . . . [that was]
linked to the production of simulacral selves in the earlier self-
imagining projects . . . [that was] also connected to a long history of
works by artists negotiating the fragmenting effects of industrial and
post-industrial age technologies on our experience of our own bodies’
(Warr and Jones, 2000, p. 41). Two contemporary artists who employ
technology as a way of extending, transforming and in general prob-
ing the boundaries of the body are Orlan and Stelarc. In rupturing
skin and other barriers they raise questions about the sanctity of the
body as they employ complex procedures – plastic surgery (Orlan)
and human–machine interfaces (Stelarc) in order to abject the body
proper.
Hermann Nitsch’s performances were theatrical events that were
staged for the camera but with such a degree of realism that it was
not a stretch of the imagination to believe that one was present
at a real sacrifice or ritual initiation. The graphic realism of the
actions meant that they appeared authentic to the viewers/audience
who responded as if the actions were real and felt horrified by the
scenes that unfolded in front of them. There are some other cases,
such as the performances and video work of Paul McCarthy, where
the set-up is artificial, theatrical and even comical. In a childlike
fashion McCarthy invents a world, staging it with props, and then
proceeds to violate it in a series of transgressions. Fantasy characters
in grotesque attire, such as Father Christmas, are the perpetrators of
horrific acts of violence; simulated body parts – the penis-as-hotdog –
are mutilated, and fluids such as ketchup (blood) are strewn across
walls.27 These obviously exaggerated actions do not always involve
real bodies but they are still able to incite feelings of utter hor-
ror as well as irony. In fact the hyperreality of fantasy characters
heightens the viewers’ expectations of a Disneyesque paradise and
makes the encounter with degradation even more stark and trau-
matic. The question is whether their unreality lessens the feeling
of abjection and to this I would argue that the visceral display of
grotesque actions and substances is potent enough to create a tumul-
tuous state of abjection in the viewer. This unreality creates parallels
with film. People watch horror films that are about monsters that do
not exist in the outside world, and yet the suspension of disbelief,
that is the projected aesthetic sensibility, means that it is not only
entirely reasonable but that it is expected that they should be scared
and threatened by the unreal characters who inhabit their screen.28
The concept of the suspension of disbelief and responses to the horror
genre are explored in Chapter 6. By applying the same reasoning in
this context, the creations of McCarthy and other artists are capable
of eliciting horror from viewers that is sustained in the viewing of
the artworks. Away from the source of the horror, we are able to
reflect on the fictional nature of the monster, but this distancing is
less achievable when in a fearful state while watching.
In the above examples the given conventional viewing positions of
the subject–object are thwarted. The ambiguous boundaries between
artist and viewer/audience allow the latter greater autonomy in the
determination of meaning or interpretation, and conversely the artist
does not have authorial authority. The meaning of the work is con-
structed in the interaction that occurs between the two parties. The
dethroning of the artist/author was the subject of discussion in
Roland Barthes’s essay, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), which over-
turned uncritical belief in the intentionality of the author in favour
of the role of the interpreter. Hopkins discusses how Barthes ‘followed
a trend in French Structuralist thought’, along with thinkers such as
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, ‘to destabilize
bourgeois liberal belief in an essential unchanging “human nature” ’
(Hopkins, 2000, p. 82). Kristeva’s notion of abjection conveyed the
instability of the conception of the self or subject, which is under
perpetual threat of invasion by the object and hence unable to main-
tain the self. The inherent instability of the subject means that it is
always in process. One is neither subject nor object but hovers in
between. What is so troubling about the examples of performance or
body art cited is exactly this inability to maintain the boundaries of
the self. We are undone by the violent actions that we witness and
cannot view the process of abjection that the artist undergoes dispas-
sionately because it affects our sense of self. Ultimately we become
abject through contamination of what we have seen and experienced
and need to go through a process of catharsis or collapse of meaning
before meaning and identity can be reconfigured.
The political dimensions of abject art
Abject art provoked strong responses from its public. Some people
were able to see that it was a vehicle for discussing ideas while others
were not able to see beyond its viscerality and regarded such works
as morally objectionable. Body artists from the 1960s onwards used
their bodies as platforms for their politics, where they were able to
portray their struggles on their own person, often by resorting to sin-
gling out the aspect of their otherness, whether it be their gender,
ethnicity, sexuality or disability as the site of difference, which would
also function as the shock mechanism to jolt public complacency

and to de-pathologize difference. The act of inscribing and impli-
cating their own bodies in their identity politics was empowering
and created new aesthetic possibilities as well as galvanizing ‘the
self-confirmation of group identities’ (Menninghaus, 2003, p. 393).
However, there was also strong opposition to abject art because of
its controversial and offensive nature, which was deemed inappro-
priate by a conservative public. It rocked the sensibilities of many,
and a number of individual works came under fire from religious and
political authorities.
The need to address right-wing attempts to silence artists was one
of the motivations of the first official exhibition about abjection,
Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art in 1993. Debates about
censorship surrounding the allocation of public funding and issues
about obscenity had emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
spurred on by controversies involving artists. Andres Serrano’s Piss
Christ (1987) sparked outrage led by the Republican senator Jesse
Helms in 1989, which was followed by a campaign that reviewed
the conditions of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants
and, moreover, introduced an obscenity clause in the grant regu-
lations. The Whitney show came out of this recent background of
turmoil and instilled in the curators a steely desire to show art that
may not have been deemed wholly acceptable but which reflected
important concerns about bodily and social identity. One way of
appeasing the authorities was to use works that were primarily from
the permanent and established collection of the Whitney Museum of
American Art.29 The Helena Rubinstein Fellows, who organized the
show, claimed that ‘the concept of abjection, encompassing inves-
tigations of discursive excess and degraded elements as they relate
to the body and society, has emerged as a central impulse of 1990s
art’ (Ben-Levi et al., 1993, p. 7).30 Citing the importance of Bataille’s
notion of base materialism to their vision, the organizers were moti-
vated by a need to degrade the orthodox purity of the art gallery, to
reflect the resurgence of the bodily in art practice that involved artic-
ulating contemporary concerns about gender and sexuality. Simon
Taylor summarized the impact in his critical essay:
‘Scatological assemblages, bodily fragments, and base materials –

dirt, grunge, and the traces of sexual difference – have defiled
the white cube of the gallery space, calling into question its
ideological “neutrality” as a site encoded with a rhetoric of con-

tamination’ (Taylor, 1993, p. 59). The show was deemed ‘urgent
partly because of a disturbing trajectory of “politics” in America
that dates from the time of Daniel Bell’s neo-conservative treatise,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, through the Reagan and
Bush administrations, to the quiescent Clinton presidency.
(Ben-Levi et al., 1993, p. 15)
The revolutionary (and somewhat overblown) tone of the exhibition

had been set in the introduction of the catalogue which discussed
the hypocrisy of the government that used the debate about fund-
ing the arts to deflect issues of economic policy. The attempts to
censor art were viewed as seeking to denigrate anything that was
left of centre, including issues about multiculturalism, ‘the repro-
ductive rights of women [and], the pathologizing of gay men and
lesbians’ (Ben-Levi et al., 1993, p. 8). Many artists, living under this
fraught and conservative government, feared reprisals, and a num-
ber of them, such as Serrano, Mapplethorpe and Annie Sprinkle, had
already ‘suffered for their art’. Over-inflated claims made by reac-
tionaries condemned shows and artists who were accused of defiling
the sanctity of museum spaces and the socially sanctified vocation
of art.
The provocative strategy, outlined earlier, used already established
works from the permanent collection which were then ‘recontextu-
alised’ (Ben-Levi et al., 1993, p. 8) for the purposes of the exhibition,
so that works by Marcel Duchamp and Claes Oldenburg, Robert
Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith were
reappropriated under the new tag. Works that had hitherto been dis-
cussed in high-flown ways were radically reread in novel ways that
emphasized the desublimated role of the body and the bodily in mak-
ing. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, of which Number 27 (1950) was
used as an example, had been previously discussed with reference
to gesturalism and opticality but not in relation to the significance of
the embodied subject, which had been overlooked. In a radical recon-
figuration of meaning, the importance of the movement of the body
started to become foregrounded, as did the crudity and tactility of the
mark-making. Rosalind Krauss debunks this overly modernist read-
ing and forges a connection between Pollock’s paintings and Georges
Bataille’s writings on base materialism and the informe, where the
horizontal orientation of the paintings was discussed. Contrary to

popular readings of Pollock that stress his intellectual vision and the
complex optical figuration, here we emphasize the haptic aspects of
his work; the fact that his paintings were constructed by the action
of his mark-making on the horizontal plane; his use of cheap paint;
and that the marks were brought about by the presence of the artist’s
body in the work (Ben-Levi et al., 1993, pp. 8–9). Krauss makes a com-
parison with Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings of the 1970s, which
were produced by urinating on canvases that had been coated with
copper-based paint. In these works:
an ironic relation between Pollock’s painting procedure’ where he

would drip and pour paint as if in the act of urination and further-
more ‘his exhibitionist habit of pissing in public, pointed to how
the issue of the body has been elided in discussions of the artist’s
work.
(Ben-Levi et al., 1993, p. 9;
see also Krauss, 1993, pp. 244–249)
These readings subvert the modernist tendency to elevate art and are
part of the discourse of the formless, which is discussed in the next
chapter. In addition to singling out individual works for attention,
there was also a move to look back at the visual arts from the 1950s
right up to the current day.
The tactic of using works that were already part of the permanent
collection was powerful because it conveyed the resonance of abjec-
tion as a concept that can be applied to a range of artworks. It was
not to be thought of as a passing postmodern fad but as a process or
operation that involved the purpose of art in culture. Foster identifies
at least two different directions that abject art has tended to take:
The first is to identify with the abject, to approach it somehow –

to probe the wound of trauma, to touch the obscene object-gaze
of the real. The second is to represent the condition of abjection
in order to provoke its operation – to catch abjection in the act,
to make it reflexive, even repellent in its own right. The danger,
of course, is that this mimesis may confirm a given abjection. Just
as the old transgressive Surrealist once called out for the priestly
police, so an abject artist (like Andres Serrano) may call out for
an evangelical senator (like Jesse Helms), who then completes the

work, as it were, negatively.
(Foster, 1996b, p. 116)
The motivation for the Whitney show was largely reactive: the orga-
nizers wanted to incite the public and politicians to take note of the
rights of artists to use their art to express their marginality in soci-
ety, acknowledging that they might resort to shock tactics in order to
do so. Another objective was to interpret works in a way which ran
against the grain of modernism and to open up fresher readings that
reconceptualized the artist and their work in a different way, while
opening up the discourse of the body. The four catalogue essays were
much more than ancillary material to support the work; they opened
up a way of developing and disseminating the concept of abjection.
The Whitney show was groundbreaking for many reasons: it intro-
duced the notion of abjection in art into popular discourse, commit-
ted itself to the importance of abjection as a critical concept, and
examined different facets of the concept by appealing to a large body
of artwork. Since then, and as the end of the millennium approached,
there had been a slow but steady rate of worldwide exhibitions that
have used the abject or cognate existential concepts as the basis for
further discussion on the subject. Rites of Passage (1995) at the Tate
brought together the work of 11 international contemporary artists
whose work articulated the importance of the rite of passage. In the
movement from birth through life to death, boundaries are crossed
and the self is lost and remade again in its journey through life.
Formless: A User’s Guide (1996), both in the exhibition and the accom-
panying publication, brought up the related notion of the informe
(the formless) which was conceptualized in relation to – and in many
respects, against – Kristeva’s articulation of abjection. The Sensation
exhibition (1997) looked at the impact that contemporary art had on
ideas about everyday life and the presentation of the aesthetic.
Sensation was an exhibition of contemporary art owned by Charles
Saatchi which showcased the talents of young British artists, many
of whom had graduated from Goldsmith College of Art in the 1980s.
Sensation started off at the Royal Academy in 1997 and later toured to
Berlin and New York, where it was met with strong reactions. It had
its roots in Freeze, which was an art exhibition organized by Damien
Hirst in 1988 in London Docklands, which was significant in the
development of the Young British Artists generation. Nine of these

artists would go on to exhibit in Sensation. It was seen as being one of
the most controversial group shows of the 1990s, and caused a media
frenzy and notoriety for a number of the artists. Particularly inflam-
matory works included Marcus Harvey’s depiction of child killer Myra
Hindley, whose image was composed entirely of child handprints,
and Jake and Dinos Chapmans’ pornographic (if not paedophilic)
images of child mannequins where noses were replaced by penises
and mouths by anuses.
The degree to which Sensation is deemed to be about abjection is
debatable, but what the exhibition does show is the growing ten-
dency, plausibly prompted by the theoretics of abjection, to produce
art that was about the visceral. While Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire
in American Art was more to do with thinking about the retrospective
application of the concept of abjection to both current and earlier
artworks, Sensation was about the preoccupation of a generation of
British artists that wanted to articulate their radicalism as well as
communicate their ennui about life. They sought to look behind the
veneer of social niceties and show the dark reality of their attitudes to
love, sex, violence and death, amongst other sensations. In their pro-
jections they wanted ‘to jolt us out of our complacency’ (Rosenthal,
1998, p. 11) and see things afresh in ways that we perhaps may have
missed before.31 In many ways Sensation responded to our need to
be touched, for new sensations, and for these inner sensations to be
unleashed.32 Martin Maloney described it as responding to the deep
psychology of ‘our pleasures, anxieties and phobias’ (Maloney, 1998,
p. 34). Sensation spectacularly divided the public. The furore led to
an increase in audience numbers and while the German public were
receptive to the seriousness of the social commentary and critique,
it was received less favourably in the United States, with critics con-
demning one artwork in particular, Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary
(1996).
The pervasiveness of abjection in the visual arts
The abject has become increasingly important in art from the twenti-
eth century onwards and it continues to occupy contemporary artists
because of its ongoing relevance to our psychic stability. The abject
is a constant threat to the unity and hence identity of the subject
and remains a challenge to visual artists today. Many of the artworks

considered in this chapter are often difficult to tolerate because their
graphic nature offends conventional sensibilities. When thinking
about the motivations of the artists, several possibilities are opened
up. The sceptic may argue for the sensationalist interpretation, thus
reducing the work to nothing more than a provocation. The rationale
offered in this chapter is that the artists, being motivated by critique
(whether of the prevailing aesthetic ideologies, social conservatism
and politics), were drawn to look behind the veneer of representa-
tion and to depict the underside of reality, to animate the senses of
the viewer and to bring about an intensity of emotion.
In the discovery of abjection, artists pulled and probed the body
until it fell apart and sometimes became literally out of control. Some
showed us the result of an abject body whilst other artists took the
viewer through the process of abjection, where the body often begins
as whole and healthy and is rendered abject through a series of dif-
ferent actions. In the case of the healthy body, the individual can
maintain control over the body’s innately uncontrollable nature and
its ability to leak and secrete. However, the sick, diseased, elderly and
dying body are special cases. The sense of control that we have over
the body was something that preoccupied Kiki Smith in the creation
of her work. She exposed the sense of freedom over the constraints
of life that this could provide:
When people are dying, they are losing control of their bodies.
That loss of function can seem humiliating and frightening. But,
on the other hand, you can look at it as a kind of liberation of the
body. It seems like a nice metaphor – a way of thinking about
the social – that people lose control despite the many agendas
of different ideologies in society, which are trying to control the
body(ies) . . . medicine, religion, law, etc.
(Smith in Ross, 2003, p. 286)
In thinking about abject viewing we can speak of different orders

of viewing, where the representation of violence as conveyed in a
sculpture, film, or photograph is not as immediate as being present
in the performance itself. The experiential aspects of actual viewing
make various moral demands on the viewer when watching someone
self-harming, witnessing the invitation to harm the artist undertaken
by a fellow viewer/participant and suspending social conventions of
propriety and normalcy. The presentation of such practices as enter-

tainment in the stage shows of Franko B and live screenings of the
multimedia performance artist Orlan convey the disturbing voyeuris-
tic sensibilities of people. A comparison may be made between the
viewing of a horror film and these performances, where the former
is carried out in an artificial and safe environment where the actors
are not physically harmed, whereas the latter invites an element
of the unknown because in many cases the performances are not
scripted and the artist often ceases the performance only when the
pain becomes unbearable. This then raises the question as to what
the enduring nature of performance art tells us about society and
our psyches. Does it show the depraved nature of humanity, or is it
communicating the importance and immediacy of abjection in our
lives? In other areas of life the abject is kept in abeyance and it is
the purpose of art to unveil what is normally hidden from us – the
unrepresentable.
I have examined a range of artworks that can be described as abject
partly by virtue of the fact that they draw the viewer into ‘a vortex
of summons and repulsion [and] place the one haunted by it liter-
ally beside himself’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1). The examples of body and
performance art discussed make demands on the viewer that test the
limits of endurance. By encroaching into the viewer’s space or by
implicating the viewer in novel ways, which often takes the form of
a direct or indirect invitation, critical distance is denied. In its incep-
tion, body art entailed the infliction of actual physical pain and the
witnessing of the wounded body and, in some cases, the testimonies
of trauma. Certain artworks place the viewer in an impossible sit-
uation where we cannot escape culpability. To turn away and not
do anything is morally irresponsible, while the more contentious
position of choosing to continue to look implies a certain degree of
compliance with the pathologies of voyeurism and masochism, and
goes against core sensibilities.
In keeping with the psychoanalytical aspects of the Kristevan
notion of abjection, Foster suggests that there is a ‘general division
of labor . . . according to gender: the artists who probe the mater-
nal body repressed by the paternal law tend to be women’. Female
artists such as Kiki Smith, Helen Chadwick, Cindy Sherman, Jenny
Saville, Jo Spence, Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramović put
the, often naked, female body under the spotlight and look at non-
idealized bodies and their proclivities: menstrual blood, vaginas,
disease, obesity and topics that are deemed to be unsavoury to the

public gaze. Since staving off the abject involves the suppression
of the maternal in favour of the paternal, then abject art entails a
return to these dark and watery spaces that are denied normativ-
ity. In contrast, male artists assume ‘infantilist position[s] to mock
the paternal law’ (Foster, 1996a, p. 159). Artists such as Mike Kelley,
Paul McCarthy, Hans Bellmer and Robert Mapplethorpe desecrated
the seriousness of the paternal realm in their emphasis on child-
like play and subversion.33 Commenting on McCarthy’s work, Amelia
Jones observes the numerous appearances of the never erect penis in
McCarthy’s works and adds that ‘[m]aleness appears pathetic rather
than macho and heroic’ (Amelia Jones, 2000, in Petersens, 2006,
p. 19). In the video piece Family Tyranny (1987) McCarthy plays
a cruel father who tortures and ridicules his son by masturbating
in front of him and force-feeding him, and in Pinocchio Pipenose
Household Dilemma (1994) the artist reworks the Disney story where
a man who wants a son creates a doll that comes to life. The
twist here is that the son is punished when he develops a will of
his own. Foster’s hypothesis notwithstanding, there are also some
artists who do not articulate a specifically gendered response, such as
Pane in Nourriture/Actualités télévisées/Feu who makes a more general
statement about the presence of abjection in everyday life.
To conclude, I want to examine Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger
(1994), which was shown at the Rites of Passage exhibition and con-
solidates all the main characteristics of art that is classified as abject:
it transgresses the boundaries of the body; it confronts us with the
formless mass of viscera from which we are unable to escape; and it
turns the known body of one into a scientific experiment thus deper-
sonalizing the individual. The viewer is invited to watch a moving
image of the inside of Hatoum’s body. We enter a small cylindrical
room that contains a viewing screen on the floor. Using endoscopic
and colonoscopic technology, which penetrates different orifices of
Hatoum’s body, we delve into ‘the world beneath the flesh’ (Morris,
1995, p. 102) and explore the layers of Hatoum’s body, tunnel upon
tunnel. ‘[T]he interminable forested landscape of the surface gives
way to glowing subterranean tunnels lined with pulsating animate
tissue, moist and glistening’ (p. 102). This is abject horror. The video
is replete with sound and we can hear her breathing and her heart
beating, features that enhance the spectacle. We are taken out of our
comfort zone and are shown the body at work. Being so accustomed
to viewing a body from the outside, without any guidance, we are
unable to identify or even understand the sights we are seeing, which
render it (to translate the title of the work) a ‘foreign body’.34 As dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, whilst inside the body, organic parts – fluids,
organs – have a physiological function, but once outside the body,
they become stark reminders of our mortality. Even though in this
case the organs are still inside the body, the fact that we are seeing the
inside as outer is deeply destabilizing. The idea of the foreign body
also plays with our fears about the boundaries of the body and how,
through our rituals of washing and monitoring, we want to discard
anything that is foreign or harmful to the body. Continuing with the
analogy, maybe it is the viewer who should be so described as we
penetrate the depths of her flesh.
Corps étranger presents a new perspective on abjection. Rather than
presenting a dialogue between inner and outer, which is a common
strategy in the visual arts – where the ruptured boundaries between
the skin and what is contained within the body create a sense of
revulsion which makes the viewer want to turn away from the sights
that it beholds – here we the enter the body through the orifices.
We have seen that performing artists persisted in enhancing feel-
ings of disgust by continuing to violate their bodies, for instance –
Hatoum’s work takes us to a different level by transgressing the taboo
of the sanctity of the inside of the body. The surgeon represents the
exception to the rule because s/he has access in order to investigate
the maladies of the body. But these sights should not be for either
the artist’s privilege or for the viewer’s gaze. Hatoum has turned the
secret compartment of her body into a piece of theatre and is sardon-
ically reflecting centuries of the objectification of the female body.
On a sensory level the sights that we see confuse our perceptual
understanding and spatial mapping of the body. The contours and
cavities inside the body mar our understanding of what is inner and
outer and, as we go deeper into Hatoum’s body, the viscera becomes
more indistinguishable and we lose any sense of the external. Facing
the screen, head down, enveloped by the acoustics and the relative
darkness, we experience disorientation, the pulsating mass simulta-
neously constitutes and undoes us, touching us in the fabric of our
being.35
5
The Formless
Three years after the groundbreaking Whitney show, Abject Art:

Repulsion and Desire in American Art, the exhibition L’informe:
Mode d’emploi1 (Formless: A User’s Guide) was held at the Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris, 1996. It was curated by Yve-Alain
Bois and Rosalind Krauss, and had an accompanying theoretical
book/catalogue.2 One of the central preoccupations of the project
(both exhibition and catalogue) was an attempt to reconfigure avant-
garde and modernist art practices and to move beyond the limited
thinking of the relationship between form and content. A ‘third’ term
was introduced to deflate this dualism. This term was Bataille’s con-
cept of the informe (the formless), which he explored in the 1920s
and which remained influential throughout his work.3 In the discus-
sions between art theorists that led up to Formless: A User’s Guide, it
became apparent that the formless bore structural and other simi-
larities with the Kristevan concept of abjection. What resulted from
discussions between the curators of the show and such key theorists
of avant-garde art as Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Denis Hollier and
Helen Molesworth, was a roundtable discussion entitled, ‘The Politics
of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the “Informe” and the Abject’,
which considered the relationship between the related concepts of
the formless and the abject, and decided what, if anything, was dis-
tinctive about each of these concepts. The findings were published in
the arts journal, October.
The similarities between the concepts were already the subject of
inquiry and were in fact going to be the subject of another exhi-
bition that was planned around the same time as Formless: A User’s
118
The Formless 119
Guide by another Parisian institution, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la

Ville de Paris. Initiated by Claude Gintz and entitled From the Informe
to the Abject, the project was later withdrawn but its very inception
put these two terms in dialogue with one another and intimated a
transitional and also linear relationship: ‘the informe has a destiny
that reaches beyond its conceptualization in the 1920s to find its ful-
fillment and completion within contemporary artistic production, it
is in the domain of what is now understood as “abjection” ’ (Krauss,
1997, p. 235). Krauss does not maintain this view throughout, how-
ever, and elsewhere insists that these concepts were to be regarded as
different ‘in the strongest possible terms’ (Krauss, 1996, p. 90).
This chapter shifts the focus from Kristevan abjection, which has
been central to the book so far, to consider how Bataille’s anti-
aesthetic of the informe has been used to critique her project as well
as to contemplate the ultimate destiny of abjection.
The formless
In his review of L’ Art primitif (Lascaux or the Birth of Art) (1955),

Bataille discusses how, contrary to popular understanding, the core
of art is not the law of form (or gestalt) but precisely the opposite –
the impulse to the formless – which is evidenced by the defaced
human effigies in Palaeolithic caves. According to Bataille, the begin-
nings of Western art involved a process of debasing the human form
(Foster et al., 2011, p. 263). This is tied in with the impulse of base
materialism, which involved the release of matter from the fetters of
form and can be viewed as part of the formless project. The tendency
to de-form or ‘to make formless’ represented the antithesis of the
modernist sensibility in the visual arts.4 Art critics, such as Clement
Greenberg, established the paradigmatic values of modernist art and
advanced certain principles.5 One of these was the sublimation of
base matter into aesthetic form, with the artist being cast in the role
of the bestower of form. The artwork was interpreted visually, where
the visual was conflated with thought and reason (see Mellor and
Shilling, 1997, p. 6). To see became a way of gaining knowledge and
understanding. This modernist tendency prioritized the visual over
the other senses, and an allied perspective was the importance of the
vertical axis (over the horizontal). The visual and vertical demarcated
the differences between the human (in its intellect and reasoning)
and the animal, which was associated with the horizontal axis and
the importance of the olfactory and tactile senses.
The frame and plinth were both important devices and metaphors
used to separate the artwork from the rest of matter, thus convey-
ing its difference. The act of framing and placing on a plinth was
a form of elevation and glorification. These attitudes were de rigeur
in the early part of the twentieth century where the focus was on
the materiality of the artwork. The motivation for the project Form-
less: A User’s Guide was to undo the rigid and elitist strategies of
modernism that sought to elevate art and the artist as the endower
of form and meaning, and to propose instead a set of alternative
operations that reversed the values of modernism. This involved
desublimation – where reality was emptied of its transcendent preten-
sions and embraced in its ignoble materiality, a notion that followed
a similar trajectory to Bataille’s desublimation of the ‘higher think-
ing’ human into its base materiality. Art should be of the body in its
anarchism and excess, and not the consolidation of form, which was
the pursuit of the vertical as modernism’s chosen structural form (see
Hopkins, 2000, p. 229). The re-evaluation of art that was centred on
the horizontal as the axis of creation and perception brought about
the downfall of form.
The idea of the formless can be traced back to thinkers such as
Augustine (in Confessions, c. AD 398) and Kant (Critique of Judgment,
1952 [1790]), but it was developed and popularized by Bataille who
wanted to destabilize the organizing principle of form.6 Form is main-
tained when figure can be discerned from ground, and subject from
object, and so the formless implies the collapse of the two states.
In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), André Breton reacted to
Bataille’s aesthetic vision which he regarded as excremental (Breton,
1972, pp. 180–187). Equally, Bataille was disillusioned by and dis-
paraging of Surrealism, which he felt was too idealistic in focus and
inauthentic in terms of its use of the subconscious. Bataille formed
an alternative “group” with fellow dissidents. New ideas about mate-
rialism and ‘ethnographic Surrealism’7 were circulated in Documents,
the ‘leftfield’ journal, which Bataille founded and edited with the
assistance of Michel Leiris and Carl Eisenstein.8 The experimental
nature of the journal lent itself to its exploration of cultural het-
erogeneity. It contained texts and images from different historical,
The Formless 121
geographical and cultural contexts, but it did not attempt to prescribe

the interpretations of these artefacts and ideas, nor did it dictate how
the information should be presented. In short, it pertained to the
formless through its anti-structural impulse.
Bataille continued in his subversive spirit with his Critical Dictio-
nary, which made its appearance in Documents from the second issue
onwards.9 It contained short articles on various topics such as ‘Archi-
tecture’, ‘Man’, ‘Abattoir’ and ‘Eye’. Unlike conventional dictionaries,
the task of which is to supply definitions of terms, this dictionary
‘provided not the meanings but the tasks of the words’, words that
were used in Bataille’s writing on the formless (Documents, issue 7,
1929; see also Bataille, 1985, p. 31). In keeping with the spirit of the
journal, the entries in the dictionary destabilized the simple mean-
ings of the objects and undertook enquiries into the words. Everyday
objects became viewed in unfamiliar ways, which highlighted the
extraordinariness of the object. In many respects Critical Dictionary
can be described as an anti-dictionary because it subverted the func-
tion of an ordinary dictionary. Bataille’s short text on the formless
appears in the Dictionary10 section of the final issue of Documents,
issue 7 (1929):
A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words,

but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a
given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in
the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What
it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed
everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic
men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of
philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to
what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming
that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts
to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.
(Bataille, 1985, p. 31)
In the above account of the formless, Bataille resists putting forward

a definition about what the formless is. Instead he conveys the form-
less in its adjectival sense, that is as a way of describing things and
objects. He also emphasizes the performativity or operation of the
formless that involves the action of declassifying and destabilizing

form. The formless was not simply an entry in the Critical Dictionary
but was also the guiding principle that underpinned its philosophy, a
notion that was contrary to the purpose of a dictionary, which was to
fix meaning. Denis Hollier argues that ‘[t]he meaning (that a dictio-
nary fixes) is identified with the concept, with the idea: eidos = form’
(Hollier, 1992, p. 29). The formless was an affront to ‘the organising
archē of philosophical meaning’ (Crowley and Hegarty, 2005, p. 20).
Its impetus is to begin the process of unravelling, where form and
meaning is undone, boundaries are undone, and matter is left to exist
in the unbounded potential that it harbours. The job of the form-
less is to undo the system of meaning and classification by blurring
the distinctions between form and ground, inside and outside, and
anatomical differences (Foster et al., 2011, p. 275).
In Formless: A User’s Guide, Bois and Krauss attempt to imitate the
unstructured logic of both form and presentation of the Critical Dic-
tionary. The introductory essay, ironically titled ‘The Use Value of
“Formless” ’ by Bois, deliberately quashes any possibility of defin-
ing the formless. In the arbitrary arrangement of essays that follow,
the reader learns little about the positive, in the sense of meaning-
endowing properties of the concept. Instead they attempt to show
the concept’s workings as operational principles that disrupt and
derange. The book/catalogue conforms to the expectations of a pub-
lication in that it inevitably involves some sense of the organization
of material in a preselected order and presents four Bataillean ‘cat-
egories’ which contain essays arranged alphabetically and which
characterize the formless: ‘Base Materialism’, ‘Horizontality’, ‘Pulse’
and ‘Entropy’.
These categories reverse the narrative of civilization of Homo sapi-
ens propounded in Civilization and its Discontents (Freud 2004 [1930]),
which gives an account of the following: when the human stood on
two legs, it experienced a different orientation of the body in relation
to the world that affected perception and behaviour. In literal terms,
the eye and nose were no longer on the same horizontal axis as the
genitals and the anus, which meant a separation of sensory percep-
tion and the concomitant feeling of disgust of the former fusion of
senses. Olfactory and anal pleasures were degraded and repressed and
gave way to the visual and the genital in the privileging of the erect
and vertical body. This led to ‘the birth of sexual repression and of the
The Formless 123
aesthetic and ethical ideals of cultural development’ (Menninghaus,

2003, p. 186). The ramifications were significant: instead of thinking
about this transition solely in terms of sexual repression, it should be
thought of more widely in terms of a denial of our bodily natures.
The move from the horizontal to the vertical axis symbolized a
change of mindset.11 The formless reversed this process and empha-
sized the base materialism of the human by reversing the processes
of civilization – four-legged creatures lie horizontally and close to the
ground. Menninghaus describes the formless as constituting a:
threefold ‘return to reality’ [note omitted] [which] hovers on the

horizon of the informe: aesthetically, a desublimation of beautiful
forms moving to the point of ‘base materialism’; psychologically,
a ‘liberation’ of violent sexuality; historically, a reactivation of
archaic practices for generating and affirming societal life through
feelings of repulsion and acts of sacrifice.
(Menninghaus, 2003, p. 346)
The categories also present a counter-history of modernism that

entails the debunking of traditionally conceived categories such as
‘beauty’ and of devising new codes that reflected the new values.
In spite of the alphabetical order of the book/catalogue, there is no
further logic to the structure or a sense of incremental development,
and this is in keeping with the desired effect to defy any attempt to
pin down what the formless is. In the essays, Bois and Krauss consider
artists over a span of half a century and use a cross-category approach
to show how the artists in question articulate and experiment with
the instability of meaning in their work. The form of both exhibition
and book/catalogue was supposed to be disruptive and subversive, in
keeping with the anti-architectural impulse of Bataille’s notion of the
formless. Bois and Krauss took great care in their approach not to
stabilize the concept and stated their concerns as follows:
We could treat the informe as a pure object of historical research,

tracing its origins in Documents, noting its occurrences there; this
work would be useful and, like all those interested in Bataille’s
thought, we have not neglected it. But such an approach would
run the risk of transforming the formless into a figure, of sta-
bilizing it. That risk is perhaps unavoidable, but, in putting the
formless to work in areas far from its place of origin, in displacing

it in order to sift modernist production by means of its sieve, we
wanted to start it shaking – which is to say, to shake it up.
(Bois and Krauss, 1997, p. 40)
Like the Critical Dictionary, which is antithetical to the function of a

dictionary, this book/catalogue is antithetical to its own purpose in
spite of the cross-referencing of essays, and is only able to convey the
anarchic sense of the formless. The project was innovative because it
celebrated materialism and desublimation as distinctive mainstream
aesthetic possibilities without reducing them to the idiosyncrasies
of Outsider Art.12 The project also moved beyond the impasse of
Greenberg’s modernism, without resorting to any of the clichés of
postmodernism, and called upon the work of a number of twen-
tieth century artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cindy
Sherman and Jean Dubuffet, to support its endeavours. Krauss stated
one of the central aims: ‘the formless has its own legacy to fulfill,
its own destiny – which is partly that of liberating our thinking . . .’
(Krauss, 1997, p. 252).
Many of the works that are considered in the exhibition and publi-
cation are formless in the sense of occupying indeterminate states.
An interesting interpretation of the formless is given in Alberto
Giacometti’s Suspended Ball (1930–31) which contains two forms: a
crescent-shaped wedge and suspended above this a sphere with a
cleft removed from its underside which has been hung from the top
of the cage. When the two forms are brought together they look as
if they are almost touching, ‘indeed, almost to be caressing’ (Bois
and Krauss, 1997, p. 152). The forms symbolize genital forms but
confusion arises in the ambiguity of identification: for the vulva-
shaped wedge is also phallic and is comparable with the knife that
sliced across the heroine’s eye in Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s film
Un Chien Andalou (1929) (Foster et al., 2011, p. 265). Likewise, the
ball is ‘active’ in its movement, making it conform to the masculine
principle but would be coded as feminine instead if the wedge repre-
sents the phallic knife.13 The ambiguity of the forms means that the
boundaries between the male and female are cancelled out, an action
that is represented by the pendulum swing of ball to wedge. Another
example of the blurring of categories is Brassaï’s Nu 115 (1932–33)
where a photograph of the female form is rotated from the vertical
The Formless 125
to the horizontal axis, which symbolizes a transmutation from high

(the gestalt) into low (the sexual), human into base (the animal).
In the orientation, the female form takes on a phallic appearance
and the two forms cancel one another out.
The abject and the formless
In its desire to undo and destroy the boundary that contains form,
the formless can immediately be placed alongside the abject, which
displays similar tendencies. Neither concept can be defined by what
it is, but instead is defined by what it is not: the formless is not the
form of an object but it is present in the negation of this. Likewise,
the abject is neither subject nor object but occupies an ambivalent,
indeterminate space in between these elements and is experienced
by the effect it has on the subject. Both concepts are also described
by the operations they perform; the formless disrupts the envelope
of containment and, similarly, abjection prevents the subject from
being self-contained by posing a perpetual threat. Other overlapping
concerns include the desire to debase and degrade and the proximity
that both concepts share with materiality. One defining feature is that
both share the same trajectory towards negation.
One of the objectives of the seminar discussion of ‘The Politics of
the Signifier II: A Conversation on the “Informe” and the Abject’ was
to ascertain the differences between abjection and the lesser-known
concept, the formless. This forms part of the opening question by
Foster who asks how they ‘are both related to the “scatterological”
impulse in contemporary art’ (Foster et al., 1994, p. 3). Benjamin
Buchloh makes a distinction between the ‘scatterological’ which ‘sug-
gests structure, and points to the informe’ and the ‘scatological’ which
‘involves the subject, and points to the abject’ (Foster et al., 1994,
p. 3). In this play on words, Buchloh intimates that the formless
involves an operation that shatters structure, thus breaking up form
but, as if in reverse, the abject takes us to the subject of scatology.
The conflation of the abject with the excremental is further dis-
cussed by Krauss who uses this to discuss the contradictions at the
core of Kristeva’s project, and hence the flaws in the latter’s theo-
rization of the abject. She discusses how Kristeva’s formulation of
the abject is self-defeating because it defines the very terms that it
intended to undermine. By its nature, the abject is something that
is beyond representation, and should be characterized by its effects;

by its action of destabilizing a sense of subjectivity; and by dissolv-
ing meaning. By naming or ‘recuperating certain objects as abject’
(Foster et al., 1994, p. 3), namely waste products and bodily fluids
Kristeva is undermining the abject’s ability to destabilize the subject
and object because it is described with recourse to certain objects.
Attempts should not be made to reify abjection – to describe objects
or categories of objects as abject because that substantiates what it is,
thereby undermining its very notion and undoing the operation of
abjection (Foster et al., 1994). By ‘naming’ and defining the abject,
Kristeva negates the shattering effects of abjection, which prompts
the question asked by Jay: ‘is “abject art” perhaps an untenable oxy-
moron . . . ?’ (Jay, 1994, p. 243).14 Benjamin Noys summarizes the
problem as follows:
Although Bataille is concerned with the limits of the body this

bodily reading of abjection ties it to the body and its waste prod-
ucts. Kristeva has provided a matrix for art criticism and practice
which allows it to understand the abject as bodily waste, to con-
fine and limit it within a meaning – no matter how ‘shocking’ that
meaning is.
(Noys, 2000, p. 34)
The rupturing effects that are central to the concept of abjection

are stabilized and reconfigured through the systematization of the
concept. In Lacanian terms the trauma of the Real is translated into
signification.
Ross defends Kristeva’s elaboration by pointing out not only the
inevitability of using categories but also their importance in con-
veying the instability of abjection (Ross, 2003, p. 282). The strongly
intentional (in the philosophical sense of being directed towards
something, such as by reaching towards an object) nature of abjec-
tion means that it is described in relation to what it does to both
subject and object. Discussing it in relation to things, such as bod-
ily fluids, does not negate the shattering effects that it has on the
self; if anything, it heightens the hold that it has over the human
subject.
Another objection to Kristeva’s notion of abjection, that is not
raised in this particular roundtable discussion but is pertinent to
the discussion, is by Foster in The Return of the Real (1996). Foster
The Formless 127
asks the broad question: Can the abject be represented at all? If it is

opposed to culture, can it be exposed in culture? If it is unconscious,
can it be made conscious and remain abject? In other words, can
there be a conscientious abjection, or is this all there can be?’ (Foster,
1996a, p. 156). Foster regards Kristeva’s theory as having a ‘crucial
ambiguity’, a point raised earlier, where it is both dangerous and
foundational: dangerous because it puts subjectivity at risk, whilst on
the other hand it emphasizes the foundational nature of the abject
which is ‘fundamental to the maintenance of subject and society
alike’ (Foster, 1996a, p. 156). I attempted to remove this contradiction
in the Introduction, where the issue of temporality provided a solu-
tion: the state of being abject and the operation of abjection are not
simultaneous but are instead successive. Foster decides that the best
solution would be to think of abjection as a ‘regulatory operation’
(p. 156) and draws on the perspective of Bataille who describes the
mutually reinforcing nature of transgression and the taboo. ‘Trans-
gression’ and ‘taboo’ refer to seemingly contradictory ideas that may
appear to cancel one another out, rather, as we thought the danger-
ous yet foundational nature of abjection would. But we find that that
there is a mutually enforcing relationship between the two terms.
Transgression does not destroy the taboo ‘but transcends it and com-
pletes it’.15 The abject is fearful and repulsive until it is expelled, but
once expelled it does not disappear but remains in the background of
everyday life until it poses a threat again.
The guiding philosophy of Formless: A User’s Guide is to ‘use the
formless to bring down art practice and criticism from its dependence
on meaning, especially an abject art that would seem to revel in the
obscene and perverse’ (Noys, 2000, p. 33). In the roundtable discus-
sion, Kristeva’s formulation of abjection was seen to be flawed and
fraught with problems, some of which were addressed by thinking
what the formless could add to the discussion. Krauss is especially
vocal in her criticism of abjection and also about the potential that
she thinks the formless has of undermining categorization, which
was supposed to be the outcome of the abject:
For Krauss, it is Bataille’s informe and not Kristeva’s abject that is

subversive, it is the informe, as a project that puts into play the dis-
solution, decay and rotting of form that is the closest to abjection
as it should be, a nonreifying and nonliteralizing process.
(Ross, 2003, p. 282)
The formless, unlike Kristeva’s abject, is able ‘to evade classification’

(Noys, 2000, p. 34) and brings about the de-forming of form.
It ‘evade[s] recuperation, unsettle[s] thought and challenge[s] the
task of interpretation’ (Crowley and Hegarty, 2005, p. 17). Foster’s
trajectory is similar and moves from the abject ‘which is often [essen-
tialized by being] tied to substances and meanings’, to the formless
‘where significant form dissolves because the fundamental distinc-
tion between figure and ground, self and other, is lost’ and then on
to the obscene, ‘where the object-gaze is presented as if there were no
scene to stage it, no frame of representation to contain it, no screen’ (Foster,
1996a, p. 149). For Krauss and Bois the formless necessitates ‘think-
ing the concept operationally, as a process of “alteration”, in which
there are no essentialized or fixed terms, but only energies within
a force field’ (Krauss, 1997, p. 245). In the conclusion to Formless:
A User’s Guide, Bois and Krauss talk about their aim for the formless,
which is ‘partly that of liberating our thinking from the semantic, the
servitude to thematics, to which abject art seem[ed] so thoroughly
indentured’ (p. 252).
Krauss and her critics raise important points about the shared
conceptual goals of the formless and abjection, but there are also
unbridgeable differences that can be explained by their different
contexts. One of these concerns the limited usage of the concept
of the formless. A crucial part of the abject (in both Kristeva’s and
Bataille’s readings) is its identification of alterity: the abject refers
to the outsider, the foreigner, who exists on the fringes of society.
Foster addresses this point when he argues that the informe is ‘not
nearly as useful in analyses of the subjective dimension of ideology’
(Foster et al., 1994, p. 6). To various degrees, the Formless: A User’s
Guide project explores the irreducibility of the form in the formless.
We should remind ourselves of Bataille’s words on ‘the Formless’:
‘[o]n the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing
and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is some-
thing like a spider or spit.’ Bataille is not saying that the formless is
devoid of form as such, but rather that the formless implies a sense
of the derangement of form (Noys, 2000, p. 35). Another reading,
which is offered by Simon Baker amongst others, views the formless
as signalling a lack of resemblance. Decategorization and declassifi-
cation removes the possibility of resemblance, of something being
like something else. That which is formless resembles nothing – the
The Formless 129
formless ‘undoes the notion of resemblance’ (Baker, 2006, p. 37).

So when Bataille says that the universe is something like a spider
or spit, he means that it – the universe – ‘. . . is something, a thing
with form, like a spider, or spit, that nevertheless resembles nothing’
(p. 37). In other words, from whatever angle we look at the formless –
as distortion, declassification or the disintegration of resemblance –
the formless still has form: as a spider or spit. These are still forms.
In spite of attempts to escape from the world of form, the formless
is dependent on form (and therefore meaning) in order to convey
its formlessness. A due comparison can be made with the relation-
ship between transgression and the taboo, where the latter needs the
former in order to reinforce its prohibition. This does not devalue
Bataille’s enterprise, indeed he has made us look at form in a differ-
ent way, but it shows us that Bataille, like Kristeva, has been unable
to evade meaning. The problem of being unable to bypass classifi-
cation and meaning reflects the problematics that faced Bataille in
his formulation of the formless, and Kristeva in her theorization of
abjection.
6
Abjection and Film
The dining scene in Luis Buñuel’s film The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
features middle-class guests at a dinner party.1 But instead of tuck-
ing into their food, as one would normally expect, they are seated on
flushing toilets, having polite conversation, flicking through newspa-
pers and smoking cigarettes. On arrival, they are shown to their tables
and start undoing their clothes so that they can each take their seat
on a toilet and expel bodily waste as and when necessary. In a comic
moment, one of the guests starts talking about how he enjoyed seeing
the latest production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as he unbuttons
his trousers before sitting down. Conversation moves on to the topic
of population growth and the amount of toxic products thrown into
rivers, of which bodily waste is identified as being a significant part.
Both urine and excrement are mentioned on more than one occa-
sion. The guests ponder just how much bodily waste an individual
evacuates per day. Conversation continues and when a guest is hun-
gry he excuses himself and retires to a dining room cubicle to eat in
private. We are taken into the private space of a diner as he waits for
his food. The meal is delivered down a chute and is devoured in an
indecorous fashion that contrasts with the well-mannered habits that
are exhibited when the group is seated around the table. When food
is mentioned in the conversation apologies are made; at one point,
Sophie, the only child present at the meal, informs her mother that
she is hungry only to be told off for being impolite.
This surrealist scene, which is part of a sequential narrative of dis-
connected tableaux that are strung together, is a gross subversion
of social attitudes and reveals the implacable status of social rituals.
130
Abjection and Film 131
Food and bodily waste exchange places where food is a taboo sub-
ject that is consumed in private only, with the minimum of fuss,
and is avoided in conversation, while the unpalatable activity of
watching people sitting on toilet seats with their trousers down as
well as talking about the average production of excrement per per-
son is considered to be within the range of normal and acceptable
conversational topics. This scene alone makes us question habits
and social conventions. We imagine what it would be like if the
conventions illustrated here were taken up in everyday life; where
toileting became a public activity that did not engender embarrass-
ment or shame, and where eating became a strictly private matter.
The enforcement of one set of rituals over any other seems arbitrary
and, as long as conventions are abided by, social understanding is
maintained. What is interesting, and which may indeed question
whether or not we are looking at a subversion of social rituals, is
the manner of conduct that is exercised with respect to these activ-
ities. The toileting, in the sense of the evacuation of matter, is done
‘silently’ with the exception of spontaneously flushing toilets. The
guests maintain their focus on the conversation, smoking and flick-
ing through the papers and do not attend to the lower parts of their
bodies. In fact if the camera lens were adjusted to capture only what
was visible from the table upwards then there would be no indica-
tion that they are seated on toilet seats. The consumption of food
in the private cubicle is less socially acceptable. The guest devours a
chicken drumstick and a bread roll without the use of cutlery and
chews his food noisily; behaviour that would not generally be desir-
able in public. This novel perspective makes us rethink what is really
abject in this discrete scene – is it the toileting, which is done dis-
cretely, or the eating, which is not – or indeed both? And as with
anything that exudes abjection, we want to avert our eyes until it is
over. Notwithstanding the inverted logic of this scene, where eating
is regarded as a necessary activity that should be carried out expedi-
ently and privately, we see the human need for ritualized behaviour
that is regulated by boundaries.
In this chapter I turn the lens to film to look at the pertinence of
the theoretical application of abjection in film studies. The concept of
abjection has been applied to film studies increasingly since Barbara
Creed’s seminal study, ‘Horror and the monstrous-feminine: an imag-
inary abjection’, in Screen (1986) and the subsequent development of
her ideas in her monograph The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism,

Psychoanalysis (2003).2 Creed identifies the figure of the mother –
what she refers to as the archaic mother – as significant in the expo-
sition of the monstrous-feminine. In Kristeva’s theory of abjection,
the mother, who is also the point of origin of primal horror, is
pre-Oedipal and experiences infant rejection that takes the form of
ambivalence where the mother’s body is at once a source of comfort
but is also a threat to the formation of autonomous boundaries. The
infant rejects the engulfing and impure mother, who is defiled by
bodily fluids such as breast milk and menstrual blood rendering her
boundaries indistinct, and fights for its own subject identity. Feelings
of revulsion about objects that are viewed as dirty and unclean hark
back to the aversion of the primal mother. The dual attraction and
repulsion of the maternal as signifier of horror and danger is a theme
that has been explored widely in the horror genre – in films such
as Psycho (dir., Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Exorcist (dir., William
Friedkin, 1973) and Carrie (dir., Brian de Palma, 1976). Horror films
are most frequently discussed within the context of abjection because
of how they involve certain features which involve abjection. The
most overt aspects are the preoccupation with corpses and bodily
fluids, which are seen particularly in certain sub-genres such as zom-
bie and slasher films. Hanich (2011) emphasizes the importance of
a phenomenological approach when considering horror and disgust,
and comments how this involves going beyond sight and hearing to
encompass ‘our entire bodily being . . .’ (Sobchack in Hanich, 2011,
p. 25).3 Further features that can contribute to the abject sense of
horror in films, but for reasons of brevity I will not be discussing
here, include lighting, cinematography, editing, and sound effects –
aspects that involve presentation and style.
Horror also involves the transgression of the boundary. On a
cosmological level the Symbolic order of the filmic universe is over-
turned, which is often signalled by the presence of the monster(s),
who has or will disrupt harmony in the course of the film. Even when
the monster is absent, the threat to stability is still felt by the charac-
ters and impacts on their safety and often sanity, which parallels the
experience of the viewer who shares in, or at least witnesses, the evil
that unfolds. Unable to predict when or how the monster will strike
and also, at times, what form the monster may assume, the viewer
sits on the edge of their seat waiting for this to occur.
Film also has a socio-political role in that it can be used to elicit

representations about society and can, as discussed by Tina Chanter,
be used to ‘expose the complicity among dominant configurations
of gender, sexuality, class, and race . . .’ (Chanter, 2008, p. 1). Chanter
references a number of different films, commenting on their poten-
tial for dislodging socio-political norms. Film then becomes a way
of mobilizing the power of abjection and of rethinking normative
identities (see Thomas, 2008).
Before we go further, a word about the ‘objects’ of analysis is
needed. Some of the films that I examine are based on novels and,
while the film adaptation may be similar to the book in many
respects, this chapter concerns itself with films only and with filmic
representation.4
The monster in horror: Between two states
The horror genre is often defined with respect to the effects that
it generates in viewers. The presence of the monster is also a com-
mon feature of horror. Monsters are typically impure and unclean –
they are in between different physical, psychological and ontological
states. Some are composite in that they are made up of different parts
from different orders. Such ambivalence contributes to their deviance
because we are not able to define or characterize them; they are
unpredictable and lie outside the natural order of things. This makes
them abject and able to elicit horror. In Chapter 2 I talked about the
role of the boundary as essential to safeguarding order and separating
one state from another. In cases of abjection, there has been an illicit
crossing from one state/category to another that causes confusion
and disruption. The consequence of this crossing over opens up the
possibility of vulnerability and contamination. In the case of the cul-
tural categorization of animals as food substances, we saw that foods
that were forbidden in the book of Leviticus were animals that defied
the boundaries of their allotted category, which made them anoma-
lous and contributed to their polluting nature, meaning ultimately
that they were not suitable for consumption. This contaminating
potential also applied in other instances. With reference to the body,
substances that crossed over from one surface to another, such as the
appearance of mucus which sullied its orifice, were feared in its con-
taminating potential. In the horror genre, monsters exhibit impurity
in many ways. Some are in between opposing states – of life and

death, of human and inhuman – such as zombies, ghosts and vam-
pires, while others are grotesque in that they are the combination of
different parts, such as a cyborg. Creed remarks how:
[a]lthough the specific nature of the border changes from film to

film, the function of the monstrous remains the same – to bring
about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which
threatens its stability. In some horror films the monstrous is pro-
duced at the border between human and inhuman, man and beast
(Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong);
in others the border is between the normal and the supernatural,
good and evil (Carrie, The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby); or
the monstrous is produced at the border which separates those
who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not (Psy-
cho, Dressed to Kill, A Reflection of Fear); or the border is between
normal and abnormal sexual desire (The Hunger, Cat People).
(Creed, 2003, p. 11)
Many monsters are composed of matter that is radically unstable:
[t]hey are putrid or moldering things, or they hail from oozing

places, or they are made of dead or rotting flesh, or chemical waste,
or are associated with vermin, disease, or crawling things
(Carroll, 1990, p. 23)
As we saw in Chapter 2, many of the substances that are associ-

ated with monsters, such as blood and mucus, are impure because
they are in between ‘categorical distinctions such as inside/outside,
living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine, and so on’ (Carroll,
1990, p. 43).
In their decomposing states, the monsters typically want to con-
taminate their victims with fluids and do so by using slimy and
slithering entities that make the viewer retch. Once infected by the
monster, the victim’s boundaries become indeterminate and they are
dragged down to their death. The grasping ‘facehugger’ creature in
Alien (dir., Ridley Scott, 1979) metamorphoses in the course of the
film, and one of the most suspenseful aspects of the film is the appre-
hension as to what form and size the creature will next assume. The
creature is a xenomorphic parasitoid that hatches from an egg found
in an alien ship and latches onto the face of Kane (John Hurt), one of
the crew members. The creature spontaneously dislodges, and while
in recovery Kane has dinner with his colleagues only to have another
incarnation of the creature burst out of his chest, causing fatal injury,
before fleeing into the depths of the ship. The mission of the crew
is then to exterminate the amorphous alien form by trapping it in
an airlock and then blasting it into space. The alien keeps growing
but both the crew and the viewers only get glimpses of it and are
not able to get a sense of its complete nature or size. Its elusive-
ness keeps the viewer gripped and the crew baffled and frightened
for their lives. One by one it kills the crew until only one character,
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), is left and she escapes into a shuttle after
detonating the spaceship. Safe in the assumed knowledge that the
alien has been destroyed and she is on her way home, Ripley is later
horrified to find that the alien is actually on board her rescue shuttle.
Opening a series of air vents, she blasts the creature with steam before
expelling it out of the airlock.
Transformation from one state to another informs the narrative
of The Fly (dir., David Cronenberg, 1986), which, in the vein of
Frankenstein, charts the transformation of the scientist Seth Brundle
(Jeff Goldblum) into a human–fly hybrid. Brundle creates a set of tele-
pods that can teleport an object from one pod to another. He modifies
the machine to enable it to work with living creatures and teleports
himself and, unwittingly, a housefly, which has grave consequences
for him.5 He undergoes a series of visual and behavioural changes
that chart his transformation into the fly. At first, the changes are
not pronounced, and remain inexplicable. He starts sprouting bristly
hairs on his back from the site of an old wound, and his face becomes
mottled and discoloured. As time goes on there are more discernible
changes as his skin becomes increasingly distorted, his hands start
swelling and his fingernails fall out. He is progressively less human in
appearance and nature, becoming a hybrid creature – appropriately
named ‘Brundlefly’ – that is neither human nor insect. It is not
simply the physical transformation that is alarming but also the psy-
chological one. Losing the ability to exercise human reason, which
had been a striking characteristic of the eminent scientist’s nature,
Brundle finds himself increasingly unable to function mentally like
a human, as he becomes taken over by his biological instincts.
The horrific transformation enacted here taps into the anxieties of
nightmares; ‘[t]he thought of turning into an insect is in itself hor-

rifying because of the loss of identity and fundamental humanity it
entails’ (Freeland, 2000, p. 109).6 In the transformation that Brundle
undergoes he becomes monstrous because of his composite condition
of being human-fly.
Noël Carroll develops Mary Douglas’s analysis of ‘category mis-
takes’ (to use a term from Gilbert Ryle7 ) to discuss the identity of
monsters in horror. He states that an object or being is impure if
it is in between categories, rendering it interstitial, incomplete or
formless. With reference to the latter two components, ‘objects can
raise categorical misgivings by virtue of being incomplete represen-
tatives of their class, such as rotting and disintegrating things, as
well as by virtue of being formless, for example, dirt’ (Carroll, 1990,
p. 32). He also makes a distinction between ‘fusion’ and ‘fission’
horror figures where the former ‘hinges upon conflating, combin-
ing, or condensing distinct and/or opposed categorical elements in
a spatio-temporally continuous monster’ and includes such figures
as mummies, vampires, ghosts and zombies. In contrast, in ‘fis-
sion’ figures, such as werewolves, ‘the contradictory elements are,
so to speak, distributed over different, though metaphysically related,
identities’ (Carroll, 1990, pp. 45–46).
Irrespective of their composition, all monsters have in common
the threat they make to the order of the universe in the film. Some
do this surreptitiously and it is not always obvious that they are the
cause of the progressive disarray that unfolds, whilst at other times,
the monster is immediately pinpointed as the perpetrator of destruc-
tion. The plot of the film invariably involves a struggle between the
forces of good and evil with the intention being the restoration of
order. In Kristevan terms the monster represents the force of the
semiotic that disrupts the Symbolic order of law and order. The force
of the semiotic is symbolized by the bursting through of the sur-
face, which happens when the monster cannot be contained, thus
shattering the calm. This is epitomized by the ‘chestburster’ figure
that erupts from the chest of Kane where it had been incubating,
unbeknown to him. The rupture occurs at the boundary of contam-
ination, where Kane’s body has been infected by the parasite alien
who ends up destroying him. The struggle between the semiotic and
the Symbolic is also played out in the film where the monster brings
about the break-up of speech and language. This happens to those
that come into contact with it, those who, frozen with fear, regress to
a state anterior to language. This also accounts for the potential reac-
tions of viewers who may also be similarly lost for words. In the case
where monsters involve the combination of human and inhuman
parts, the monstrous part is attributed to the inhuman aspect and
when this surfaces, speech is paralysed or distorted. A classic example
of this is when Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist is overcome by the
demon possessing her. She begins to speak in a deep gravelly voice,
uttering profanities, making eerie sounds and talking backwards –
features that are incongruous with her childlike innocence. There are
also examples of monsters that do not possess any linguistic skills but
have extrasensory powers that bring about destruction, causing peo-
ple to regress in sheer horror, like the monster in Night of the Demon
(dir., Jacques Tourneur, 1957).
The monstrous-feminine
In her study, Creed challenges the patriarchal notion that horror

films only involve the subjugation of the female victim by the male
monster. While there are numerous films that support this hypothe-
sis, equally there are many others that are orientated around female
monsters. There is a plethora of female monsters in religious and
mythological traditions (see Paglia, 1990) and, although these are
often the sources for the filmic representation of monsters, the preva-
lence of the female monstrous had not been documented or theorized
in film theory prior to Creed’s study. In her reconstruction of film
history, Creed unearths the legacy of the female monster in Western
films from the 1940s up until the end of the twentieth century, which
is when her study was published. She constructed a typology of the
female monster as a way of redressing the balance and of showing the
power of monstrous women. She argues that there are seven faces of
the ‘monstrous-feminine’, a conceit she coins, which consist of the
archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body,
monstrous mother and castrator, and she delineates their identities
through the framework of psychoanalysis and sexual difference.8
In conventional Freudian readings of sexual difference, women are
deemed to be weaker than men because they do not possess the
phallus and, furthermore, they cause anxiety and terror because they
are castrated. The narrative reads as follows: on seeing the absence
of a penis on his mother, the male infant fears that he may be cas-
trated. The substitute of a fetish (object) is commonly employed as
a symbolic reminder of the threat of castration and a simultane-

ous defence against it. This formula has often been rehearsed but
now abjection can be used as ‘a resource to rework the[se] fetishistic
discourses’ in order to advance film theory beyond its traditionally
patriarchal biases (Chanter, 2004, p. 48).
Creed revises orthodoxy and moves beyond Kristeva in her asser-
tion of the monstrous-feminine as part of the Symbolic order. Freud’s
theory stresses the fear generated by the mother because she is cas-
trated, but Creed shifts the focus – the mother and indeed women in
general are fearful because they possess the power to castrate. Prior to
Creed’s pioneering work in this area, film theory had focused on the
fear evoked by the feminine because of her lack. Creed’s new dimen-
sion, something that radicalized perceptions of the feminine, is that
‘woman also terrifies because man endows her with imaginary powers
of castration’ as revealed in the personification of the folk mythol-
ogy of the vagina dentata, for instance (Creed, 1993, p. 87).9 ‘The
monstrous-feminine is constructed as an abject figure because she
threatens the symbolic order’ (p. 83). The most graphic instance of
this is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho who is threatened
by the fear of being castrated and, in his powerlessness, is forced to do
the incomprehensible – to become the mother. In his guise as mother
he destroys the woman he desires – Marion (Janet Leigh) – because
he is unable to relinquish his first, maternal love. The presence of
the abject maternal means that Norman is unable to create discrete
boundaries of the self and exists instead between different states: of
masculinity and femininity, and of mother and son. As ‘Norman’
he is emasculated and threatened by Marion’s sexuality and by his
fixation on his mother, which paradoxically turns out to be him.
His identity is split between two conflicting roles. One of the most
sinister aspects of the film is that Norman does not bear traits of
the monstrous in a conventional sense. Although seemingly eccen-
tric, he is strangely passive. In spite of her feminist perspective and
her desire to convey the active power of the monstrous-feminine,
Creed argues that the female monsters in their representations are not
‘liberated’ because they address ‘more about male fears than about
female desire or feminine subjectivity’ (Creed, 1993, p. 7). In Psy-
cho, Norman creates the monster of ‘other’, and not the other way
around. The film, then, is about the psychotic breakdown of a man
who has been unable to escape from the mental clutches of his
mother. In his construction of her as monster figure, he becomes a

murderous monster himself.
The defiled mother figure
Kristeva’s theory of abjection describes the mother figure as abject

because of the threat that she presents to the infant’s boundaries.
Her role is ambivalent because she toilet trains the infant in prepara-
tion for socialized living and yet is all-engulfing. Many horror films
are preoccupied with the proximity between womb and tomb, where
birth brings with it unknown forces that lead to death. In horror the
maternal figure is defiled, abject and needs to be expelled. Creed
explores the numerous faces of the monstrous-feminine. By mov-
ing the monstrous beyond the maternal to encompass other roles
and identities, some of which – like the witch – are female monsters
but are not necessarily defined in terms of their femininity, Creed
extends by going beyond Kristeva’s association of the maternal with
the abject, which advances scholarship in the field.
Creed is faithful to Kristeva’s focus on the maternal space as the
source of abjection. Following Kristeva, she argues that ‘[t]he womb
represents the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form
which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of
its contamination – blood, afterbirth, faeces’ (1993, p. 49). In the
Symbolic order the womb is the ultimate space of ambiguity with
its invisible boundaries and the threat of irruption. It is part of the
unruly natural world that cannot be regulated. A popular theme in
horror films is the reworking of the primal birth scene. This is exem-
plified in the Alien films. In Aliens (dir., James Cameron, 1986), ‘the
spectator is confronted with the site of an Alien womb, externalized
in the form of a deathly birth chamber of awe-inspiring proportions’
(Tyler, 2009, p. 83). Rosemary’s Baby (dir., Roman Polanski, 1968) is
the narrative of an alien pregnancy. On the night that her baby
is conceived, protagonist Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) expe-
riences a sense of unease at what is happening to her. She has a
nightmare that culminates in a ritual sacrifice, where she is restrained
and raped by an inhuman creature that had the face of the devil
and she wakes up with scratches on her body. During her pregnancy
she develops pains and weakness but is dissuaded from taking con-
ventional medicine and is instead looked after by her neighbour,
Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), who makes her a herbal concoction

to drink on a daily basis. As her pregnancy progresses, Rosemary feels
a mounting sense of dread and suspects that she is surrounded by
Satan worshippers. When the time comes to give birth, she confides
in her doctor about her suspicions and ends up being sedated while
labour is induced. On waking she is told that her baby is dead, but,
after hearing a baby cry through the walls of the apartment and the
coven’s strange request for her to continue expressing breast milk,
she realizes that her baby has been taken by the coven members. At
the end of the film she learns that she was impregnated with the
devil’s spawn, an agreement made between her husband, Guy (John
Cassavetes), and the coven in exchange for a successful acting career.
On first seeing her baby in a black deathly cot, instead of feeling
maternal love she is horrified because of his inhuman eyes.
Throughout the film, Rosemary, in her expectant state, is treated
by her neighbours with a disquieting overfamiliarity. And rather than
it being the cause of celebration, her pregnancy presents her with a
whole series of worries. She experiences trouble through all stages
from copulation right through to breastfeeding and this is because
of the intervention of evil. Throughout, the maternal is demonized:
her female neighbours are old maids (past childbearing age) or are
childless and express disingenuous concern for Rosemary’s welfare.
On suspecting danger for herself and her unborn child, she plans
her escape strategy where she will give birth away from those she
mistrusts. Her pleas to see her child and rages at what has happened
to her are interpreted by others as post-partum hysteria and she is
continually silenced or marginalized.
Another prevalent subject in horror focuses on the abject space
of female adolescence as a site for exploration. The female child,
approaching womanhood, begins to abject the mother’s confining
embrace by rejecting her emotionally and also poses a challenge
to the Symbolic order. In The Exorcist, the little girl Regan and her
mother enjoy a close relationship. In the absence of a father-figure,
the mother functions as Regan’s nurturer and closest companion.
This intimate bond comes under threat when Regan’s behaviour
starts to transform her personality from a normal loving child to
that of a demon. At first the strange goings on, like the rattling in
Regan’s bedroom, are perceived as being external and her behaviour is
thought to be caused by a medical abnormality. After various options
are exhausted, the possibility of the cause being supernatural is con-

sidered. The idea that Regan may be possessed by a demon or some
other spiritual force drives a wedge between her and her despairing
mother who is unable to control her daughter’s aberrant behaviour
as it worsens over time. Arguably, one of the most disturbing scenes
is when Regan, in a state of convulsion, is thrusting a crucifix into
her bloody genitals while shouting in the voice of the demon ‘Let
Jesus fuck you, Let him fuck you!!!’ When her mother tries to restrain
her, Regan pushes her mother’s head to her bloodied crotch and
says ‘Lick me! Lick me!’ Her head then turns back to front and she
exclaims ‘Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?’ This
series of actions is utterly blasphemous and transgresses the ultimate
taboo, that of incest. It also reveals the power of the prohibition and
yet the overriding fascination of the maternal body that lies at the
heart of horror. But let us be clear – Regan is not abject because she
is demonic, although this does contribute to her ambivalent status.
Her abjection is conveyed by the relinquishment of the body and
mind to wild abandonment, the explanation of which is attributed
to an unknown force. She deliberately flouts all customs and bound-
aries. She speaks obscenely by hurling insults and expletives and
behaves in an unbridled way in which her body is literally out of
control. One of the early instances of this is where she urinates in
front of guests at her mother’s dinner party after prophesying that
one of those present is going to die. More sinister behaviour follows
and includes the revolving of her head from front to back and the
paroxysmal abandonment of her body in her bedroom where she
flays and convulses in the presence of others while spewing disgust-
ing fluids. Creed describes Regan’s body as being ‘carnivalesque’ and
comments how in her immodest display she has ‘broken with her
proper feminine role – she has “made a spectacle of herself” – put her
unsocialized body on display. And to make matters worse, she has
done all of this before the shocked eyes of two male clerics’ (Creed,
1993, p. 42).
The relationship between the uncanny daughter and mother is
also explored in Carrie but, unlike Regan who has no control over
the possession that gripped her, the powers exercised by Carrie (Sissy
Spacek), specifically telekinesis, are controlled by her will. Unlike the
mother and daughter relationship in The Exorcist, there is no prior
harmony between Carrie and her fanatically religious mother. The
onset of womanhood, as symbolized by the commencement of her

menarche, drives a wedge between the mother, who conflates sexu-
ality with sin, and the vulnerable daughter who is victimized both at
home and at school. Her only ally is her gym mistress, Miss Collins
(Betty Buckley), who encourages her to embrace her womanhood.
She remains a constant source of support to Carrie, but this is not
enough. And in her final humiliation, where she is doused in pig’s
blood at her prom, which recalls the opening scene of menstrual
blood, Carrie seeks revenge. This unexpected humiliation fuels her
paranoia about people’s perceptions of her and initiates a chain of
reactions that results in the utter destruction of her school. This trail
continues into her home, where she kills her mother and brings
about the demolition of her house, which causes her own demise.
The narratives of Carrie and The Exorcist part company in the finale.
While the transfer of the demon into the person of Father Karras
(Jason Miller) restores Regan’s innocence and reunites her with her
mother, retribution is the order of Carrie as revealed by the hand
emerging from the grave.
The theme of ambivalence, discussed earlier, in relation to the
impurity of the monster exhibiting more than one state and nature
is pertinent here. In the above two films both protagonists are
defined by their normalcy (the fact that they are young girls) and
their abnormality (they have strange gifts). Tension is created by the
incompatibility of these attributes. The feeling of abjection is caused
when the abnormal component overtakes their normalcy. If we were
faced with the demon alone (‘the other’ in The Exorcist) or the witch
(what Carrie can be described as being) then this would heighten
our hatred and horror of the monsters that are Regan and Carrie
respectively. What makes things problematic is that both characters
betray characteristics of their humanity – they are still girls – and
this heightens their vulnerability and arouses our sympathy.10 It also
renders them more abject, especially the unspeakable profanities and
actions that Regan commits and the frightening power that Carrie
possesses.11 When possessed, both of them defy the Symbolic order –
of God, school regulations, laws of nature – and use their extrasensory
power to wreak chaos. Together with Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie and The
Exorcist belong to a sub-genre of horror films that can be described
as quasi-theological. In these films the Symbolic order is represented
by orders of the divine and the demonic, and this authority is called
on to vie with and fight the evil of a demon (female) figure who
threatens to overturn established practices.
Regan and Carrie are also abject in virtue of their uncontrol-
lable bodies. Regan-as-monster loses all inhibitions and flaunts and
parades her body in front of the horrified priests. Carrie is literally
abject on our first encounter with her when she becomes covered
in her menstrual blood while showering. Her classmates taunt her
naïvety about her predicament and pelt her with sanitary towels
while she cowers and tries to cover herself. At home, her mother’s
jibes about her impending womanhood abject Carrie further. Instead
of nurturing her daughter, her mother rebukes her leaking body
and warns of the blood of women which leads to sin. In an apoc-
alyptic vein, she proclaims: ‘After the blood come the boys, like
sniffing dogs. Grinning and slobbering and trying to find out where
that smell comes from.’ Blood becomes a symbol of impurity and
reappears on the shorts of Miss Collins as she explains what has hap-
pened to Carrie. The blood that Carrie learns to mistrust reappears
in one of the final scenes in her ritual humiliation. Here again the
shroud of blood is the occasion for public ridicule, but this time it
releases the animus in Carrie who systematically destroys the world
around her. The monstrous-feminine is reflected to the viewer who,
through the aid of a split screen, witnesses the disintegration of order.
While Regan’s abjection is contained within the private space of the
bedroom and is attributed to external forces, Carrie’s abjection is
ridiculed. She is denied the private spaces of sanctuary – the ‘pri-
vate space becomes public’ in the shower scene (Pheasant-Kelly, 2013,
p. 29) – and even at home she is under her mother’s ‘watchful’ eye
at all times, the same mother who punishes her by locking her in
a prayer room. Both Regan and Carrie undergo purification rites in
order to restore harmony, which in The Exorcist means the return of
innocent Regan, and in Carrie the death of the feminine order with
Carrie as the sacrificial victim.
Social abjection in film
Many discussions about abjection in film are oriented around the

horror genre. Whilst it is arguably the most pertinent genre to
the topic of abjection because of the presence of corpses, mon-
sters, bodily fluids and the numerous narratives that either re-enact
or rework the primal abject moment, it is important to consider

other ways of thinking about abjection, particularly in relation to
other genres. Creed’s theories about the monstrous-feminine have
been particularly influential in advancing the theory of abjection
in film theory. While recognizing the significance of Creed’s analy-
sis, Cynthia Freeland also identifies problems with her study. On a
general level Freeland expresses scepticism about the validity of psy-
choanalysis as a theoretical framework and, with specific reference
to Creed’s approach, finds it reductive and simplistic to trace all
instances of horror to the archaic mother when in fact our fear may
not have a psychoanalytical root at all and when, in any case, the
conception itself is too vague (Freeland, 2000, pp. 20, 61).
Chanter also discusses the limitations of orthodox psychoanalyti-
cal theory with a particular condemnation of the logic of fetishization
which, she argues, assumes ‘sexual difference as the bedrock of iden-
tity’ and derives ‘all other socially salient differences, such as race,
from this . . .’ (Chanter, 2004, p. 48). Russell Ford reminds us of how
abjection reworks traditional psychoanalytical theory:
The problem with traditional psychoanalytic film theory is that it

interprets and critiques the semiotic fantasy in terms of the logic of
fetishism, which, in turn, is organized by the castration complex,
and therefore remains ‘patriarchal’. Taking abjection to be more
primordial than the identification with the father that yields the
structures of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis allows ‘difference’
to be given priority over identity.
(Ford, 2010, p. 81; see also Chanter, 2008, p. 274)
However, Chanter’s objective of exposing the phallic-centred

approaches of psychoanalytical theory in order to mobilize a theory
of abjection, thereby emphasizing the position of viewer in theory,
is well intended and is indicative of an advancement of other pos-
sible avenues of interpretation. Also in this vein are Kelly Oliver
and Benigno Trigo’s Noir Anxiety (2003) that presents a reworking
of psychoanalytical and feminist film theory applied to anxieties
surrounding race.
I would like my discussion of the development of film theory in
this section to reflect the move beyond traditional psychoanalyti-
cal approaches. Abjection in film should not be seen only in terms
of the withdrawal from the maternal but should invite other possi-
bilities, such as looking at social abjection. Exploring the abjection
of people(s) in social spaces moves away from the preoccupation of
sexual difference and involves the exploitation, marginalization and
expulsion of certain social groups to reinforce ideas of cultural hege-
mony. This is certainly one of David Sibley’s objectives in his study
of exclusion in the creation of social and spatial boundaries where
minority groups are viewed as defiled and polluting. One of his anal-
yses is of Taxi Driver (dir., Martin Scorsese, 1976), where he views the
depression experienced by Travis (Robert De Niro) as partly fuelled
by Travis’s anxieties about sleaze and decadence. The ‘filth’ he wit-
nesses on the streets of New York City as a taxi driver activates his
violence. He desires to purify the streets by eliminating the lowlife
who bring about such deprivation. His vitriol is evident in his diary
entries:
May 10 . . . Thank God for the rain which has helped to wash away
the garbage and trash from the sidewalks . . . All the animals come
out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dop-
ers, junkies; sick, venal; some day, a real rain will come and wash
all this scum off the streets.
(See Sibley, 1995, p. 61)
Another film that presents society in oppositional terms through the

negotiation of spatial boundaries is One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(dir., Miloš Forman, 1975).12 The film explores the exploitation of
madness in society through the mapping of abject spaces.13 Set in a
mental institution, the narrative is constructed across boundary lines
where a clear demarcation is set between spaces that are accessible
(the patients’ areas) and those that are prohibited (the nurses’ quar-
ters and the outside world, which represents freedom). Randle Patrick
McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), the latest admittee, comes to the asy-
lum under false pretences. Being recently released from prison for
statutory rape, he is not clinically insane but feels that being admit-
ted here is preferable to the fate that awaits him elsewhere. On his
arrival his anti-authoritarian impulse takes over and he seeks to shake
up the rigid divisions that divide the powerful from the powerless
and encourages fellow patients to follow suit by venturing beyond
sacred boundaries. His crossing of the sanctified threshold of the
nurses’ office causes panic and disrupts erstwhile stable spaces. Later
in the film he exploits their anxiety by staging a party at this sta-
tion, where the usual administration of prescribed medication that
occurs across the hatch becomes the site for the exchange of alco-
hol. His charisma and bravado soon win him a loyal following and
he ventures on a fishing trip with some of the patients, passing
them off as doctors in order to gain access to the boat. McMurphy
succeeds in reterritorializing spaces that have hitherto been undiscov-
ered or denied. He effectively reframes the power dynamics in order
to empower himself and others. He maintains a perpetual battle of
subjugation and is unwilling to accept his abject status. Examples of
his achievements include securing the fishing boat, which symbol-
izes freedom, and showing the Chief (Will Sampson) how to score
at basketball. This involves teaching him to jump higher off the
ground; in other words, to push the boundaries of what he knows.
Some of the spaces that he opens up are internal and hence invisible
to others. In a concerted effort to resist the control of medication,
McMurphy hides his tablets in the roof of his mouth. His spirit
is eventually broken down by the devastating effects of lobotomy,
which stupefy him. Unable to bear seeing his friend and saviour
in such a desperate state, the Chief smothers him to death before
breaking through the window and making his great escape. Death is
preferable to submission to the hierarchy of the clinic. McMurphy’s
maverick spirit problematized spaces as he found opportunities to
liberate regimes of oppression. What is poignant is that in the end
he is unable to escape from the institution and his spirit is bro-
ken by it. By killing him, the Chief ensures that his life is not also
taken.
McMurphy is abject because he calls boundaries into question and
threatens the cohesion of the asylum. Before his arrival, the bound-
aries between different states were established, where the sane were
divided from the insane, the powerful from the powerless and the
outside from the inside. McMurphy causes progressive disarray with
his antics, generating an increasing sense of dysfunctionality. Nurse
Ratched’s white hat – her badge of authority and sanitization – is
found dirtied on the floor, signalling the anarchic environment that
is heralded by McMurphy’s reign of freedom. The restoration of order
is only possible by his abject vegetative state that is symbolic of
death.
The paradoxes of horror
In his analysis of horror, Carroll talks about two paradoxes that are
relevant to our motivations to watch films that unsettle and scare us:
the paradox of fiction, which I will discuss shortly, and the paradox
of horror, which concerns the question of how we can be attracted to
that which is repulsive (Carroll, 1990, p. 160).14 How can we explain
the desire to watch or read something that elicits horror (which
includes feelings such as fear and disgust) in us? If we accept that
the genre of horror ‘is designed to produce an emotional effect’ (p. 8)
and more precisely certain effects of fear and disgust, then how can
we explain our desire to engage with such material, and more widely,
the sociological need for horror in culture? It needs to be stressed that
the monster generates emotions that go beyond fear. Fear alone is
not a sufficient condition for horror, or for abjection for that matter.
Monsters do evoke fear but they are also disgusting and make us feel
nauseous, and it is this compound sense that signals horror and gen-
erates abjection (Carroll, 1990, p. 22). Returning to the issue at hand,
why do we voluntarily choose to interact with horror in its multi-
tudinous forms? In evolutionary terms we deal with things that elicit
horror through the ‘fight or flight’ instinct where we either contend
with, or flee from the source of danger, but either way the intention
is to free ourselves from the situation in which we have found our-
selves and to do so as quickly as possible. Taking this train of thought
further, why would we then voluntarily put ourselves in a position
where we have to deal with sights or things that cause us to feel fear,
shock, dread or terror? The prospect of willing horror, or entertaining
it, is alien because it goes against our basic survival instincts.
Aristotle offers an account of tragedy in his Poetics, which is defined
in part by the catharsis of pity and fear that tragedy exudes. Using
Aristotle’s theory as a model, Carroll ‘offer[s] an account of horror
in virtue of the emotional effects it is designed to cause in audi-
ences’ and looks at how the characteristic structures, imagery and
figures work towards causing the emotion of ‘art-horror’ (Carroll,
1990, p. 8).15 In Carroll’s study, the paradox of horror is split into
two different but related questions: ‘1) how can anyone be fright-
ened by what they know does not exist, and 2) why would anyone
ever be interested in horror, since being horrified is so unpleasant?’
(Carroll, 1990, p. 8).
The first of these questions was originally posed by Colin Radford

in his 1975 article ‘How can We be Moved by the Fate of Anna
Karenina?’ Here Radford addressed the paradox of fiction, which is
how we can have an emotional response to things that happen in
fiction, such as the fate of a character, when we know that these
characters do not exist in the real world. If we assume that emo-
tion is positively correlated to belief then, following this, how can
we care for something that we know does not exist? The same sit-
uation applies to the context here. We know that Regan (from The
Exorcist) is not a girl in the real world who is possessed by a demon,
and this sentiment extends to other characters beyond this particu-
lar film. But in spite of our belief that these are not people in the
real world, we are still moved by their plight, and we still care what
happens to them. Several explanations can be put forward to explain
this. The power of art is such that it creates a strong sense of empathy.
We relate to Regan’s universe because the film is directed convinc-
ingly, the actors are skilled in their roles, and so on. This leads us to
what Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as ‘the willing suspension of
disbelief’ where we read (and, by implication, watch) fiction as if it
were real. In his Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge explained that
he wanted to be able to generate a sense of the suspension of disbelief
when reading lyrical poetry:
. . . in which it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed

to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet
so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and
a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of
imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,
which constitutes poetic faith.
(Coleridge, 1951, p. 264)
The concept implied that to become emotionally engaged in a narra-

tive, readers (and we can add viewers) must react as if the characters
and events are real, thereby displaying expectations that they might
have if the parallel narrative were happening in their real lives
rather than in the possible world of the fiction. This involved a
co-operation between the writer who created the sense of illusion
and the reader/viewer who was able to suspend judgement about the
correspondence of the narrative to reality. A strategy used in horror
and fantasy films is, often with the use of special effects, the creation
of a sense of hyperrealism in the monster, which generates a greater
sense of the uncanny. This is evident in the realistic style of David
Cronenberg’s films, examples which include The Brood (1979) and
Scanners (1981). He speaks of his intentions:
The very purpose was to show the unshowable, to speak the

unspeakable. I was creating certain things that there was no way
of suggesting because it was not common currency of the imagina-
tion. It had to be shown or else not done. I like to say, during the
course of the film, ‘I’m going to show you something that you’re
not able to believe, because it’ll be so outrageous or ridiculous or
bizarre. But I’m going to make it real for you. I’m going to show
you this is for real!’
(Cronenberg, 1997, p. 43, in Freeland, 2000, p. 90)
Kendall Walton offers a different solution to the paradox of fiction

when he argues that ‘[w]e do not actually pity Willy Loman or grieve
for Anna Karenina or admire Superman . . . nor do we feel contempt
for Iago or worry about Tom Sawyer and Becky lost in the cave’
(Walton, 1990, p. 249, in Eldridge, 2003, pp. 190–191). Since we
know that they do not exist, it makes perfect sense to assume that we
do not feel real emotions as we would if they existed in the real world.
Walton proposes that what happens is that we make-believe or pre-
tend that we feel the appropriate emotions for these characters, what
he calls ‘quasi-emotions’, and when we apparently experience pity,
or fear, for instance, or whatever the emotion is, it creates the ‘phe-
nomenological experiences characteristic of real emotions’ (Walton,
1990, p. 251 in Eldridge, 2003, p. 191). We feel ‘the felt quality of
terror, say, but without the belief that anyone is in danger’ (Eldridge,
2003, p. 191). This answers part 1 of the paradox of horror but what
about the second question? We can return to Walton’s views here. He
notes that negative emotions, such as sadness for instance, do not
necessarily have to involve negative experiences. We may enjoy feel-
ing horror, but it may not feel unpleasant to have such an emotion
(Walton, 1990, p. 257 in Eldridge, 2003, p. 191). This attitude can be
traced back to the findings of philosophers such as David Hume in
Of Tragedy, (1757, reprinted in volume 3 of his Philosophical Works),
who believed that there are certain instances, such as in the case of a
well-written tragedy, where an unpleasant emotion can be regarded

as a positive attribute. Edmund Burke, in his A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2008 [1757];
see also Carroll, 1990, p. 161) argued that the relief of aesthetic ter-
ror causes pleasure as a sense of delight and not as sadness or pain:
‘It is a common observation, that objects which in the reality would
shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a
very high species of pleasure. This taken as a fact, has been the cause
of much reasoning’ (Burke, 2008, p. 44).
The paradox of negative pleasure has also been the subject of recent
philosophical debate. In addition to Carroll’s and Walton’s research,
Hanich discusses what he describes in the title of his article as ‘The
Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear’ and talks about ‘frightening
fascination’ (Hanich, 2010), which echoes Otto’s ideas of the holy,
and will be discussed shortly. In a detailed analysis of the climatic
scene in Titanic (dir., James Cameron, 1997), Carl Plantinga (2009)
investigates the appeal of negative emotions and argues that the sor-
row generated in the narrative is able to give way to positive emotion
through the elaboration of fantasies or myths of eternal love, for
example, that are life affirming.
Our continued desire to seek out horror can also be explained in
terms of the numinous experience which the theologian Rudolf Otto
conceptualizes in The Idea of the Holy (1958 [1917], Carroll, 1990,
p. 165). The numen, or non-rational aspect of religion, imparts a
sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. ‘Mysterium’ refers to
the ‘wholly other’ aspect of the numen. ‘Tremendum et fascinans’ refers
to the dual aspects of the numen which is fearful and awe-inspiring,
causing a sense of feeling overpowered, while fascinans draws us in.
This attraction–repulsion dynamic can be directly mapped onto our
experience of horror. What often happens in horror is that the sen-
timents of the protagonists run parallel with the emotions of the
viewers and, although we are not part of the narrative, the inten-
sity of fear grips us to such an extent that we feel a shared empathy
with other characters that are in a similar position of terror. When
the level of horror increases, our ability to stay looking at the screen
is tested. At times we have to look away because what we are seeing
is unbearable. Aversive reactions include shuddering, flinching, and
laughing, which ‘is a way of placing or displacing abjection’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 8). All these modes have the same intention, which is to keep
horror at bay and protect the self from contamination. What remains
constant is that flight is not an option. William Ian Miller (1997,
p. 26) argues that ‘[w]hat makes horror so horrifying is that unlike
fear, which presents a viable strategy (run!), horror denies flight as an
option’. Miller cites Robert Solomon’s characterization of the vivid
presence of the spectator: ‘In fear, one flees . . . In horror, on the other
hand, there is passivity, the passivity of presence. One stands (or sits)
aghast, frozen in place . . . Horror is a spectator’s emotion, and thus it
is especially well-suited for the cinema and the visual arts’ (Solomon,
1983 [1976], pp. 125–126, in Miller, 1997, p. 262).
These moments of recoil may cause physical reactions like retch-
ing, or other responses like laughter but, even in their enormity of
sensation, they always involve the viewer staying put. We may want
to block our view of the screen or perform similar actions but we
are still physically present. During such moments Creed describes
how the ‘[s]trategies of identification are temporarily broken and
pleasure in looking is transformed into pain as the spectator is pun-
ished for his/her voyeuristic desires’ (Creed, 1993, p. 28). But the
period of looking away is short-lived and this is counterbalanced
by a strong urge to continue looking. And it is the very force of
repulsion that causes the fascination that prompts the oscillation
to once again look back at the screen and re-engage. We have a
perverse desire to see whether the demon in Regan can withstand
the force of the Church/clerics and to bear witness in Carrie to
the power of her telekinesis which is able to bring about complete
destruction. Creed frames our desire to watch horror by reference to
abjection:
Viewing the horror film signifies a desire not only for perverse
pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images/being filled with
terror/desire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, once hav-
ing been filled with perversity, taken pleasure in perversity, to
throw up, throw out, eject the abject (from the safety of the
spectator’s seat).
(Creed, 1993, p. 10)
One of the purposes of horror is to facilitate the dissolution of the

self which occurs when experiencing sheer terror. When immersed
in deep fear, accompanying feelings like shock make us numb and
suspend the reality of our everyday lives. This is why horror is so

appealing: it grips the viewer in both a sensory and psychological way
to powerful effect. The ultimate goal is to confront the monster and
monstrous head on. Creed comments how ‘[t]he horror film attempts
to bring about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily
wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order finally to eject the abject
and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human’
(Creed, 1993, p. 14). Similarly, we experience catharsis at the turmoil
of the order of the universe of the film and subsequent calm on its
restoration.
Abjection and the dinner party
I opened the chapter with an analysis of the eccentric dinner party

in Buñuel’s Surrealist film where eating is a taboo subject that is hid-
den from the public gaze. Throughout history, communal eating has
functioned to communicate certain values about society that range
from the importance of the family unit to the sharing of community
though sacrifice. The resonance of the symbolism of the meal around
the dinner table has been employed widely in film. One of the most
gruesome representations of this has been in one of the most disturb-
ing horror films of the 1970s, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir., Tobe
Hooper, 1974).
Prior to the dinner party scene, Sally (Marilyn Burns) has, one
by one, had her friends, boyfriend and brother brutally killed by
the bloodthirsty Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), who is so named
because he wears a mask of human skin. Having just witnessed the
slaughter of her brother, she flees the scene in fear and enters the
gas station that the group had stopped at earlier, where they were
told that there wasn’t any fuel but were bizarrely offered barbequed
meat instead. The consumption of this food, regarded as inconse-
quential at the time, takes on a sinister edge when viewers realize
that the meat is human flesh, and that the strange family of the
Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), Leatherface and Old Man/The Cook (Jim
Siedow) are indeed cannibals. Having no knowledge of the truth
about the gas station, the hysterical Sally is simultaneously comforted
and frightened by the father who bundles her off to the family home
where she is sadistically tormented before failed attempts are made
to slaughter her.
Strapped to a chair and seated at the dinner table, Sally faces her
tormenters: the cross-dressing Leatherface who, caked in make-up
replete with a woman’s wig, is incestuously paired with Old Man/The
Cook; the vampiric Hitchhiker and the zombie-like Grandpa (John
Dugan). This is the first time in the film that the miscreants are
seen together, a fact that increases their immeasurable power. These
four monsters violate the taboos of civilized life – they indiscrim-
inately kill people for food, as clinically conveyed by Hitchhiker,
‘My family’s always been in meat.’ Armed with chainsaw or with
a sledge hammer, Leatherface is responsible for the butchering and
preservation of bodies. These are then roasted and sold by the father.
Hitchhiker is a grave-robber who is reprimanded by his father for
his indiscretions. The house of the cannibals is a monument to their
depravity. At various scenes in the film we see the bones and remains
of human and animal carcasses. In this final killing, Sally, tied to
a chair beneath a hanging skeleton, is sadistically tormented and
goaded by the family as she is faced with a plate of sausages and
other meats that may have been made from the bodies of her friends
and family. But in spite of their special, in the sense of laboured,
treatment of her, there is nothing sexual about their motives. The
family’s response to her is dehumanized: she is meat like any other
prey and any arousal is caused by their anticipation of killing her.
She squirms in her seat as she tries to escape from the clutches of her
captors. Eventually Grandpa (who disgustingly sucked her cut fingers
for blood) is nominated as the one who should kill her but his failing
strength prevents him from delivering the fatal blow. In the ensuing
scuffle, Sally manages to flee and avoid the cruel fate that met her
friends.
Naomi Merritt views the film as a ‘nightmarish (but bleakly
parodic), vision of an America, metaphorically and literally devour-
ing itself’ (Merritt, 2010, p. 202). The institutions held so sacred
by modern society, the family and the worker, are subverted and
ridiculed. Robin Wood suggests that this is ‘the logical end of
human relations under capitalism’ (Wood, 1984, p. 189, quoted
in Merritt, 2010, p. 204). Behind the façade of a normal home-
stead and neighbouring gas station lies a world of depravity and
dehumanization, where the norm involves transgressing two of the
ultimate taboos: murder and cannibalism. The excessively violent
treatment faced by trespassers is revealed in the immediate slaughter
of Kirk who is the first victim of the film. The metal sliding door
of the kitchen is then slammed shut. In many horror films the
supernatural aspects cause the greatest sense of disquiet because
we are not able to account for their source or power. The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre does not deal with metaphysical horrors in spite
of the ghostly foreboding during the trip around Sally and Franklin’s
grandfather’s home. The horror of the film is rooted in the here-
and-now mundanity of the life of a deviant family, all of whom
are devoid of social and moral sensibilities and who are motivated
by their animal impulses to hunt and kill. The majority of the vio-
lence of killing occurs behind the scenes, and we are privy only
to the slaughtering of the party of friends. The mise-en-scène of
bones and decay, and the freezer full of bodies indicates that what
we are bearing witness to is an active family business that oper-
ates violently and lawlessly to serve the sadism and bestiality of
the family. In his role as provider, the father represents a bridge
between his deranged family and the outside world, where he uses
his social mask to mislead unsuspecting individuals who visit the
gas station. Behind the veneer of civilization lies the abjectness of
humanity as embodied in this family who ‘serve as bleak reminders
of the violent aspects of humanity uncontained by prohibitions,
which effectively undermines the sense of order or security pro-
vided by taboos’ (Merritt, 2010, p. 219). The film shows us what
happens when safeguards in society have been removed and we are
exposed to life without boundaries or control. The family is physi-
cally set apart from the rest of society and lives in the rural heartland
of Southern Texas. Leatherface represents the ultimate abject figure
‘who disturbs/transgresses categories and boundaries (of species, of
gender, of individual identity and subjectivity), further stimulat-
ing the anguished response of the audience to his brutal actions’
(Merritt, 2010, p. 222). Cynthia Freeland suggests that the film shows
an example of ‘uncanny horror’ which she goes on to describe as
being ‘a disturbing and relentless vision of evil “out there” in the
world . . . the evil is localized in human form, but somehow it exceeds
human instantiation and haunts the entire landscape’ (Freeland,
2000, p. 244). One of the reasons I chose to focus on this film as the
coda of this chapter is to redress the balance from the earlier emphasis
on the monstrous-feminine as the purveyor of abjection. The sig-
nificance of Creed’s work on the study of abjection in film studies
should not be underestimated. However, it is limiting to conflate the

monstrous-feminine with the abject. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
we see the workings of abjection in relation to boundaries that
transcend gender difference and take the viewer to a state that is
more primeval and is about the collapse of human civilization and
sanity.
7
Abjection in Literature
So far in the book, abjection has predominantly been discussed in

relation to the visual, namely, artworks and film. It is easy to see why
theorists and critics tend to gravitate towards the visual aspects of
abjection, especially given that the visceral and somatic aspects of the
phenomenology of abjection lend themselves more readily to visual
expression. However, in order to attain a fully rounded understand-
ing of the concept, and in keeping with Kristeva’s efforts, a discussion
of the application of abjection in literature needs to be undertaken.
Franz Kafka argues for the power of language to evoke the visceral:
‘[w]riters speak a stench – not because they subscribe to the pro-
duction of unpalatable things, but because they are able, thanks to
their “construction,” to enjoy “with all their senses” everything, even
the “most evil” . . .’ (quoted in Menninghaus, 2003, p. 261). Another
writer who expresses the turmoil of sensation as central to his percep-
tion of the world is Jean-Paul Sartre. Pierre de Boisdeffre observes that
‘[t]he entire novelistic work of Sartre seems haunted by the obsession
with a rotten, decomposed, moldy world, one full of sickening secre-
tions’ (quoted in Menninghaus, 2003, p. 356). ‘Sartre’s Roquentin [in
Nausea] is not merely using disgust metaphorically when he describes
his condition as nausea. He feels it and finds everything around him
to elicit it’ (Miller, 1997, p. 29).
A significant portion of Powers of Horror is dedicated to literary anal-
ysis. Kristeva uses the term ‘art’ with reference to literature but I (as
have others) have taken it to have a wider application to include
other art forms. Kristeva argues that ‘[l]iterature has always been
the most explicit realization of the signifying subject’s condition’
156
Abjection in Literature 157
(Kristeva, 1984, p. 82). It also ‘represents the ultimate coding of our

crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 208). The trajectory of her thought in Powers of Horror indi-
cates the emphasis that she places on literature. She begins by looking
at its role in psychoanalysis in relation to the development of the sub-
ject, before moving on to look at its application in various religious
traditions. In the final part of the book she addresses avant-garde
literature, which she identifies as unveiling the horror of humanity.
Kristeva’s shift away from religion (and related discourses, such as
anthropology) is concomitant with the growth of secularism. In the
West in the twentieth century, religion no longer holds sway in the
way it once did. It is now the arts, which in Powers of Horror Kristeva
takes to consist of literature, which act as ‘an unveiling of the abject:
an elaboration, a discharge . . .’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 208). Unlike reli-
gion, literature does not impose prohibitions, but ‘[l]ike perversion, it
takes advantage of them, gets round them, and makes sport of them’
(p. 16). So whereas the abject was once veiled or marginalized in reli-
gion, we now see the reverse, where the task of the writer is to make
it manifest. She states how ‘[i]n a world in which the Other has col-
lapsed, the aesthetic task . . . amounts to retracing the fragile limits of
the speaking being . . . [and] [g]reat modern literature . . . unfolds over
that terrain . . .’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 18). ‘The writer, fascinated by the
abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and
as a consequence perverts language – style and content’ (p. 16). She
mentions a number of writers whose work articulates the transgres-
sion of socio-political and cultural orders, including Lautréamont,
Mallarmé, Bataille, Dostoyevsky, Artaud, Kafka, Joyce, and Borges,
presenting a case as to how their work can be conceived as abject
before undertaking a detailed treatment (in the third and final part
of Powers of Horror) of the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.1 Powers
of Horror should also be considered to be a work of abjection. As a
‘theoretical’ text, which is the way it is conventionally interpreted,
it accounts for the different aspects of abjection but its potential as
a literary text should also be noted, where it portrays a descent into
horror.
The emphasis given to Céline in Powers of Horror warrants a dis-
cussion of his writing, and for this reason I have selected Journey
to the End of the Night (2012 [1932]) as one of my three works in
this chapter. The other two works are Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1982
[1928]) and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1982 [1959]). The work
of Bataille has been a continual thread running through the book
and it seems appropriate to examine his other face here – to look at
his novels and their relation to abjection. Each of the examples takes
the reader through an experience of abjection in both content and
style. The content may involve transgression (of the physical and/or
moral) and abject bodies, which may in turn evoke a sense of repul-
sion in the reader, who feels drawn in but is simultaneously repulsed.
The importance of style also needs to be stressed, particularly because
many analyses overlook the contribution that style makes in com-
municating horror. Kristeva underscores the pertinence of style: ‘style
is the mark of interpretation in literature’ and uses Céline’s words to
support her view: ‘I am not a man of ideas. I am a man of style . . . This
involves taking sentences, I was telling you, and unhinging them’
(Moi, 1986, pp. 314–315).2 What emerges in the analyses is the cor-
relation between the abject themes and the textual language that
reflects the disintegration of meaning, where the writing becomes
almost intolerable in its obscenity in some cases. The abjection of
the text is brought about by the interplay of the two components of
signification, the semiotic and the symbolic, which will be discussed
shortly.
Abjection and the written word
As in the cases of the visual arts and cinema, abject literature is not
defined by a particular genre or style, but there are certain genres that
are more preoccupied than others with the themes of abjection and
its phenomenology. Kristeva isolates avant-garde literature as being
useful to her discussion. ‘Avant-garde’ was a neologism applied to
artists and writers since the late nineteenth century who were com-
mitted to the idea of art involving a revolution against tradition.
In their different practices artists and writers sought to transform ide-
ologies (about bourgeois cultural hegemony for instance) and artistic
practice (ways of writing) by anti-establishment and subversive ways
and to impel the self to shun the mainstream. They did this by exper-
imenting with different aspects of writing, including the use of non-
linear, non-chronological representations of time, which involved
sudden temporal shifts and fragmentation. There was a focus on
characters’ consciousness and perception. These writers were intent
on taking the reader to the limits of expression by communicating

‘the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ (Kristeva,
1982, p.1). This often involved delving into subjects that had hith-
erto been unexplored, such as the twentieth century interest in
the unconscious.3 They were also interested in disrupting bourgeois
society and the various ideals that it upheld, including the patriar-
chal Symbolic order that represented God, morality and law. With
the onus being on disruption and instability, the common ground
between the objectives of the avant-garde and the preoccupations of
the abject are evident. Susan Sontag describes how the ‘exemplary
modern artist is a broker in madness’ who pushes the frontiers of
consciousness and perception (Sontag, 1982, p. 92). Kristeva views
the writer as a saviour who ventures into territories on behalf of read-
ers – the writer dares to go where we cannot. The writer finds himself
‘marked out for identification with Christ’ in a journey that discloses
recovery that ‘is equal to resurrection’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 26). ‘[T]he
[w]ord alone purifies . . . the abject’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 23) and read-
ers bear witness to the trauma as survivors. The task of the writer
becomes not only to engage with representation but also to testify
to the wounds of existence. The hardship endured by the writer is
symbolized in Marlow’s journey in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(2007 [1902]) where he undertakes a physically and psychologi-
cally testing voyage up the Congo River that involves brute mental
strength and an endurance that tests the limits of sanity. His ultimate
goal is to meet the elusive and magnetic Kurtz who is the lynchpin
of the narrative. On meeting Kurtz he is faced with the shadow of
a dying man who has ‘kicked himself loose of the earth’ (Conrad,
2007, p. 82). The dramatic pathos comes in Kurt’s dying utterance
that conveys an abyssal moment that resounds in modern literature:
‘The horror! The horror!’
The semiotic and the symbolic
Literature that can be described as abject or as bringing about

abjection is characterized by the disruption of the symbolic by the
semiotic. In order to understand what this means, we need to revisit
these two modalities of expression that were introduced in Chapter 1,
where the semiotic involves preverbal communication, such as bab-
bles and cries, and the symbolic is the realm of linguistic language
and structure. One of Kristeva’s main preoccupations is with the con-

stitution of the speaking subject in signification and the relationship
between the psychoanalytical and the textual. According to her, in
psychoanalysis the semiotic is associated with the mother’s body and
in linguistics it is viewed as the attempt to distort the patriarchal logic
of the Symbolic order.
The semiotic is a precursor to the symbolic in an infant’s life;
indeed the semiotic is broken up by the infant’s entry into the Sym-
bolic order of language, but both modes are needed and sustained
throughout life – in fact, they are ‘inseparable within the signifying
process that constitutes language’. Kristeva states that ‘no signifying
system . . . can be either “exclusively” semiotic or “exclusively” sym-
bolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both’
(Kristeva, 1984, p. 24). The relationship between the semiotic and
the symbolic can be conceptualized in an ‘antagonism’ (Lechte and
Margaroni, 2004, p. 17) and both are necessary for different reasons:
Not to have entered the symbolic at all, that is, not to have sepa-
rated from the mother – as in extreme psychosis – is to be close to
living death. On the other hand, not to be alerted to the material
basis of the symbolic which the concept of the semiotic evokes, is
to remain at the level of a static, fetishized version of language.
(Lechte, 1990b, p. 27)
In order for a subject to emerge as a social being, or for language

to appear intelligible, the semiotic is suppressed but is still present,
rendering the subject in a state en procès, which means in process
or on trial (Kristeva, 1984, p. 63). In artistic practice, the semiotic
is expressed in the suppression or disruption of the symbolic. Grosz
describes the thetic as the ‘threshold between the semiotic and
the symbolic – the thetic – is an anticipation of the symbolic from
within the semiotic, as well as the residues of the semiotic in the
symbolic’ (Grosz, 1989, p. 45). Some non-verbal signifying systems
employ more of one of the modalities. Music, for example, is almost
exclusively semiotic (Kristeva, 1984, p. 24).
The recognition that language consists of more than just the
symbolic – the linguistic aspects – does not stem from Kristeva but
is also widely maintained in the philosophy of language, which
Kristeva purports to be influenced by, as indicated by her references
to turn of the century philosophers like Gottlob Frege. To draw

a parallel between the philosophy of language and Kristeva’s the-
ory, the concept of syntax in the former approximates to Kristeva’s
symbolic and concerns itself with the set of rules governing the
well-formed sentences of a language, that is, sentences that are gram-
matically well-formed (irrespective of their meaning). In contrast to
this, semantics is about the meaning or the content of a sentence
(as opposed to its syntactic form). In the sentence ‘The policemen
stopped drinking at midnight’ we learn that the syntax/Kristevan
symbolic can only take us so far in understanding the meaning of
the sentence. This sentence can be interpreted in two different ways
in spite of the syntax being exactly the same in both sentences. One
interpretation is that the policemen stopped their own drinking at
midnight; the other is that at midnight the policemen stopped people
from drinking. The semantics of a sentence therefore cannot wholly
be determined by its syntax. Syntax only provides so much infor-
mation about the meaning of a sentence. It is indispensable to the
meaning of a sentence but insufficient in imparting its full meaning.
Similarly, in Kristeva’s theory of signification the symbolic meaning
can only take us so far and needs to be supplemented by the semiotic
in order for it to be meaningful.
The symbolic can be described as a mode of communication that
concentrates on meaning, judgement and position. The need for
the symbolic is self-evident: we need linguistic language in order to
communicate with other people and to make meaning. The func-
tion of the semiotic is more complicated because in many ways
it can be seen to impede the development of coherent communi-
cation. The semiotic comprises the non-linguistic (non-signifying)
parts and ‘is characterized by motility, by the movement of energies
and drives’ (Chanter, 1990, p. 66), including the ‘rhythm, intona-
tion, and echolalias of the mother-child symbiosis’ (Oliver, 1993,
p. 34). In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva describes the semiotic
as ‘[i]ndifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space
underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its
intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment,
but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax’ (Kristeva, 1984, p. 29).
It is also viewed as negative in a Hegelian sense and is activated
or unveiled – depending on how it is viewed – in communication
that takes us to the brink of meaning, thus shattering the limits
of linguistic communication. During moments of extreme pain we

resort to semiotic babbles to express how we are feeling, and very
often the more severe the pain, the more incoherent the babble.
And, as with an infant’s pre-symbolic babbles, these sounds may not
have a specific symbolic meaning but they do, by implication, convey
something. In the case of an adult’s use of the semiotic, we see the
limitations of words; precisely that in certain experiences and emo-
tional states, words and symbolic communication are inadequate.
The range of semiotic expression naturally lends itself to art, which
is often geared towards capturing non-prosaic states of being.
The interplay of the semiotic and symbolic is discussed at the level
of speech and also writing. In the work of literature ‘the dialectic
between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalan-
guage, theory, poetry, etc.) . . .’ (Kristeva, 1984, p. 24). When applied
to literature the semiotic and the symbolic approximate to the
Kristevan modes of classification of the ‘genotext’ and ‘phenotext’
respectively:
The genotext refers to the materiality of language, which may

correspond to the style of a work, such as rhythm, ‘certain com-
binations of letters, certain sounds – regardless of the meaning of
words in which they occur’. In contrast the phenotext refers to
the mode of communication, the ‘societal, cultural, syntactical,
and other grammatical constraints’.
(Roudiez, 1984, pp. 5–6)
Roudiez illustrates the difference with the use of examples. He

explains that ‘[a] mathematical demonstration is perhaps a pure phe-
notext; [and that, on the other hand] there are writings by Antonin
Artaud that come close to being unblended genotext, those, in Susan
Sontag’s words, “in which language becomes partly unintelligible;
that is, an unmediated physical presence” ’(Roudiez, 1984, p. 5).
From the 1970s onwards, and in texts such as Revolution in Poetic
Language and Powers of Horror, Kristeva sought to convey the impor-
tance of the semiotic in psychoanalysis, linguistics and art (Lechte,
1990a, p. 130). Indeed, both literary and art criticism in recent
decades have been geared towards uncovering the semiotic and aes-
thetic dimensions (what is often referred to as the materiality) rather
than narrowly focusing on the work as a vehicle (Lechte, 1990a,
p. 130). Kristeva’s involvement with Tel Quel, which was an avant-

garde literary magazine founded in the 1960s by Philippe Sollers and
Jean-Edern Hallier, was also influential in the development of her
theoretical views. One of the main objectives of the group was to pro-
mulgate different kinds of writing that emphasized ‘writing (écriture)
as production, not representation’ which included new concepts about
writing as ‘intertextuality’, ‘genotext’ and ‘phenotext’, for instance
(Moi, 1986, p. 4).
Literature from modernism onwards involved the disruption of lin-
guistic and syntactical meaning by the force of the semiotic, which
meant readers start to lose their bearings as they were taken to the
point at which meaning and language breaks down. In classical lit-
erature the symbolic elements of language predominate, but in the
‘abject’ literature of the avant-garde the semiotic is accentuated in
order to convey the horror. The form this takes depends on the
writer’s idiosyncrasies. It may involve the subversion of conventional
rules of grammar or syntax, or even the break-up of words and, by
implication, meaning altogether. When the semiotic overrides the
symbolic, the reader experiences an explosion of limits which is dis-
cussed shortly with reference to Roland Barthes’ interpretation of the
disruptive inflection of pleasure that brings about jouissance. In bring-
ing about the disintegration of meaning, we witness the collapse
of meaning and sometimes sense that is facilitated by the style of
writing.
Writing that involves the semiotic disruption of the symbolic is a
crucial aspect of avant-garde literature and is described by Kristeva
as ‘poetic language’. She explores this conceit at length in Revo-
lution in Poetic Language and then applies it to specific writers in
Powers of Horror. The first point that needs to be stressed about
poetic language is that it is not equivalent to poetry; it is more
than poetry (Roudiez, 1984, p. 2). It ‘stands in opposition to spo-
ken language, a language whose basic purpose is communication’
and seeks to ‘[liberate] the subject from a number of linguistic, psy-
chic, and social networks’ and to explore the materiality of language
in relation to the semiotic (Roudiez, 1984, p. 2). Poetic language
involves the recovery and revival of language which has long since
been hardened and become staid by its adherence to the Symbolic
order of law and order. It is unsurprising then that poetic language
is both expressed and experienced in art. ‘ “Revolution in poetic
language” refers to the capacity of poetic language to bring strictly
symbolic functioning into an encounter with its process of produc-

tion, signifiance, for signifiance involves a functioning other than
strictly symbolic functioning: semiotic functioning’ (Beardsworth,
2004, p. 41). Kristeva examines poetic language in the context of
the work of the nineteenth century poets Mallarmé and Lautréamont
who are archetypally avant-garde and who attempt to disrupt the
symbolic by freeing verse from the fixed laws of metre and prosody.
This creates a sense of musicality, which is supplemented by graphical
signs in the case of Mallarmé.
Bataille uses the example of poetry as a type of literature that uti-
lizes the semiotic and is the ideal mode of expression for engaging
with sovereignty. It fits into his scheme of the general economy
which celebrates unproductivity and loss – what Lechte describes
as ‘a logic of destruction’ (Lechte, 1990a, p. 73). In ‘The Notion of
Expenditure’ Bataille claims how ‘[t]he term poetry, applied to the
least degraded and least intellectualized forms of the expression of
a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it
in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss’
(Bataille, 1985, p. 120; see Lechte, 1990a, p. 74) and where conven-
tional rules of the Symbolic order are flouted. Andrew Hussey argues
that ‘poetry is a sacrifice that is a sovereign renunciation of recog-
nition which erases meaning and abolishes individuality’ (Hussey,
2006, p. 89). Kristeva concurs with this view and argues in Revolu-
tion in Poetic Language how poetic language disrupts the symbolic
elements of signification. In its materiality, poetry accentuates the
sounds, rhythms and tones over the strictures of syntax and gram-
mar. Poetry, as motivated by the poetic, should not be constrained
by the necessities of the symbolic and draws attention to its own
materiality.
The effects of abject literature: Destabilizing the reader
Before I discuss the works of literature that I have selected, it is impor-

tant to think more generally about the activity of reading and the
impact of literature that instils a sense of the abject in readers. If we
think back to an earlier definition of abjection – that which does not
respect the boundary or, to use Kristeva’s words, that which consti-
tutes ‘an exorbitant outside or inside’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1) where
the boundary between different states is problematized – this can
be applied to the position of the reader who occupies a precarious

place in abject literature. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973) Roland
Barthes distinguishes between two different types of pleasure that we
experience during the process of reading: plaisir which comforts and
secures, and the other, jouissance, which is subversive. His contrast is
set up as follows:
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria;

the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is
linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text
that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to
the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical,
cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes,
values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
(Barthes, 1990, p. 14).4
The first sense of pleasure engenders continuity with prevailing tra-

ditions and reinforces the sense of self through understanding, as
any activity that involves pleasure does. The second type of pleasure
involves a different intensity of pleasure often referred to as jouissance
or bliss, which ruptures understanding, and takes us beyond the con-
fines of the self. This mode of reading is dislocating because of what
it does to the boundaries of the self; the reader cannot hold on to cer-
tainty and all former points of reference are brought into question.
Consequently, the reader is taken to the limits of sense and mean-
ing; ‘pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot’ (Barthes, 1990,
p. 21) and this struggle is played out in the process of reading, leav-
ing the reader in a state of despair at the intractability of the text that
lies before them. As discussed in Chapter 2 and from thereon, abjec-
tion destabilizes the boundary between self and the other, thereby
threatening identity. Writing that involves this second sense of plea-
sure, which characterizes the work of avant-garde literature, is ‘aimed
at reworking and enriching the technique of the nouveau roman, to
make it incorporate a painful, dramatic, or ecstatic internal experi-
ence, which its somewhat protestant austerity had rejected’ (Kristeva
in, Oliver, 2002, p. 10). Writers wanted to stir, to provoke their
readers – and themselves in many cases – to a spirit of revolution.
Instead of sublimating the abject, as many classical writers had done,
they sought to show the horror of the real and this made serious
demands on the reader that wound and afflict. It also often involved
the ‘psychic instability’ of the writer/narrator who, in the encounter
with the other, experienced attraction, repulsion and was ‘literally
beside oneself’ (Moi, 1986, p. 318). The torment inflicted upon the
reader is articulated by Henry Miller in his controversial novel Tropic
of Cancer (1994 [1934]): ‘[W]e encounter pages that explode, pages
that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses . . .’ but
the payoff is worth it because we are witnessing authenticity and the
truth of humanity. As Miller says:
know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose
only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger
than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all
the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the
miracles of personality . . . .
(Miller, 1994, pp. 248–249)
In Naked Lunch (1959) William Burroughs warns the readers of the

violence of the text:
Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron
claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunist land crab,
it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will
coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of
rancid ectoplasm.
(Burroughs, pp. 180–181)
The antithetical type of pleasure that arises from reading certain liter-
ature problematizes its role and function, or at least draws attention
to an aspect that we are not wholly comfortable with. It raises the
question, as it does in relation to artworks and film, as to why people
would choose to engage with literature that causes a crisis of stability.
This was a question raised by Noël Carroll in his philosophical anal-
ysis of horror in film which was discussed in Chapter 6. My concern,
which Carroll echoes, is why we should engage with an artwork (or
film) that is potentially harmful since this goes against our instincts
of self-preservation and care. This can be answered partly by evalu-
ating the function of literature in the first place, as Andrew Bennett
and Nicholas Royle have done. In one of their self-styled edicts, they
follow in the footsteps of Bataille and claim that literature is evil
and ‘like the infringement of moral laws, is dangerous’ (Bennett and

Royle, 1995, p. 125; see Bataille, 2012 [1957], p. 17).5 Moving away
from critics like Matthew Arnold (in the nineteenth century), and
F. R. Leavis (in the twentieth century) who expounded the virtues
of literature, Bennett and Royle emphasize the importance of an
‘aesthetic of evil’ where there is a correspondence between the lit-
erary imagination and evil (Bataille, 2012 [1957]): ‘[L]iterature tends
towards the demonic: it is about entrancement, possession, being
invaded or taken over’ (Bennett and Royle, 1995, pp. 125–127). This
is certainly the case in Bataille’s novels where the characters, and in
some cases the narrator, are possessed by drives or impulses that over-
power their rationality and sweep them into cycles of destruction and
anarchy. Kristeva addresses the negative powers of literature and sug-
gests that literature ‘represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of
our most intimate and most serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal
power, “the great darkness” (Angela of Foligno). Hence its continual
compromising: “Literature and Evil (Georges Bataille) . . .” ’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 208). In Kristeva’s account, literature acts as ‘an unveiling of
the abject: an elaboration, a discharge . . .’ (p. 208). Literature is where
we can see abjection at work and experience the effects that abjection
gives rise to.
For Bataille, writing is evil (and sinful, although not meant in a
Christian sense) because it brings about guilt as a result of violat-
ing the condition of existence – silence – thereby confronting our
state of separation and anguish (Richardson, 1998, p. 3). As dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, Bataille argues that we are discontinuous
and strive for community which necessitates rupture and violence.
Bataille explores this idea in On Nietzsche (1945), where he discusses
how Christianity was founded upon an act that involved killing to
reestablish community. The sublimity of the crucified Christ, in its
demonstration of the ‘exuberance of forces’, is ‘evil’ insofar as it is
an act that involves immeasurable violence and does not protect the
integrity of the individual by violating its boundaries (Botting and
Wilson 1997: 7). But this act of evil is integral to the maintenance of
Christian community. Integral to communication is laceration and
wounding, and the death of Christ on the Cross is the apotheosis
of this.
Literature presents another possibility for ‘communication’ meant
in a Bataillean sense: it is sacred because it involves momentary
fusion, even if that entails nothing more than a confrontation with
the void. It is therefore evil but in the sense and context described
earlier. Bataille is not using the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in their con-
ventional sense but in a post-moral sense where the latter is about
shattering the limits of homogeneity to give rise to an experience of
heterogeneity. His revision of these terms of morality is unmistak-
ably Nietzschean. The death of God means that we cannot aspire to
salvation or redemption, but what we do strive for is ‘sovereignty’,
‘in which we accept the contingency of the moment uncondition-
ally. Or, more accurately, we cannot strive towards it, since to do [so]
would be to negate its possibility. It is only by surrendering to its exi-
gencies, by recognising them, that its possibilities become manifest’
(Richardson, 1998, p. 3). Bataille declares that ‘[w]riting’s always only
a game played with ungraspable reality’ (Bataille, 1988 [1961], p. 47).
Céline’s journey of despair
After her extensive study of different aspects of abjection, including

its phenomenology and its significance in anthropology and religion,
Kristeva employs one of the most controversial twentieth century
writers to unveil the last part of her journey of abjection. ‘Nearly
twenty years after his death, close to half a century after the publi-
cation of Journey to the End of the Night, how, where, and why does
this Célinian universe challenge us so vigorously?’ (Kristeva, 1982,
pp. 133–134). Although Kristeva acknowledges that she could have
used the work of other writers as a case study for abjection (Kristeva,
1982, p. 207), she chose Céline as her exemplar whom she states
‘will become, body and tongue, the apogee of that moral, political,
and stylistic revulsion that brands our time’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 23).
Céline’s interpretation of abjection is total and permeates all facets of
his work from his depictions of historical events to those of sexuality.
The first point that needs to be raised about Céline, before even
looking at his writing, is his politics. He was a fascist and an anti-
Semite and this objectionable content is conveyed both in his novels
and pamphlets. He was also misogynistic and homophobic, which
further problematizes Kristeva’s decision to focus on his work. In her
selection of him as a writer of abjection par excellence, she does
not directly apologize for her use of him, and in Powers of Horror
she downplays his political sympathies by describing his adherence
to Nazism as ‘ambivalent and paltry’ or as being tantamount to ‘a
security blanket’ (Kristeva, 1982, pp. 136–137). She applies her psy-
choanalytical lens to examine his right-wing motivations and sees
him as ‘an analysand struggling against a desired and frustrating, cas-
trating, and sodomizing father . . .’ (Kristeva, in Oliver, 2002, p. 112).
Another observation about Kristeva’s treatment of Céline is that she
does not contextualize his attitudes by examining his political views
in any detail, preferring instead to focus on the literary aspects of his
writing. She almost seems to let the reprehensible content of his writ-
ing pass and concerns herself only with how he articulates the horror
of his vision. Martin Jay offers a defence of Céline, citing his tal-
ent as being of paramount importance: Céline’s writing is ‘endurable
because of the daring and brilliance of his style, “where any ideol-
ogy, thesis, interpretation, mania, collectivity, threat, or hope become
drowned” ’(Jay, 1994, pp. 238–239). Or perhaps we can take the line
that writing is not as severe a crime as the enacting of real violence, or
the even more extreme viewpoint that one’s art and politics are sepa-
rate matters, and that the ethical import of someone’s politics should
not colour judgement of their art. Neither one of these counter-
objections is wholly satisfactory, though, and Kristeva’s justification
remains incomplete.
Céline’s writing is broadly about the abject nature of humanity.
In his pamphlets and other anti-Semitic works, he writes about his
hatred of the Jews whom he describes in terms of the abject, and
where the abject is turned ‘into an object of hatred’ (Beardsworth,
2004, p. 117). In L’école des cadavres (1938)6 he describes them in
abominable and abject terms as ‘monsters’, ‘half-breeds’ and ‘hybrids’
(Céline, 1938, p. 108). But his racism is not confined to the Jews,
and in Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) he describes Jews as being
the product of ‘interbreeding’ between ‘negros’ and Asians (Céline,
1937, pp. 191–192). In his deluded vision, Jews are not only racially,
ethnically and socially inferior but they also represent a threat to
the Aryan heterosexual masculinist order; they are on the margins of
society. ‘His anti-Semitism also has a more subtle foundation, more
intrinsically linked to the psychic instability of the writer and the
speaking subject in general: it is the fascination with the wander-
ing and elusive other, who attracts, repels, puts one literally beside
oneself’ (Kristeva, in Moi, 1986, p. 318). Jews represent a threat to his
subjectivity and sexuality and he deals with this by demonizing them
as the abject.
As well as his anti-Semitism, which is unrelenting in much of

his work, Céline also extends his misanthropy to other races and
classes of society. His novels depict a number of different types of
female figures or characters who are unconventional and grotesque.7
Céline’s writing embodies an enraged and bleak sense of humanity,
which is not dampened by his vitriolic and nihilistic studies of peo-
ple. Kristeva describes him as ‘a true writer who believes in his wiles.
He believes that death and horror are what being is’ (Kristeva, 1982,
p. 134). His biography has often been cited to explain his life philoso-
phy, although this should not be used to excuse his outlook. In 1913
he joined a cavalry regiment and two years later fought in the First
World War before being badly wounded in action. He was awarded
a military medal and was subsequently discharged. Following this he
went to work for a French trading company in Africa. Céline was
also a medical doctor by training and worked as a physician while
pursuing his writing.8 He wrote his doctoral dissertation (in 1924)
about Ignaz Semmelweis, a pioneering doctor in the nineteenth cen-
tury whose introduction of antiseptic procedures into obstetric clinics
significantly reduced mortality rates of puerperal fever in mothers.
Semmelweis noted that female genitalia were being contaminated
during examination by doctors who had not adequately washed their
hands after touching corpses. Céline’s interest in this subject area, in
the triadic relationship between sexuality, femininity and death (Jay,
1994, p. 250, n. 25) indicates his burgeoning interest in the abjection
of the flesh.
His most celebrated novel Voyage au bout de la nuit, translated as
Journey to the End of the Night (2012 [1932]), was inspired by his own
experiences during the war and when he worked in Africa. He wrote
it while working as a dispensing physician in Paris. The novel adopts
the form of the picaresque and charts the journey of the protagonist
Ferdinand Bardamu in his various adventures in different geographi-
cal locations and time periods, from the massacres of the First World
War to the colonies in West Africa then to New World America and
finally to familiar territory in the suburbs of Paris during the 1920s
where he worked as a doctor. In all these episodes we are subjected to
similar emotions of despair and frustration, and similar sentiments
about the human spirit – about the greed of humanity, the unneces-
sary suffering placed upon humans by others, the absurdity of life,
and by hopelessness at every turn. All people, no matter what their
background or social status, are reduced to the same hopeless state.
People desire to escape their wretched condition but are unable to

do so. This is acute in the first part of the novel which opens with
the violence of war. As we move to another locale, people entrapped
by different regimes fight against each other. Perhaps more than any
of his other works Journey to the End of the Night captures the bit-
ing and savage sensibility of Céline’s worldview. He says, ‘Of all my
books it’s the only really vicious one . . . That’s right . . . The heart of
my sensibility . . .’ (Derval, 2012, p. v).
The historical and geographical shifts that occur in the novel con-
vey Céline’s thorough frustration with humanity. In other works,
particularly in his pamphlets, he singles out the Jews for recrimina-
tion, but his overall judgement of damnation applies to the whole
of human civilization. In Chapter 2 I discussed the prevailing ten-
dencies in a range of cultures and societies to make a distinction
between the grandiosity of the human spirit and the baseness of the
human body. Becker’s metaphor of the symbolic self is one way of
addressing the problem and enables us to distance ourselves from
our mortality. Rather like Bataille who reminded humanity of its
baseness by bringing death and baseness back into the human form,
Céline interprets the fruits of humanity – war, colonization, industri-
alization and capitalization – disdainfully by denigrating humanity’s
attempts to transcend itself. By referencing global achievements that
are very much a part of readers’ lives, he is entrapping us by reflecting
on something that is ours. We remain low and abject, and violence
underpins our bestial natures. His sentiments are articulated in the
following excerpt that conveys abject humanity. In extreme states
the human is governed by its animal instincts which override any
higher goals. The overarching objective to fight for nation and coun-
try in the First World War is forgotten about in squabbling over joints
of meat:
The meat for the whole regiment was being distributed in a sum-
mery field, shaded by cherry trees and parched by the August sun.
On sacks and tent cloths spread out on the grass there were pounds
and pounds of guts, chunks of white and yellow fat, disembow-
elled sheep with their organs every which way, oozing intricate
little rivulets into the grass round about, a whole ox, split down
the middle, hanging on a tree, and four regimental butchers all
hacking away at it, cursing and swearing and pulling off choice
morsels. The squadrons were fighting tooth and nail over the
innards, especially the kidneys, and all around them swarms of

flies such as one sees only on such occasions, as self-important
and musical as little birds.
Blood and more blood, everywhere, all over the grass, in sluggish
confluent puddles, looking for a congenial slope. A few steps fur-
ther on, the last pig was being killed. Already four men and a
butcher were fighting over some of the prospective cuts.
‘You crook, you! You’re the one that made off with the tenderloin
yesterday! . . .’
Leaning against a tree, I had barely time enough to honour that

alimentary dispute with two or three glances, before being over-
come by an enormous urge to vomit, which I did so hard that
I passed out.
(Céline, 2012, p. 18)
In their desperate hunger, the squadrons are divided against each

other and fight over the viscera like a pack of dogs. As well as cap-
turing the essence of humanity as he saw it, Céline also displays his
commitment to the finer points of detailed description that mark
him out as a great stylist. One of his greatest gifts was his obser-
vational skill with which he vividly records, in graphic detail, the
utter grotesqueness of humanity. One of his most celebrated exam-
ples of this, which Kristeva picks up on, is the passage about vomiting
that occurs in Death on the Installment Plan9 (1971 [1936]). A mother
and son, together with other passengers, suffer on the rough sea
and what is expounded in minute detail is their desire to throw
up and the passage their food makes from their stomachs out into
the open as vomit. Céline does not spare us and gives us a running
commentary:
. . . The gale blew my mother’s veil away . . . it landed wringing

wet on the mouth of a lady at the other end . . . who was retch-
ing desperately . . . All resistance had been abandoned. The hori-
zon was littered with jam . . . salad . . . chicken . . . coffee . . . the whole
slobgullion . . . it all came up . . .
My mother was down on her knees on the dock . . . she smiled with
a sublime effort, she was drooling at the mouth . . . .
‘You see,’ she says to me in the middle of the terrible

plummeting . . . ‘You see, Ferdinand, you still have some of that
tuna fish on [sic] your stomach too . . .’ We try again in unison.
Bouah! and another bouah! . . . She was mistaken, it was the
pancakes . . . With a little more effort I think I could bring up
French fries . . .
. . . Mama collapses against the rail . . . She vomits herself up again,

all she’s got . . . A carrot comes up . . . a piece of fat and the whole
tail of a mullet . . . .
(Céline, 1971, pp. 123–124)
Céline’s writing style represented a departure from the formalities of

French prose. According to Kristeva, Céline’s writing involves two
main techniques: segmentation of the sentence, which is typical of the
earlier novels, and the syntactical ellipses, which are more characteris-
tic of the later novels (Moi, 1986, p. 315). Both involve the disruption
of syntax and place an emphasis on the fragment. This is particularly
acute in Journey to the End of the Night which contains many dis-
jointed sentences that are adjoined or held together by suspension
points. The exclamatory power of the ‘ . . .!’ captivates attention and
keeps the ‘horror fresh’ (Limon, 2000, p. 75). Céline wanted to con-
vey patterns of spoken French in order to create a sense of vividness
and urgency and the frequent insertions of three suspension points,10
staccato, and slang enabled him to impart a sense of realism.11 The
three suspension points, used in Journey to the End of the Night and
other texts, such as Rigadoon (1969), enabled Céline to break free of
the constraints of syntax and to use the power of words and ruptures
to create meaning. It creates a tonality, musicality and rhythm indica-
tive of jazz and that coheres with the articulation of the semiotic.
It also conveys the urgency and breathlessness of his thoughts with-
out interruption. Kristeva interprets the three dots followed by the
exclamation mark as indicative of an impulse to propel the reader
not towards meaning or closure but to the lacunas and caesuras that
are frequently overlooked in reading (Oliver, 2002, pp. 109–110). The
use of suspension points:
divides the sentence into its constitutive phrases; they thus

tend to become independent of the central verb, to detach
themselves from the sentence’s own signification, and to acquire

a meaning initially incomplete and consequently capable of tak-
ing on multiple connotations that no longer depend on the
framework of the sentence, but on a free context (the entire book,
but also, all the addenda of which the reader is capable)
(Kristeva, in Oliver, 2002, p. 109)
Another reading that has not been articulated before but which is
highly plausible is that these grammatical points aid the smashing
of the syntax – Céline’s characters’ thoughts and observations are
so intense and wounding that they cannot be assimilated into the
boundaries of a contained sentence and instead break through the
surface of the sentence causing rupture.
His self-consciously anti-literary style was deliberate and was
intended to add weight to his cynicism and his sense of the absurd.
He also wanted to strip away the façade of literariness to look at the
violence that lay beneath. He wanted ‘to touch the intimate nerve’
of humanity (Kristeva, 1982, p. 137). In this chapter’s analysis of
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, we will see a similar operation occurring –
language is not florid but instead is about an unmasking of the horror
of reality. It is threadbare. Kristeva comments:
When reading Céline we are seized at that fragile spot of our sub-
jectivity where our collapsed defenses reveal, beneath the appear-
ances of a fortified castle, a flayed skin; neither inside nor outside,
the wounding exterior turning into an abominable interior, war
bordering on putrescence, while social and family rigidity, that
beautiful mask, crumbles within the beloved abomination of
innocent vice.
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 135)
Horror in Bataille
The importance of Bataille’s work to a study of abjection has been a

constant feature of this book. So far I have considered his theoret-
ical writings, focusing mainly on the themes of the sacred and the
formless which, as we have seen, contributed to a more developed
and deeper understanding of Kristeva’s interpretation of abjection
but also abjection in general. I want now to turn the spotlight onto
his novels, which, on the whole, are not as widely written about as his
other work but which are still important because they often involve
the application of, or experimentation with, ideas found in his the-
oretical writings, such as that of base materiality. Bataille’s novels
present a different face of the sacred – its more dark and destruc-
tive side – one that is opposed to its socially beneficent side which
is oriented towards community.12 Richardson argues that Bataille’s
novels ‘respond to a need to open the wound even more, to look
horror full in the face and recognize one’s identity within the realm
of transgression’ (Richardson, 1994, p. 64).
Bataille’s novels place great demands on readers. ‘He writes in a
tone of provocative intimacy: he demands the reader’s direct atten-
tion and at the same time issues a challenge’ (Richardson, 1998, p. 4).
The French original of Madame Edwarda had an epigraph which seems
applicable to all his novels:13
If you are afraid of everything, read this book, but first listen to me:
if you laugh, it is because you are afraid. A book, you believe, is an
inert thing. And yet what if, as is the case, you cannot read? Should
you be apprehensive . . . ? Are you alone? Are you cold? Do you
know the point to which the man is ‘yourself’? An imbecile? And
naked?
(Epigraph to Madame Edwarda, OC, Vol. III, p. 15,
in Richardson, 1998, p. 4)
Laughter is a strategy of deflection and diversion from the horror of

the text which he is imploring we should not be guilty of. To take
him seriously then is to open up the reality of being deeply affected
on an emotional level. For the purposes of this chapter I focus on his
first novel Story of the Eye by Lord Auch14 that tells the story of the
narrator, who is a young prurient boy in a permanently aroused state,
and his misadventures with his companion Simone.
On the surface of it the novel is about sexual discovery and abase-
ment. The narrator and Simone are highly sexualized and seek to
discover themselves and each other by sharing and exercising their
sexual desires. Their relationship with the outside world is also
framed in terms of desire and the novel is structured in episodic form
where the two of them are seen in different locations that often by
necessity take them beyond their homes. One of the most disturb-
ing and controversial features of the novel is the typology of their
desire which often involves bizarre sexual acts involving saucers of
milk, eggs and the balls of a bull and, furthermore, acts of moral
transgression, such as masturbating during religious confession and
fucking a priest. This is coupled with the unnerving insatiability of
their appetites where orgasm provides only temporary relief. Apart
from their sexual exploits, we learn little about the two protagonists,
which means that for the majority of the time we see them as one-
dimensional characters rather than fully fledged human beings. But
there are moments that confirm their humanity and make it more
difficult for the reader to maintain critical distance, because at times
they evoke our sympathy. Following the scandal of an orgy, which
was initiated by the narrator and Simone, the narrator runs away
from home in order to escape the clutches of his ‘awful father’,
whom he describes as ‘the epitome of a senile Catholic general’
(Bataille, 1982, p 19). We suspect that the narrator’s background may
have contributed to his waywardness and isolation. On escaping, he
walks along the seashore for most of the night and becomes over-
whelmed by bleakness and the urge to kill himself. ‘[I]n my weariness’
he says, ‘I realized that my life had to have some meaning all the
same . . .’ (p. 20).
The plot revolves around Marcelle, a friend of the narrator and
Simone, who fascinates and arouses them in equal measure. She is
described as ‘the purest and most affecting’ of their friends (Bataille,
1982, p. 12) and is in turn aroused by the debauchery of the exploits
of the folie à deux but is unable to openly express her desire and
instead is subjected to gross acts where they take advantage of her
vulnerability while being turned on by her ‘ravishing’ beauty (p. 12).
At the orgy, Marcelle, unable to attain the level of self-abandon
experienced by the others, resorts to masturbating in a wardrobe.
Marcelle’s ‘purity’ and arguably regulated response to sexuality is
pitted against the animalism of her exploiters. Simone is particu-
larly abject; the narrator less so, or at least is more able to reflect
on their depravity. It is worth making the point here that it is the
male author, and through him the male narrator, who says this about
Simone. From a feminist perspective she could be seen as not hav-
ing been given a voice. Her abjection then is not a simple matter
of transgression but is the stuff of male fantasy. This reveals a bias

against the female, reminiscent of the traditional demonization of
female sexuality. Speaking about Simone, the narrator states that
‘on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the
faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of
all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden
terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and hon-
esty’ (Bataille, 1982, p. 11). Her derangement is manifested in her
maniacal desire to break eggs with her backside, to insert a bull’s
testicle into her vagina and, in an act of ‘supreme blasphemy’ as
described by Keith Reader, she ‘strangles the priest as she straddles
him in intercourse’ (Reader, 2006, p. 62). And as if the horror of these
acts could not be any worse, the eye of the dead priest is enucleated
and inserted into her anus and then vagina. In her shameless state
she is stimulated by disgust rather than recoiling from it. The sight of
her respectable mother witnessing her sexual antics spurs her on to
push the boundaries of obscenity as she seeks to desecrate all sense
of propriety. The extent of abjection increases throughout the course
of the novel, which is attributed in part to the disruption the two are
able to inflict on other people. At first their perversity is confined to
themselves, but as time progresses they implicate others, and, more
often than not, these are unsuspecting victims.
Although some critics such as Andrea Dworkin (1981) remain stuck
on the abhorrent and pornographic imagery while missing the sub-
tleties of Bataille’s contentions, more balanced critiques contextualize
Story of the Eye and indeed his other novels, seeing them as part
of a larger dialogue about eroticism and the proximity of sex and
death. The inclusion of Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imag-
ination’ in the 1982 version of the novel further substantiates the
view that we are witnessing more than just empty self-gratifying acts,
but actually, the existential fear of death. At times the narrator is
immersed in the more serious message of the novel. Jeremy Biles
claims that ‘[t]he coincidence of horror and ecstasy, characteristic
of Bataille’s morbid eroticism, is perhaps nowhere so poignant and
terrifying as in this novel’ (Biles, 2007, p. 159). His opening line is
suggestive of an attitude that belies the casual and reckless attitude
he has to sexuality throughout: ‘I grew up very much alone, and as
far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual’ (Bataille, 1982,
p. 9). It is significant that the couple waits for a long time before
copulating and do so in the most frightful of circumstances, in front

of the corpse of Marcelle, after which, Simone desecrates her dead
friend’s body by pissing on it. For Bataille, copulation symbolized
procreative sex, and was determinate of the restrictive economy. The
erotic activity that fuels the desire in the novel is of a distinctively
different order because it is about the exuberance of loss without
limits and the ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’ (Bataille,
1987, p. 11). The narrator shows awareness of the semblance between
jouissance and death when he states how ‘death was the sole outcome
of my erection’ (Bataille, 1982, p. 30).
Story of the Eye is the apotheosis of abjection and involves the aban-
donment of meaning and sense. Prior to writing the novel, Bataille
had been recommended to undergo analysis due to the ‘virulent
obsessions of his writing’ as well as his pathological tendencies. His
inclusion of the autobiographical reverie ‘Coincidences’ explains the
source of some of the traumatic imagery. Of particular import was
the image of his blind invalid father at his toileting, which haunted
Bataille (Bataille, 1982, p. 72; see also Surya, 2002, p. 6). One of the
only ways of engaging with the novel is to regard the characters
as dehumanized abject beings or as vehicles of thanatos. To regard
them in any other way is to descend into the madness that engulfed
Marcelle, who operates as a stand-in for the reader. She is driven
to madness and confined in a sanatorium. Fuelled by the traumatic
memory of being locked in the wardrobe, she hangs herself, thus ful-
filling Simone and the narrator’s sick premonition. This is a lesson to
the reader who has to distance herself critically from the pathological
behaviour or else risk a similar tragic fate. The novel is an overhaul
of the Symbolic order that is represented by parental authority, the
law, morality and religion, and each episode involves transgressing
at least one of these structures. In this dystopian universe, abjection
and nihilism reign in the collapse of patriarchal order. As the narrator
claims, ‘[w]e did not lack modesty – on the contrary – but something
urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible’
(Bataille, 1982, p. 11). He and Simone are separated from others by
their unique vision which is antithetical to convention. The narrator
lucidly explains their differences:
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have

gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never
frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a

starry heaven. In general, people savour the ‘pleasures of the flesh’
only on condition that they be insipid.
But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what
is known as ‘pleasures of the flesh’ because they really are insipid;
I cared only for what is classified as ‘dirty’. On the other hand,
I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the
only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or
other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it.
My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts,
but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the
vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.
(Bataille, 1982, p. 42)
What the narrator is intimating is that to him (and, as it hap-

pens, Simone), what constituted the normal range of pleasure was
insufficient and what he aspired to instead was that which contami-
nated their whole outlook. The all-encompassing mania of his vision
extends to nature. He talks about the ‘astral sperm’ and ‘heavenly
urine’ that cloud his vision when he looks up to the sky (Bataille,
1982, p. 42).
In addition to the ‘somatic transgression’, which entails ‘a cross-
ing of the limits of the subject’ that occurs throughout the novel, we
also have the technical transgression of linguistic rules – ‘semantic
transgression’ – which is ‘a crossing of the lines of sense’ (Foster, 2004,
p. 238). This brings about a universe that disintegrates.15 Bataille sub-
verts certain figures of speech, like the metaphor. He employs a stock
number of globular tropes like the eye, egg, sun, testicles and the
momentum of the novel is sustained by the wet and protean flow of
objects, like a semiotic chora that sweeps away syntactical sense. The
novel is propelled by the unyielding libidinal energy of the characters
and their fetishized objects and this continues in an endless cycle of
motion ad infinitum. Biles claims that ‘perhaps nowhere is the organ
of vision subjected to so many transformations, and made victim of
such abundant violence’ (Biles, 2007, p. 158). Richman argues that as
such there is no closure of the narrative; the story only ends when
the narrative is ‘suspended, once the inner compulsion directing it
has been exhausted’ (Richman, 1982, p. 97).
In his essay ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, which is included in the

1982 edition of the novel, Roland Barthes states that there are two
metaphoric chains in the novel – the first is the chain of objects,
such as the eye, egg, sun and testicles. The second chain is made up
of the avatars of liquid (Barthes, 1982, p. 121), that is the liquids asso-
ciated with the object, for example tears, milk in the cat’s saucer, the
yolk of a soft-boiled egg, sperm or urine. Bataille swops over the two
chains, but the object is not paired up with its accompanying fluid,
so that we have a surrealist image where ‘the more remote . . . the rela-
tions between the two realities, the more powerful will be the image’
(Barthes, 1982, p. 124).16 But, unlike a true Surrealist image, the vari-
ables are determined and are taken from a finite series of objects and
fluids. An example of this mismatched crossover of the two chains
is expressed when the narrator is recalling Simone’s actions during
her period of ill health. He states how she was ‘virtually drinking’ his
left eye between her lips. ‘Then, without leaving the eye, which was
sucked as obstinately as a breast, she sat down, wrenching my head
towards her on the seat, and she pissed noisily on the bobbing eggs
with total vigour and satisfaction’ (Bataille, 1982, p. 34).
Barthes defines this crossover as metonymic, and it occurs in the
exchange of one chain (of metaphors) for the other at different lev-
els of metaphor (Barthes, 1982, pp. 125–126). The two metaphoric
chains of the objects and the liquids cross metonymically, thus rup-
turing the stability of the metaphor and making it possible to experi-
ence the ‘eye sucked like a breast’, ‘drinking my left eye between her
lips’ for instance, (p. 125). By violating the boundaries of the signify-
ing practice, metonymy demonstrates its transgressive practice. The
mixing up of organs and orifices also adds to the level of disgust. The
eye, so prized in cultural life is now viewed in terms of its erotic (and
not intellectual or spiritual) potential as it is readily coupled with
erogenous zones.
Richman explains how we are accustomed to identifying an object
with a verb or function that it adheres to in its pragmatic usage.
So a crying eye, liquid flowing from an eye and light flowing from
the sun are acceptable images in conventional discourse. However
the images that we are subjected to in the deranged and broken
universe of the novel are destabilizing. Images of a broken egg, a
pierced eye, or a urinating sun are part of the erotic game, but they
thoroughly upset our schemes of linguistic convention and social

normality (Richman, 1982, p. 88). The consequences of Bataille’s
metonymic explorations are that the ‘world becomes blurred; prop-
erties are no longer separate; spilling, sobbing, urinating, ejaculating
form a wavy meaning’ (Barthes, 1982, p. 125). The eruption of the
semiotic force of the erotic that creates the excessive images of fluid-
ity that line the novel conveys a universe that has been submerged
by the abject. In this blind universe where the eye is dethroned as the
primary sense, meaning is created through liquid sensation and the
odour that abounds.
The algebra of need: Burroughs’ demi-monde
Burroughs, like Céline and Bataille, was opposed to mainstream

convention. Throughout his life he maintained a stance of non-
conformism. Born into a wealthy family where he received a privi-
leged education and opportunities to match, Burroughs established
himself as an intellectual outsider who mingled with artists of a sim-
ilar disposition. Together with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he
was central in founding the Beat Generation. His life took something
of a torrid and nihilistic path that involved his lifelong obsession
with drugs, or ‘junk’ as he called it, which was a ‘generic term for
opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics from demerol to
palfium’ (Burroughs, 1982 [1959], p. 9). His addiction, which started
in the early 1940s, may have been fuelled by other factors in his life
story, such as the tragic shooting of his wife in 1951, a traumatic
event which haunted him.17 He admitted the decisiveness that this
event had had on his literary career, which was born out of a need to
maintain sanity:
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have

become a writer but for Joan’s death . . . I live with the constant
threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from posses-
sion, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact
with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvered me into
a lifelong struggle, in which I have no choice except to write
myself out.
(Baker, 2010, p. 69)
His attitude indicates the influence of something beyond the ratio-

nal that Burroughs felt pulled by. Indeed, the metaphysical or
supernatural was a constant source of intrigue in his life, undoubt-
edly influenced by his drug use, and which manifested itself in
a variety of ways, including his belief in telepathy, his years of
psychoanalysis and later his interest in scientology, all of which indi-
cate a predisposition to identify with the unknown forces of the
universe. One of the consequences of his addiction was that he spent
a good deal of time in a state where rational and conscious thought
was suspended and he was immersed in a world of unpredictability
and danger.
Addiction (or ‘The Sickness’)18 was the subject of a number of
autobiographical works, including Junky (1953),19 penned under the
pseudonym of ‘William Lee’. Junky, written in the first person in a
hard-boiled realist style, documents his heroin addiction and looks
at its different aspects, including drug peddling, hallucination and
sickness. Naked Lunch (1959), which is stylistically similar and was
written under the same alias, is his second main foray into the topic.
On one level it tells the story of his drug addiction and the psycho-
logical and physical impact this had on his body and mind. This is
supplemented by the‘Testimony Concerning A Sickness’ which doc-
umented the extent of his drug addiction and which was included in
the appendix.20 But, on another level, Naked Lunch should be inter-
preted more widely as a novel about human behaviour. Oliver Harris
suggests that confining readings of Naked Lunch to drug addiction is
‘wildly simplistic and ignores the origins of much of the text, obscur-
ing the desire-driven creativity behind its sexual content’ (Harris,
2010, p. 477). The novel explores a series of unconnected vignettes,
which occur in different geographical locations, such as New York
City and Mexico, and are about a host of different subjects including
scoring drugs, sexual obsession, political plots and medical exper-
iments. Each world is plagued by depravity and violence and the
overriding subject is not the specific addiction that the protagonist
is consumed by, but the need for control, whether social, political
or sexual. This is powerfully captured in the phrase ‘Naked Lunch’,
which Burroughs defines as ‘a frozen moment when everyone sees
what is on the end of every fork’ (Burroughs, 1982, p. 9).
Addiction can take many forms, but all addictions pivot about an
axis of control and submission. Burroughs used the phrase ‘algebra
of need’ to explain human behaviour when one is pushed to the

extreme. In a situation where there is any form of absolute need –
whether a junkie’s need for drugs, an alcoholic’s need for drink, or a
starving man’s need for food – the outcome can be predicted. After
all, ‘[d]ope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they
do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite’ (p. 10). The greater the
need, the more certain and predictable the behaviour is which defines
what Burroughs means by the ‘algebra of need’. It was the aspect
of control, whether exerting it or being under it, that preoccupied
Burroughs more than the object of the specific addiction. As a drug
user, Burroughs needed drugs in order to get a fix, but this rationale
should not be transferred to his attitude to drugs in his imagination.
On an intellectual level, drugs formed part of his existential frame-
work which revolved around pain, pleasure and death. In spite of
his visceral language about fulfilling needs, Phil Baker claimed that
‘Burroughs wasn’t entirely comfortable with sexuality and life in the
body’ and his interest was ‘ultimately ascetic’ (Baker, 2010, p. 101).
There are plenty of passages in Naked Lunch and elsewhere which
describe ambivalent sensations causing pleasure swiftly followed by
pain and repulsion, of which Baker gives numerous instances:
[In Naked Lunch] Johnny anoints Mary with gasoline from a

Chimu jar and they copulate under a great magnifying glass set
in the roof before bursting into flames; the addicts of the Black
Meat eat and vomit and eat compulsively to the point of exhaus-
tion; and in a letter routine Burroughs imagines Paul Bowles
compulsively ecstatic over a huge female centipede, which he
rips apart and rubs on himself: his body jerks in uncontrollable
spasms as a current runs up his spine, ‘a penetration unspeak-
ably vile and delicious, to burst in his brain like a white hot,
searing, rocket’ [endnote omitted]. Eukodol made him imagine
an even stronger quintessence of junk called Super Plus Square
Root H: once addicted, without it ‘you die in convulsions of over-
sensitivity, flashes of pleasure intensify to acute agony in a fraction
of a second [endnote omitted]’.
(Baker, 2010, p. 101)
Stylistically, Naked Lunch cannot be described as a novel or as a typ-

ical novel: it is an anti-novel. It does not conform to the traditional
linear narrative of beginning, middle and end, but seems instead

to be a collection of fragments, which could theoretically be read
in any order as there is no sense of incremental growth.21 It was
a collaborative effort that utilized the editing skills of figures like
Ginsberg and the artist Brian Gysin. This experimental technique
would later be developed in the cut-up method that was influenced
by the modernist collage techniques of European avant-garde tra-
ditions as seen in the visual arts of Dada and Surrealism. In this
aleatory technique a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new
text. This aesthetic enabled disparate and incongruous bits of text
(and images when used in the visual arts) that would not normally
be seen on the same visual plane to be juxtaposed.22 The adoption
of this practice in literature led to the annihilation of meaning and
content in a conventional sense. But it simultaneously allowed for
new images and ideas to emerge from the novel connections that
could be forged between the fragments, thus reinvigorating language.
Burroughs and the other Beat Generation writers were influenced
by Céline’s use of three sequence points to emulate speech patterns
and to create the sense of tough unsentimentalism that was char-
acteristic of hard-boiled fiction. Burroughs wanted to expose the
grittiness of the urban underworld, which is kept from the purview
of the public. He achieved this with his graphic imagery, blunt and
obscene language and argot which offended common decency. He
wanted to convey the utter desperation of human experience in all
its rawness and authenticity, and does this in a way that involves
uncensored imagery and language which at times instils nausea in
the reader. But far from being gratuitous, as The Saturday Review (June
27th 1959) claimed, the obscenities ‘are inseparable from the total
fabric and effect of the moral message’ (Burroughs, 1982, p. 204).
Consider the following, which is typical of the approach he takes,
‘She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great
hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, fester-
ing mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which
she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound’ (Burroughs,
1982, p. 23). But we could equally say that, in his descent into
the demi-monde, Burroughs in part parodies crime fiction while
also mocking the literary tradition in his ironic admission to the
reader:
Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description.

Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed
mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville
skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit
and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch
his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would
spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner.
Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate
these scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye
of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. ‘This brain atrophy
already, and dry as a grandmother’s cunt’ (p. 44).
Naked Lunch is a journey or descent of the body in the manner of

corporeal turbulence. Abjection is at work on many levels. Burroughs
explores subjects that transgress boundaries of acceptability, such as
the taking of illegal substances and sexual perversions, and brings
them to the fore of imagination and perception. The taking of drugs,
which is described phenomenologically, mars the boundaries both
psychologically where it eradicates the boundaries between the self
and other, and physically, where the body surface is perforated by the
ingestion of drugs. These forms of rupture are relayed to the reader
who witnesses the disintegration and dissolution of the body that is
flayed and in a state of perpetual instability. Robin Lydenberg (1987,
p. 142) states how the ‘unified body remains in constant danger
of contamination – dismemberment, penetration, and hemorrhage’.
She views the breakup of the body as a desire ‘to deconstruct the
logocentric body, to liberate a new plural body without limits . . .’; it
was a way of threatening ‘the seamless unity and autonomy of the
symbolic body’ (p. 141).
One of the most vivid instantiations of the illogic of the body is
present in the ‘talking asshole’, which is the apotheosis of Bataillean
base materialism. This follows a discussion about the inefficiency of
the human body, where it is decided that it is superfluous to have
two separate orifices to eat and eliminate when just one would do
(Burroughs, 1982, pp. 109–110). This notion anticipates Deleuze’s
theory of the body without organs which did not describe a body
that is literally devoid of organs, but which considered the possibil-
ity that the body does not behave like an organism which relies on
the structured physiological functioning of organs and body parts.23

In the body without organs, organs do not conform to the systematic
organization that they occupy in a real body, and are instead polyva-
lent in a Rabelaisian way. In an organic body, organs define the organ-
ism, and the organism stands against the body because it reduces
the body to its functions. The body without organs is freed from the
constraints placed on it by the strict functioning of organic work-
ing and allows for the greater expression of sensation. In Deleuze’s
words, ‘sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism,
takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the
bounds of organic activity’ (Deleuze, 2003, p. 45). Returning to the
novel, the grotesque talking asshole is the embodiment of this multi-
functioning hole, which Dr Benway describes in absurdist terms:
‘Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?
His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out
the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard . . .’
‘After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in

without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the
gags back at him every time.’
‘Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks

and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built
an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his
pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal
rights . . . .’
(Burroughs, 1982, p. 110)
Because of its subject matter and gross realism, Naked Lunch has been
regarded as transgressing the boundaries of decency and, moreover,
its content and stylistic oddities were deemed not to meet the stan-
dards of good literature. Together with other works by Burroughs,
Naked Lunch was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1963
under the headline ‘UGH . . .’ and was also met with considerable
resistance during and after publication, with individuals involved in
the production process pulling out because they did not want to be
associated with such work. In 1964 an obscenity trial began, with the
Massachusetts Supreme Court later ruling in 1966 that the charge of
obscenity should be lifted.
Literature of horror
Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Bataille’s Story of the Eye and
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch are irredeemably abject in that they are intol-
erable and lie beyond the boundaries of socio-cultural order. This
applies to the subjects that the writers deal with, the themes explored
in the works, the realist treatment of subjects, and also aspects of
the style. In all cases we experience dystopia. Humanity is stripped
bare and people react with greed and desperation to fulfil their basic
needs. We see the naked human impulse that is unregulated and also
relentless. The immoderation of appetite is one of the most unnerv-
ing aspects from a reader’s point of view because it problematizes our
relationship with the text. If we treat the characters as human, as
fiction often invites us to do, then we run the risk of rendering our-
selves abject if we empathize with their grotesqueness and nihilism.
We do not want to readily identify with them because of the impli-
cations this has for our self-conception and outlook. But if we ignore
their humanity then this reduces the emotional impact the charac-
ters have on us as well as frustrating the objectives of reading novels.
All of these writers also chose to use the device of episodic narrative
which was punctuated by different stories, often involving different
characters and scenes, with a distinct lack of community prevailing
in each story.
Each wanted to convey the hypocrisy of social structures and meta-
narratives that creates belief in illusory structures like God and love.
But whilst Céline and Burroughs are commenting on a world that is
already fallen, Bataille’s protagonists actively will the abject resulting
in a world that becomes unacceptable. John Calder discusses how
writing is viewed as a form of social critique, where writers look
‘underneath the skin of apparent reality to see what human beings
are really about’ (Burroughs, 1982, p. 238), and where Burroughs
threatens us with the power of the written word: ‘[t]he Word will
leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and
toes like an opportunist land crab . . .’ (Burroughs, 1982, pp. 180–181).
At the heart of society lies a ravening greed where everyone is out for
themselves, and characters exploit one another’s vulnerability and
weakness in order to further their own ends. The geographical sweep
across different cultures that occurs in each of the novels exposes
the depravity that is central to our collective psyche, and shows
us that addiction, greed, obscenity and other undesirable traits and

behaviour are non-specific and potentially universal.
Another interesting commonality is the use of a pseudonym that
may have been used as a distancing mechanism for fear of back-
lash. For Céline and Bataille the pseudonyms they used protected
their reputations from exposure to their depraved worldviews.24 Per-
haps they were each making a statement about the need for separate
identities where their literary identity, however significant, did not
encompass the entirety of their identity. This distancing mechanism
is not reflected in the narratives of their works, where each writer
is immersed in the chaos that abounds. They do not take the guise
of the omniscient narrator who judges and comments from afar, but
instead are embroiled in the corruption of their making.
In response to the condemning review of Naked Lunch in the Times
Literary Supplement for November 1963, the publisher John Calder
presented a robust case which defended the integrity of Burroughs’
work, stating that not only was ‘he a humanist [who was] terrified by
his vision of contemporary society’ but also that in immersing him-
self in subject matter that offends, he was following in the footsteps
of other acclaimed writers who were part of the established canon of
literary greats, writers such as Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Eliot and Beckett.
‘There is as much stench of the charnel house and the sewer in Swift
as in Burroughs . . .’ (Burroughs, 1982, p. 208). But Burroughs and, by
implication, Céline and Bataille offend more as their reference points
encroach further on our boundaries because of their contemporane-
ity, thus making the abject a distinct reality in the here-and-now,
rather than a distant nightmare and that is yet another reason why
their work courts so much controversy. Rather than purifying the
abject, these works take us so far into abjection, to the Lacanian Real,
that the text becomes rejected for the sake of public decency. We see
‘the horror of hell without God: if no means of salvation, no opti-
mism, not even a humanistic one, looms on the horizon . . .’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 147).
Concluding Remarks
Your sex is the darkest and most bloody part of yourself.

Lurking in the washing and in the undergrowth, it is itself
a sort of half being or animal, alien to your surface habits.
An extreme conflict exists between it and what you show of
yourself. Whatever your real violence, you present a civilised
and polished aspect to others. Every day you seek to commu-
nicate with them, avoiding clashes and reducing each thing
to its poor common measure so that everything can har-
monise and be ordered (Bataille, Œuvres completes II, Manuel
de l’anti-chrétien, p. 390 in Surya, 2002, p. 518).
Throughout the book I have attempted to assay a concept that is

paradoxically regarded as dangerous and yet essential to our existen-
tial human condition. Civilization is a campaign against abjection.
Although we may take great pains to avoid abjection by purifying it
and safeguarding boundaries, it dominates a large part of our exis-
tence on an individual and societal level. Kristeva’s claims for it are
profound: it is foundational to both the production and mainte-
nance of society: ‘[f]or abjection, when all is said and done, is the
other facet of religious, moral, and ideological codes on which rest
the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 209).
Uncovering the powers of horror that continue to inform our exis-
tence was primarily an academic task. As I said in the Preface, one
of my intentions in writing this book was to enable students in
the arts and humanities to be able to engage with abjection, not
just from a visceral or phenomenological perspective, but to look
beyond its effects and to think about its significance in a number
of different realms in order to appreciate that what is abject is indeed
far more than just an abbreviation or code for bodily fluids and its
concomitants. Indeed, as I have shown in various applications and
189
interpretations, Kristeva’s theory of abjection is wide-ranging in its

scope and has proved fruitful in many disciplines and discourses that
include psychoanalysis, religious studies, anthropology and the arts.
From an experiential point of view, the abject emerges in bodily func-
tions, food loathing, cultural rituals and products such as in artworks.
On a cognitive level we have seen how the abject can be used to pro-
vide insight into a number of subjects, including our fear of things
that are foreign; our desire to engage in aspects of culture which elicit
profound horror; the relationship between the body and language;
and the way in which we construct identity.
In conveying the different aspects and manifestations of the
abject, we begin to appreciate its multifaceted nature which stretches
beyond the corporeal and the psychosexual to include other dis-
courses and realms of thought, such as the social and political.
In Strangers to Ourselves (1989; English translation, 1991) Kristeva
deals with different configurations of foreignness and argues for ways
of understanding otherness. She draws on Freud’s notion of the
uncanny as a way of thinking through the feelings generated by fear
of the other, which include repression and anxiety. And so it is not
just historical and cultural differences that separate foreigners from
ourselves, but even within our internal psychic spaces we are divided
against ourselves (Lechte and Zournazi, 2003, p. 5). We learn from
how our own bodily fluids become repulsive to us that otherness is
contained within us and is the (repressed) condition of self.
Returning to one of the fundamental aspects of abjection, we are
reminded of the complexity of its very in-betweenness. Being neither
subject nor object but existing somewhere in between, it cannot be
entirely removed because it is a part of the self: it is the otherness
in us. It is this intrinsic relationship with the self that contributes
to the complexity of understanding abjection. As was stated in the
Introduction, one of the most fraught components of abjection is the
integral link it has to the self that affects our cognitive, psychological,
emotional and aesthetic interpretations of it. One of the most vivid
ways of thinking about this is if we imagine ourselves as a corpse and
then consider how we feel and think about ourselves in that state,
as well as reflecting on the way our loved ones would be behaving
around us.
The wider application of abjection to political discourses of oth-
erness, as instigated by Judith Butler’s seminal study, has led to a
growth in recent studies of abjection in a number of contexts, such as

social policy, health and development studies. Calvin Thomas argued
for the ‘urgency of examining the mechanisms of abjection’ and this
has happened with its adoption as a tool in intellectual inquiry and
social policy (Thomas, 1996, p. 198).
In its adoption in the socio-political arena the study of abjection
is following a path set out by Georges Bataille whose early work on
abjection considered it in terms of a framework of social expulsion,
where the abject was what was rejected by mainstream society. One
of my key aims in this book was to foreground the importance of
Bataille in the study of abjection. In many treatments of abjection
Bataille is cited as being a forerunner to Kristeva, but little attempt has
been made to establish a comparison between the two thinkers. This
may be because, although clearly influential on Kristeva, Bataille’s
writing about abjection is not extensive, which may lead people to
believe that there are no important connections. What I have done
is to treat his notion of abjection as one part of his overarching the-
ory of the sacred and have developed his interpretation of abjection
by discussing related concepts that are part of his critique of Western
reason. The sacred in Bataille is defined in terms of the excluded part
of a system that cannot be assimilated, and this conforms, in part, to
the abject. Taking this further, the abject is then essential in the for-
mation of sacred community and is actively sought in activities such
as ‘communication’, eroticism and sacrifice. Aside from Bataille’s nar-
rowly conceived writings on abjection, we see that if we consider his
work more holistically, then the idea of the abject is central to his
enterprise. In Bataille’s notion of the sacred, the abject as the rejected
and the other is a necessary part of social ritual and is integral to the
formation of community. Within the framework of the sacred, the
abject can be paralleled with the impure (left) sacred. In Bataillean
thought then, the abject plays an integral role in the creation of the
sacred, and is not simply the excluded part that is unconnected from
the workings of society.
∗ ∗ ∗
Beyond academic interest in abjection, there is another objective

that is of concern and which involves sharing in the precarious
nature of human life. Lifting the lid on abjection is then also
of personal consequence as it informs the fear and anxiety that

overshadows our everyday life, and exposes the fact that civiliza-
tion is a deception. Many sociologists and cultural thinkers have
stressed the importance of a split in the collective conscious between
certain states of consciousness that are productive and that enable
us to maintain social order and other states that invariably involve
the disruption of equilibrium. Thinkers such as Freud and Durkheim
predicted that with the growth of human civilization, the struggle
between dualistic forces would increase. There have been various
modes within cultural history, such as the carnivalesque and the
Dionysian, that express the need for the frenzied proliferation of life
and the liberation from control and order, but these are not unregu-
lated structures that are embedded in the social fabric and are instead
expressed at certain points in religious and cultural calendars. One of
the great ironies about abjection is that although it is an integral part
of our bodily being, it is antithetical to human civilization, and this
leads to a conflict between different aspects of human identity.
In the everyday realm, thoughts and behaviours that take us
beyond the boundaries of social acceptability are suppressed. In its
transgressive potential, abjection falls into this category and hence
is avoided. The proliferation of texts about disgust that have been
discussed earlier in the book – the writings of Kolnai, Miller and
Menninghaus – convey that in spite of humanity’s intellectual
achievements we still have a fraught relationship with a body that
we are unable to bring under complete control. Disgust underpins
human life and abjection explains our fear and fascination with it.
We want to keep the abject literally and metaphorically at bay in
our lives; we may feel that we have a moral obligation to suppress
it. Some people are more receptive to its consequences. There is the
fear that dwelling on it can lead to experiencing it, which the general
public wants to stave off at all costs. But resistance through tactics of
aversion is matched by an insistence by the abject to break into our
lives in all quarters. For we see that abjection is manifested culturally
in many ways that are regarded as perverse: in food that is forbid-
den, in certain sexual practices, such as incest, and in certain types
of crime. We are surrounded by a number of things (both animate
and inanimate) that have the propensity to threaten our sense of
well-being. We spend an exorbitant amount of time staving off the
unsavoury; human societies invest time and labour in relegating the
abject to the peripheries of systems as we do in our bodily rituals and

social attitudes. The most acute instance of this is the lifelong preoc-
cupation with regulating (as helped by our primary caregivers in our
early years) the boundaries of our bodies. A litany of rituals includes
our daily activities of wiping, washing, grooming, cutting, exfoliat-
ing and depilating. Understanding our reasons and motivations for
staving off our visceral natures enhances our comprehension of reli-
gious, moral and social codes that are there to repress and purify the
abject, thus preventing us encountering the horror of being. What
is especially disarming is that on one side of the boundary, namely
internally, these secretions are ‘safe’ and expected but once they have
crossed over to the outside they become foreign and abject, and
something we need to expel for our continued existence.
The resistance to the abject is a major part of our lives, of our
bodily rituals and habits and of our collective understanding. The
time invested in marginalizing the abject is not matched by a cog-
nitive need to grasp the motivations for our behaviour. There is an
unwillingness to engage with the existential purpose of these efforts
to banish. The negation and rejection that is at the centre of being –
the corpse within – is repressed in favour of productive life.
∗ ∗ ∗
It becomes the task of the artist to express these hidden truths and the
numerous artworks, films and texts that have been examined in my
study convey the intimate relationship that artists have with trans-
gression. Exposing the hidden truths about abjection runs counter
to prevailing aesthetic beliefs that art should be about the contem-
plation of beauty and pleasure, notions that have underpinned the
Western tradition of aesthetics. Art can be described as a ‘sacramental’
activity, where the artist makes ‘forays into and tak[es] up positions
on the frontiers of consciousness . . . and report[s] back what’s there’
(Sontag, 1982, p. 92). Indeed art in its manifold forms provides respite
from profane life by offering people the chance to escape from actual
reality into flights of fancy, which can mean anything, depending
on our predilection, from casual escapism to an encounter with real-
ity that unsettles our being. Some people seek out art that induces
disgust, such as certain horror films. There are occasions where the
Real ruptures the limits of prosaic symbolic expression and these are
experienced in powerful artworks. Live performance art, as discussed

in Chapter 4, stirs us partly because of its presentness, being in real
time. By watching the performance, we participate, however indi-
rectly, in what unfolds before us, which may involve the threat of
mutilation, or even actual mutilation and we watch individuals put
their bodies and themselves in danger, thereby inducing feelings
which go against our natural instincts to protect human life. But
there are also numerous examples of artworks that are not live that
have the propensity to disrupt our inner sense of calm.
Writing in the mid 1990s, Hal Foster observed that the concerns of
aesthetics have changed: there has been ‘a general shift in concep-
tions of the real: from the real understood as an effect of representation
to the real understood as an event of trauma’ (Foster, 1996b, p. 107).1
In other words, our engagement with the arts has deepened insofar
as we have different expectations of what art might do for us. Art-as-
representation may be impactful but it does not challenge and wound
us in the manner that art-as-trauma does. Through the development
of Cindy Sherman’s work from 1975 to the early 1990s, Foster charts
the stages of representation of her work as she moves from images of
voyeuristic fantasy and fetishization in her earlier Untitled Film Stills
(1977–80) to her later photo-works that open on to the terrain of
the obscene. In the progression of her work, the viewer has the gaze
turned in on itself as traces to otherness are eradicated and we are
forced to contemplate the abject body that has often been turned
inside out.2 The examples that I have examined in Chapters 4–7
similarly cause trauma in that they puncture or tear the screen and
threaten the stability of the boundaries of the self. In order to explain
this further I want to revisit Foster’s discussion of the gaze which he
develops from Lacan’s discussion of the gaze in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1979 [1973]).
The Lacanian gaze differs from the ‘look’ (which is associated
with/given by the eye) and refers to the awareness and feeling of
being looked at; ‘it preexists the subject’. The subject views the gaze
as a threat, as if he/she is being queried (Foster, 1996a, p. 138) and
this contributes to anxiety. Lacan views the gaze as violent; it is a
force that can harm and needs to be ‘disarmed’ (p. 140). The screen
‘mediates the object-gaze’, thereby protecting the subject and oper-
ates as ‘the schemata of representation’ which ‘tames it in an image’.
Having access to the Symbolic (the gaze), subjects can now ‘manip-
ulate and moderate’ the object-gaze at will (p. 140) and this practice
underpinned much of our cultural understanding of art up until the
twentieth century. Contemporary art is less interested in pacifying
the gaze, (p. 110) preferring instead to move beyond the Symbolic
and into the Real. Foster uses the term ‘obscene’ to capture this shift
from the image-screen to the object-gaze where what occurs is the
removal of any protective device such as the screen or its analogues.
The result is that we experience the rupture of the Symbolic, which
as I have shown, manifests itself in artworks where language has been
exhausted and this in turn opens up to an impossible Real, akin to a
sublime sense of horror and abject nothingness. This entails trauma,
as it is about breaking up, disintegration and the abyss. And, like
abjection, trauma also involves the reconstitution of the self through
a double-movement from ‘evacuation’ of the self to its ‘elevation’
(p. 168).
But there are consequences for the consumption of art that brings
about trauma. In putting forward different examples of artworks that
articulate abjection, we also have to address various ethical questions
that surround any discussion of abjection. One of these primary ques-
tions concerns why we should seek to experience something that
causes such rupture. Social, religious, cultural and political rituals are
geared towards keeping abjection at a distance, and to focus on it
goes against the conformity of social practices. As with any discus-
sion about death, abjection forces us to confront our bodily existence
and this is undesirable for many. One of the main questions dis-
cussed when thinking about examples of abjection in artwork is:
why should we be exposed to sights that are so difficult to look
at and involve sensations of psychological and even physiological
discomfort? This is different to thrill seeking where the outcome
is pleasurable and invigorating. We do not have the same inclina-
tion here when engaging with works that open up the experience of
abjection, where we are forced to confront negative emotions such
as fear, anxiety and a sense of the loss of self. The intrigue abjection
arouses as mediated by our interest in cultural products that disturb
us, is explained by the fear–fascination dynamic. As well as being
frightened we are also drawn to work that takes us to a vertiginous
sense of despair.
The essential human need for abjection is conveyed in the contin-

ued production of artworks that invoke a sense of dislocation, horror
and the sense of a loss of self. Our continued desire to experience this
is perverse: we may curtail our exposure to abjection in most cases
but it is also part of a darker drive in the human psyche. This book
has catalogued the efforts of a range of artists who have documented
the dark side of the human spirit, some of them endangering their
own lives in order to do this.
Notes
Introduction
1. Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, was first published in
1980 in Paris by Éditions du Seuil. Two years later it was translated into
English and it had a momentous impact on an Anglo-American audience.
2. Kristeva argues that the term ‘l’abjection’ has a ‘much more violent sense
[in French] than it does in English’ (Oliver, 2002, p. 374).
3. This argument is also developed in Foster (1996a, p. 156).
4. This bears similarities to the dual nature of the sacred, which being both
pure and impure is essential for the sustenance and maintenance of social
order but is also feared because of the threat of contamination and dis-
array that it poses. What the abject and the sacred have in common is
their integral sociological role in human life and their apparently contra-
dictory nature, which can be viewed as the fundamental paradox of life,
which is that we are born to die.
5. In that respect it bears similarities with other theoretical concepts, such
as the sublime and the sacred.
6. In fact, Kristeva makes this point when she examines the comparisons
that exist between the abject and the sublime: ‘The abject is edged with
the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same
subject and speech bring them into being’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 11).
7. They were stripped of their human dignity and treated as the dregs and
refuse of social life (Krauss, 1996, p. 90).
8. Consulting the MLA Bibliography, Winfried Menninghaus (2003, p. 365)
notes that since the late 1980s there has been an increase in book and
article titles that employ the terms ‘abject’ and ‘abjection’.
9. In Strangers to Ourselves (1988; English translation 1991) Kristeva pursues
the idea that the otherness that we fear actually comes from within, and
one way of coming to terms with this is to confront the other in our
encounters with strangers, by which she is referring to foreigners:
[T]he foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity,
the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding
and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are
spared detesting him in himself . . . The foreigner comes in when the
consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we
all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and
communities.
(Kristeva, 1991, p. 1)
10. The milk is ‘an aberrant fluid or a melting solid’ (Douglas, 2002, p. 48).
In this halfway state between solid and liquid, it bears similarities to Jean-
Paul Sartre’s notion of le visqueux (the slimy or the sticky), which Mary
197
198 Notes
Douglas discusses in Purity and Danger in relation to her classification of

the anomalous. The viscous, Douglas says, ‘is like a cross-section in a pro-
cess of change. It is unstable, but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding and
compressible. [Stickiness] attacks the boundary between myself and it’
(Douglas, 2002, p. 47). See also, Sartre, 2003 [1943], pp. 624–632.
11. The notion of the autonomy of the artist, and indeed of the artwork, is a
phenomenon that is typical of the twentieth century where artists were
more at liberty to express their own vision.
1 Unpacking Abjection
1. La Révolution du langage poétique is Kristeva’s doctoral thesis (Sorbonne)
which was written in 1974, and part of it (only the first third of the orig-
inal French edition) was translated a decade later to form Revolution in
Poetic Language (McAfee, 2004, p. 13).
2. The discussion of abjection and the maternal body informed Kristeva’s
later writings on female sexuality (Oliver, 2002, pp. vii–viii).
3. Estelle Barrett states that abjection (as signalled by the concomitant pro-
cess of rejection and repulsion) arises in the womb, when the foetus
rejects various fluids from the mother. This view is only valid if we believe
that the foetus has emotional responses and agency (Barrett, 2011, p. 70).
4. In Kristeva’s account, the male infant experiences more of a sense of
repulsion and fascination than the female infant, who is unable to split
the maternal to the same extent (see Chapter 7, n. 1).
5. La sémiotique (semiotics) as the science of signs is distinct from this sense
of the semiotic, what Kristeva calls le sémiotique.
6. Lacan was a major figure in Paris in the 1960s and Kristeva would
have become more aware of his influence following her relocation from
Bulgaria in 1965.
7. The Imaginary is often capitalized to distinguish it from the more quotid-
ian term imaginary, which means what appertains to the imagination.
8. In Lacan’s work a capital ‘S’ is often used to denote the Symbolic and this
practice will be continued here to differentiate Lacan’s use of Symbolic
from Kristeva’s use of symbolic.
9. ‘The mother’s gaze is the child’s first mirror; the child’s identity or notion
of itself as a whole being is first formed in that gaze; it is a narcissis-
tic manoeuvre that underpins the development of identity’ (Bailly, 2009,
p. 37).
10. Grosz makes a connection between these bodily by-products which
Kristeva refers to as the abject and Lacan as objet a or objet petit a (Grosz,
1994, p. 81). This is entirely plausible. The objet petit a does not refer to an
object in the real world but to an object that the subject has lost, which
is now configured in the sense of ‘object relations’ (such as the breast, the
stool, the genitalia). See Bailly, 2009, p. 129.
11. Some critics, such as Rosalind Krauss have used the psychiatric term
‘borderline’ to define this state of being in-between (Krauss, 1996, p. 91).
Notes 199
12. Her use of male writers in Powers of Horror and other texts further rein-
forces her conflation of the symbolic with the post-maternal masculine
(see Chapter 7, n. 1).
13. Keith Reader suggests that this is the viewpoint taken by Judith Still who
argues that ‘the maternal is not identical with the feminine and is not
simply to be conflated with it’ (see Still, 1997, pp. 233–225).
14. In some cases the terms were lumped together or used interchangeably
(see ‘Disgust and Abjection’ in Ahmed, 2004, pp. 84–89). An example
where the concept of abjection is reduced to a variant of disgust is in
Julian Hanich’s paper ‘Dis/liking Disgust: The Revulsion Experience at
the Movies’ where he describes abjection (through inference to Kristeva’s
Powers of Horror) as ‘psychoanalytic speculations about the functions of
disgusting films’ (Hanich, 2009, p. 294).
15. See Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).
16. In 1973 Kolnai wrote another important essay based on aversive emotions
entitled ‘The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust, and Hatred’,
which is collected in Kolnai (2004, pp. 93–109).
17. However, equally surprising is that Kristeva does not engage at all with
the literature on disgust in spite of her describing abjection in terms of
disgust. In an interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch on ‘Feminism in
the United States and France’ Kristeva described abjection as something
that causes disgust: ‘ . . . there is also the aspect of nausea, of wanting to
vomit. L’abjection is something that disgusts you. For example, you see
something rotting and you want to vomit . . . ’ (Oliver, 2002, p. 374).
18. Some analytic philosophers, such as Noel Carroll, go so far as to voice
disdain for Kristeva. In a footnote Carroll expresses how ‘I do not
know whether Kristeva’s meanderings are even intelligible’ (Carroll, 1990,
p. 221, n. 39).
19. Ross would reject this conjecture for she believes that the contemporary
use of the abject involves not only the matter of a return to nature but
also that which ‘produces an excessivity or an uncontrollability’ and in
particular ‘an excess that problematizes the relationship of the self to the
feminine other, and opens up new cybernetic definitions of subjectivity’
(Ross, 2003, p. 281).
20. Colin McGinn, 2011 comes to the same conclusion (see p. 13, n. 1).
2 A Cultural History of Abjection

1. Although morally objectionable, the caste structure systematizes social
relations and self-identifies people’s positions in society.
2. It is important to reiterate that, in this interpretation, structural place-
ment precedes any analysis of its unhygienic nature. In other words,
something is deemed dirty because it has a problematic relationship with
the category in which it is meant to fit.
3. Following on from Douglas, Kristeva also examined the laws of unclean-
liness in the book of Leviticus and considered them in relation to the
boundaries of the body.
200 Notes
4. It is significant that food classifications are more scrupulous when dealing

with meat (animals) rather than vegetable food substances, a fact that
conveys our ambivalence about the relationship between humans and
animals. We express our distance from them by not just indiscriminately
consuming any animal but rather through the exercise of judgement in
the selection process of what we can (and cannot) consume, a method
which even extends to specific parts of an animal, and also prescriptions
about the way something should be cooked. The other biological theory
is that given that animals foods are the source of pathogens, more care
has to be exercised handling animal products.
5. Miller identifies weaknesses in the laws put forward in the book of
Leviticus and concludes that ‘No single-dimensioned scale explains satis-
factorily all the cultural distinctions we make in constructing the category
of edible animals’ (Miller, 1997, pp. 47–48).
6. This view can be paralleled with Butler’s theory of social abjection.
7. The fact that Kolnai used the definition of dirt as being ‘matter out of
place’ confirms that this notion in fact predates Douglas. Douglas bases
her structuralist system on this idea.
8. ‘Western’ refers to Europe and North America.
9. In The Birth of Tragedy (1993 [1872]) Nietzsche argued that the nature
of human beings was divided between two contrasting principles:
the Apollonian (which stood for formalism and rationalism) and the
Dionysian (which represented the ideas of excess and ecstasy).
10. Durkheim argued for the duality of human nature, what is known as the
homo duplex:
The individual is . . . comprised of two different ‘beings’ – the first
derived from and expressing our physical organism, the second
derived from and expressing society. It is inevitable that these two
beings should oppose one another, for the first is reflected in those
sensations and appetites for which the individual demands satisfac-
tion, while the second gives rise to reason and moral action, without
which society is literally impossible.
(Quoted in Jones, 2005, p. 81)
11. In 1995 the journal Body & Society, edited by Mike Featherstone and Bryan
Turner, was launched to cater for the growing academic interest in the
sociological and cultural analysis of the body.
12. The incest taboo underpinned the basis and functioning of society.
13. Originally published in 1939, the English translation is in two volumes.
14. Chris Shilling (1993, p. 152) states that ‘in examining the development of
civilized bodies, Elias’s approach is both sociogenetic and psychogenetic
[Elias’s own terms] as it encompasses the broadest of long-term processes
underlying society’s development, and the specific personality and drive
structures of individuals’.
15. His study bears similarities to Weber’s conception of rationalization
and the latter’s examination of the impact of Protestantism on modern
societies (Weber, 2011 [1904–05]).
Notes 201
16. Mellor and Shilling are referring to the term used by Margaret Miles to
denote how knowledge was acquired in a sensory way through the body
(see Mellor and Shilling, 1997, p. 23).
17. For a comprehensive study on the development of different body-systems
in Western culture, see Mellor and Shilling’s Reforming the Body (1997),
which charts the transition from the ‘medieval body’ that is immersed in
the natural and supernatural worlds to the rationalizing and secularizing
outlook of the ‘Protestant modern body’ and beyond.
18. The Society of Individuals consists of three different sections. Part 1 was
written in 1939, part 2 between 1940 and 1960, and part 3 in 1987. The
book was published posthumously in 1991.
19. The academic literature on disgust explores the various psychological,
social and behavioural attitudes that people have to the emotion of
disgust.
20. Disease and illness also bring the body’s stability into question, which
causes fear and distrust of the body. In Western culture, ageing has also
become loathsome and people take great pains to slow down the process
in various ways.
21. Being untrained in socialized processes, children (very young children
especially) do not experience the same feelings of repulsion or disgust.
22. In contrast we have the skeleton which, although used widely in the hor-
ror genre and may cause fear, does not provoke disgust ‘so long . . . as it
is completely stripped of the remnants of flesh’. The skeleton is ‘clean’
(McGinn, 2011, p. 17).
23. According to Kristeva, menstrual blood provokes disgust because it is a
further reminder of the archaic mother who has been made abject. This
is witnessed in the numerous rites, particularly in pre-modern religions,
concerning menstruation.
24. Some theorists, such as Kolnai, make a distinction between ‘excreta’ and
‘secreta’ where ‘the former are bare dross, [and] the latter serve a spe-
cific function and thus are essentially free from putrefaction’, but he also
acknowledges that there are intermediate cases (Kolnai, 2004, p. 54). See
also Douglas, 2002, pp. 154–155.
Kristeva states that polluting objects fall into two types: excremental
and menstrual. Furthermore, she argues that even though tears ‘belong to
the borders of the body’ they do not have ‘any polluting value’ (Kristeva,
1982, p. 71). What is problematic and remains unjustified is Kristeva’s
curious suggestion that menstrual blood is contaminating but semen is
not. Adhering to her boundary-rule, Douglas (2002, p. 153) argues that
since semen breaches bodily boundaries, it is impure. Kristeva applies
this logic to her assessment of menstrual blood, arguing that it repre-
sents a danger to identity and threatens the relations between the sexes
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 71). Why she regards semen as being any less of a threat
is not clear, unless it is the case that Kristeva is intimating that paternity is
less dangerous and less vulnerable, speculations that Grosz puts forward
(Grosz, 1994, p. 207). The split between nature (the maternal) and cul-
ture (the paternal) may be another reason for debasing menstrual fluid
202 Notes
(Kristeva, 1982, p. 74). Miller and others reject Kristeva’s views about
semen and argue that it is ‘one of the most polluting of substances’
(Miller, 1997, pp. 103–105, p. 261, n. 41).
25. Grosz observes the commensurability between Kristeva’s concept of the
abject and Lacan’s objet petit a (Grosz, 1994, p. 81).
3 Recovering the Sacred: The Abject Body

1. The anthropologist Victor Turner isolated the middle liminal stage from
van Gennep’s analysis and further examined its significance in his
own work.
2. See Mellor and Shilling’s Reforming the Body (1997).
3. Bataille was influenced here by the ideas of Marcel Mauss in his theory of
the gift (in his essay The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Soci-
eties, 1925/1967 – English translation). Mauss studied archaic systems of
exchange among certain groups of indigenous groups living on the north-
west coast of North America, and he argued that these societies’ economies
are characterized by potlatch, that is the ritualized exchange of gifts that are
set up at significant points in the life cycle including birth, marriage and
death. During these occasions the giving of a gift set up a cycle of exchange
that involved putting on a show of wealth in different ways – by giving,
squandering or destroying wealth. In turn the beneficiary was obligated to
reciprocate by giving more, or else they would lose status and prestige. This
competitive cycle, which could continue ad infinitum, of demonstrating
wealth resulted in bigger stakes and an increasing sense of obligation.
4. ‘[We are] [m]ade discontinuous beings by the very fact of our birth’
(Richardson, 1998, p. 20).
5. It is worth making a distinction here between sexual desire and sexual
experience. Being of the imaginary, sexual desire does not involve abjec-
tion unlike sexual experience which entails having to overcome repulsion
at the confrontation with another’s genitals and bodily fluids.
6. Menninghaus’s translation of Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), 2003, p. 163.
7. She is using the term widely to accommodate theorists of culture (Kristeva,
1982, p. 64).
8. In spite of Kristeva’s sociological and anthropological ‘excursions’ vis-à-vis
Douglas, her primary interest (in abjection) is rooted in the psychological
and the effects that abjection has on language.
9. Orality is explored as a mode of socialization in rituals by Pasi Falk in The
Consuming Body (1994).
4 Abjection in the Visual Arts

1. Bataille is known for his critical writings on a host of subjects and he also
exerted a strong influence on the visual arts. He wrote about art – Lascaux
Notes 203
or the Birth of Art and Manet, both 1955 – and it is through his concept of
the informe that he has become well known in the visual arts.
2. See the Introduction n. 10.
3. Although the dolls themselves are sculptures, they are always only pre-
sented to us through the medium of photography. This enables Bellmer
to control the context in which they are set but also the perspective from
which they are seen. Bellmer relays the misadventures of the doll to the
viewer via photography.
4. The doll has since been lost but photographic evidence aided the
description of what it once looked like.
5. Peter Webb picks out the 1935 photograph of the second doll with two
sets of legs, one set belonging to a young girl crossed coyly on a bed, and
the other set belonging to a man dressed in trousers with the flies open,
as being an ‘intimation of rape’ (Webb and Short, 1985, p. 70).
6. Therese Lichtenstein viewed the construction of the dolls as an impas-
sioned attack on National Socialism and its promotion of an idealized race
(Lichtenstein, 1991, p. v). His cultivation of the abject in the form of the
multi-orificed body that invited the overflow of impurities undermined
the totalized and fascistic body.
7. The doll has been interpreted in various ways: as an alter ego, a fetish
and a transitional object ‘that protects the artist from an overwhelmingly
terrifying maternal imago . . . ’ (Taylor, 2000, p. 6).
8. In psychoanalysis, polymorphous perversity refers to ‘the earliest libidinal
stage of psychosexual development, during the oral stage, characterized
by undifferentiated sexual desire that finds gratification through any
erotogenic zone’ (Colman, 2003, p. 567).
9. The figural is distinguished from the figurative, which is a more common
trope in aesthetics. The figurative concerns a figure that stands for an
object. If something is figurative then it is of a form that retains strong
references (including resemblance) to the outside world, particularly to
the human figure. Bacon, among others, vehemently objected to the fig-
urative tendencies of painting, which he believed would minimize the
power of the painting as the narrative took hold. Deleuze adopts the
term ‘figural’ from Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure, 2011[1971],
in which Lyotard discusses the figural as remaining outside the grasp of
discourse or any structure. Dawn Ades (1985, p. 9) comments on how
‘Deleuze suggests the term “figural” to describe a process which both
avoids abstraction and the illusionism of complete figuration’ (see also
Deleuze, 2003, passim).
10. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens argue: ‘In a world without God,
humans are no different to any other animal, subject to the same innate
urges; transient and alone, they are victims and perpetrators of mean-
ingless acts.’ They suggest that the godless world provides the theoretical
context in the 1940s for what can be described as Bacon’s animalistic
humanoid figures, where there is a melding between human and animal
forms (Gale and Stephens, 2008, p. 27). The context can be expanded
here to encompass Bacon’s worldview. In a godless world the human is
204 Notes
levelled with the beast, and the hierarchy separating the two is suspended
(see also Rina Arya’s Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World, 2012, for
an extensive discussion about this subject).
11. Bacon was familiar with the art journal Documents and, by extension, with
Bataille’s concept of base materialism. The entry on the desublimation of
La Bouche is especially relevant here.
12. The original text, Logique de la sensation (1981), was translated into
English in 2003.
13. For a detailed study on Bacon’s treatment of the crucifixion, see Arya,
2012.
14. ‘Body art’ is often used interchangeably with ‘Performance Art’, although,
technically, as a branch or category of Performance Art, body art concen-
trates on the artist’s body as material or the use of the body in other ways
to make ‘human sculptural forms in space’ (see, for instance, Goldberg
1999: 153). Performance art as an overarching practice itself started much
earlier than the 1960s with the Dadaists and the arrival of the European
war exiles in the United States in the 1940s.
15. Examples include Otto Mühl’s Pissaction (1969) and Keith Boadwee’s
Untitled (1995).
16. This use of their bodies as the platforms and loci of self-expression was
met with reservation in some quarters. Lisa Tickner comments on the
tendency of women artists in the 1970s to take the body as their ‘starting
point’, arguing for the importance of making a distinction between the
overpowering position of ‘living in’ and ‘looking at’ a female body, which
are qualitatively different experiences (Tickner, 1987, pp. 263, 266). Vagi-
nal iconography may be used politically but there is a danger that it can
be viewed as a debasing gesture that enforces biological determinism by
reducing women to their bodies.
17. Womanhouse was an installation and performance space created by
Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and their students of the Feminist Art
Programme at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
18. L’écriture féminine (women’s writing) is a concept that was coined by
French feminist Hélène Cixous in 1975 and was used in feminist lit-
erary theory to promote a liberating practice that emphasized women’s
experiences and the drives of the libido.
19. ‘Photo-therapy’, a term coined by Spence, refers to the crossover between
photography and therapy – the works are neither one nor the other but
both, and should be interpreted as such.
20. Thomas McEvilley comments on how they ‘had ideological roots in
Neolithic ritual involving themes such as the incorporation of the female,
human sacrifice, shamanic endurance, the seeking of dishonor, and more’
(McEvilley, 2006, pp. 37–38).
21. ‘Collective effervescence’ is a Durkheimian notion that refers to a col-
lective sensibility that is generated through ritual and is the origin of
religious feelings. Karen E. Fields summarizes the key ideas: Durkheim
‘found the birth of that idea in rites, at moments of collective efferves-
cence, when human beings feel themselves transformed, and are in fact
Notes 205
transformed, through ritual doing. A force experienced as external to each

individual is the agent of that transformation, but the force itself is cre-
ated by the fact of assembling and temporarily living a collective life that
transports individuals beyond themselves’ (Fields, 1995, p. xli).
22. We have to consider the possibility that some viewers may not react in
such ways, which is not to say that they are unaffected by abjection but
that they are unaffected by art, or certainly by this type of art.
23. In many examples the artist ‘performs’ abjection.
24. Artists working in the field of Conceptualism and Performance Art often
used language performatively and instructively instead of merely in a
descriptive sense. The influence of the philosopher of language J. L.
Austin’s notion of ‘speech acts’ is apparent here (see Austin, 1975 [1962]).
25. The psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment that explored
the relationship between the orders of authority and one’s own morality.
26. Hal Foster stated that ‘[i]n trauma discourse, then, the subject is evacuated
and elevated at once’ (Foster, 1996a, p. 168).
27. In the first phase of his work McCarthy was the subject of his videos
and performances. When he gave this up he started using a number of
disguises, such as hyperreal characters, to hide behind.
28. This is not applicable in the case of bad horror films that are unconvinc-
ing and uncompelling.
29. Although this is recognized as the seminal exhibition of abjection, it is
technically not the first exhibition about abjection, which was the 1992
exhibition Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine, which was
also at the Whitney Museum (Krauss, 1996, p. 90, n. 3). In spite of the
critical need both for the show and for the concept to be disseminated
widely, Denis Hollier expressed what could be described as disappoint-
ment when he saw it, remarking that he wondered what was abject about
it since ‘[e]verything was very neat; the objects were clearly art works’
(Foster et al., 1994, p. 20). The aestheticization of the artworks detracted
from their supposed abjectness.
30. The four catalogue essays, drawing on different artworks, addressed
themes about gender and abjection. The final essay, ‘I, Abject’ written
by Craig Houser expanded the discourse to include films. Collectively the
essays fleshed out the conceptual richness of abjection.
31. Brooks Adams (1998, p. 38) discussed how some artists, in particular the
Chapman Brothers, were drawn to ‘horror and the gothic-grotesque’ to
portray their vision of humanity.
32. The title of the show was apt because it implied two senses of sensation: to
make aware through provocation and also the celebration of the sensuous
through the materiality of the artwork.
33. See Mignon Nixon’s article ‘Bad Enough Mother’ (October, 71, 1995,
pp. 70–92).
34. Hatoum may also be referring to her own political displacement as a
refugee in Britain during the Lebanese Civil War.
35. Some of the ideas in this chapter were previously published in my
essay ‘Taking Apart the Body: Abjection and Body Art’ (see Arya, 2014,
pp. 5–14).
206 Notes
5 The Formless
1. Mode d’emploi literally translates as ‘instructions for use’.
2. The volume that accompanied the exhibition was conceived of as a book
rather than as a traditional exhibition catalogue.
3. In the development of his ‘theory’ of the informe, as well as other ideas,
Bataille was influenced by Kolnai’s essay ‘On Disgust’ and made notes on
this essay (see Kolnai, 2004, p. 17, p. 113, n. 28).
Richard Williams suggests, following on from the suggestion by Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood, that the notion of the formless which the
curators of Formless: A User’s Guide were interested in was that proposed
by US artist Robert Morris in 1968 and was published in Artforum (see
Williams, 2006, p. 143). While Morris’s writing about ‘Anti Form’ may
indeed inform their discussion, I maintain that their focus was indeed on
Bataille’s formless.
4. Georges Didi-Huberman analyses Bataille’s opposition to form in his
study La Ressemblance informe: ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille
(1995).
5. See Greenberg’s essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in Harrison and Wood
(ed.), 2002, pp. 529–541.
6. Bataille’s notion of the informe should not be mistaken for art informel,
which was a postwar style that referred to a style of painting that was
gestural and which employed automatism in a Surrealist sense. Although
‘[t]his concentration on abject bodily imagery in informel art has led to
a suggestion that it may have connections with [Bataille’s] thought’ (see
Hopkins, 2000, p. 21).
7. This term was coined by James Clifford (Foster et al., 2011, p. 264).
8. They are often described as dissident Surrealists who were opposed to the
idealist aesthetics that defined the mainstream Surrealist movement.
9. Following issue 4, 1929, the term ‘critical’ was dropped.
10. After the second issue of Documents, Dictionary was known as the Critical
Dictionary, but this tag was later dropped.
11. Becker’s The Denial of Death (2011 [1973]) explores the ramifications
of this. His premise is that human civilization is a defence mecha-
nism against the knowledge of our mortality. He moves the focus away
from sexual repression (Freud) to knowledge of the organic nature of
human life.
12. ‘Outsider Art’ loosely refers to art made outside the mainstream that was
regarded as being naïve and unskilled. As an official tag the term was
coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972 to describe the works that were created
by individuals who existed outside established society and who had had
no prior academic art training.
13. The commentary can be applied to the discussion of Bataille’s first erotic
novel Story of the Eye (1928). See Arya, 2007, pp. 67–77.
14. Perhaps this is what Hollier was alluding to in his assessment of the
Whitney show where ‘[e]verything was very neat’ and ‘the objects were
clearly art works’ (Foster et. al., 1994, p. 20).
15. See Bataille, 1987 [1957], p. 63.
Notes 207
6 Abjection and Film

1. The film deals with a variety of transgressive themes such as necrophilia,
murder, sadomasochism and paedophilia and consists of a patchwork of
different narratives.
2. Chapters 1 and 2 of her monograph are, with minor modifications, taken
from the journal article. It is worth stressing that abjection continues to
be a key theme in Creed’s work, as is seen in Media Matrix: Sexing the New
Reality (2003), where she examines its application in popular media.
3. Elsewhere he discusses the ‘concept of synaesthesia [as] . . . at the heart of
our disgusting experience at the movies’ (Hanich, 2009, p. 307, n. 3).
4. The Exorcist (1973) is based on the novel of the same name by William
Peter Blatty which was published in 1971. Similarly Carrie (1976) was
adapted from Stephen King’s first novel published in 1974. One Flew over
the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir., Miloš Forman, 1975) was based on the 1962 novel
by Ken Kesey.
5. The ‘telepods’ were meant to allow the instantaneous teleportation of an
object from one pod to another.
6. The morphology of the man-fly hybrid can be couched in the broader
terms of Cronenberg’s thematic concerns. Linda Williams identifies these
as concerning a ‘masculinity in crisis’ which ‘is frequently dramatized
through an impossible vision of male interiority, often of male bodies
literally breaking apart at the seams . . . ’ (Williams, 1999, p. 32).
7. The term ‘category mistake’ is introduced in Chapter 1 of The Concept of
Mind (Ryle, 2000 [1949]).
8. In her reformulation of the monstrous, Creed is following Donna
Haraway’s concept of the cyborg and other embodiments of the mon-
strous that problematized the presentation of the feminine and which
looked to the grotesque to derive new interpretations.
9. Elizabeth Grosz remarks how abjection is ‘the precondition of castration;
castration is an attempt to cover over and expel it’ (Grosz, 1990,
pp. 92–93).
10. In spite of her adolescence, Carrie is remarkably childlike both in stature
and disposition.
11. It is significant that Carrie only uses her special powers when she is under
threat or is being unfairly treated.
12. More recent films about institutionalized spaces, such as Girl Interrupted
(dir., James Mangold, 1999), also follow this format.
13. For an incisive study on this, see Frances Pheasant-Kelly’s Abject Spaces in
American Cinema: Institutional Settings, Identity and Psychoanalysis in Film
(2013) which explores the interrogation of spaces of films set in institu-
tions. She claims that ‘[a]bject space is usually associated with institutions
that function as castrating maternal bodies, but it is also apparent in
repressive patriarchal structures’ and unravels these spaces through the
course of the book (Pheasant-Kelly, 2013, p. 235).
14. Although I have in mind horror films here, other genres and films would
be equally applicable, including One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which
involves themes that are deeply unpleasant.
15. Carroll makes a distinction between horror that happens in the actual
world which he defines as ‘natural-horror’, and horror that occurs in art-
horror (Carroll, 1990, p. 12).
208 Notes
7 Abjection in Literature
1. It is apparent that Kristeva has only listed male writers in her analyses,
a fact that needs justifying. One interpretation, although I am not sug-
gesting this is an excuse for her treatment, is that since male writers in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had more social power,
they had the potential to be more transgressive (than female writers) and
hence revolutionary ‘in their disruption of the Symbolic order’ (Spencer,
1990, p. 521). This line of argument is developed by Kristeva throughout
her work. She argues that the male infant experiences a different rela-
tionship with the maternal than the female infant who is unable to rid
herself of the mother. Some critics have advanced the thesis that Powers
of Horror is a narrative about the male (infant) and his mother (see Still,
1997, pp. 223–225 and Oliver, 1994, pp. 55). In About Chinese Women
Kristeva uses sexual difference to explain how the infant’s relationship to
the maternal and language impacts on how revolutionary their writing
might be.
2. A variant of this quotation was used in Powers of Horror (see Kristeva, 1982,
p. 188).
3. Burroughs’ interest in drug-induced experiences fits in with this objective.
4. Barthian theory crops up in many discussions of Kristeva’s work. John
Lechte stated that ‘Barthes and his writing have a special place in
Kristeva’s intellectual and personal trajectory’ (Lechte, 1990a, p. 65).
5. In Literature and Evil (1957) Bataille profiled the work of eight writers and
discussed their work in terms of the themes of violence, eroticism and
transgression.
6. Céline wrote four pamphlets from the late 1930s to the early 1940s: Mea
Culpa, 1936; Bagatelles pour un massacre, 1937; L’École des cadavres, 1938;
and Les Beaux Draps, 1941.
7. Venom is reserved for the mother figures who are anything but maternal
but are instead vengeful and manipulative.
8. This ‘double’ life could possibly explain his use of a pseudonym; his real
name was Louis-Ferdinand Destouches and he used his grandmother’s
first name ‘Céline’ as his alias.
9. It is also sometimes known as Death on Credit.
10. They are frequently referred to as ellipses.
11. John Lechte describes Céline’s writing as being hyperrealist (Lechte,
1990a, p. 165).
12. The dual nature of the sacred – where it is holy and accursed, pure and
impure – has been acknowledged by scholars such as William Robertson
Smith, René Girard and Robert Hertz. Bataille developed this distinction
in his work on the sacred in the 1930s.
13. As Richardson states, this note is not included in the English translation
of Madame Edwarda.
14. Auch is a contraction of ‘aux chiottes’ (to the shithouse), so Lord Auch is
‘God relieving himself.’ (Bataille, 1982, p. 76).
Notes 209
15. Much of the discussion that follows about the style of the novel has been
discussed in my paper ‘The Role of Objects in Bataille’s Story of the Eye’
(see Arya, 2007, pp. 67–77).
16. Given that he was undergoing psychoanalysis at the time of writing Story
of the Eye, this experimental technique could be viewed as a form of free
association.
17. While testing out a pistol that he was intending to sell, Burroughs acci-
dentally shot his wife in the face instead of the glass on her head. This
lead to a court case and his subsequent exile from the US.
18. See Burroughs, 1982, p. 9.
19. Junkie was the original spelling of the title of the book before it was
republished.
20. This takes on an urgent aspect when we learn that Burroughs wrote
the novel after he had successfully completed a course of treatment on
apomorphine.
21. Its opposition to the novel form in these respects defines it as being closer
to an ‘anti-novel’.
22. The technique of the crossover of different chains of signification in
Bataille’s Story of the Eye bears similarities with this approach.
23. See Arya (2012, p. 130) for a discussion on the anti-structural notion of a
‘body without organs’.
24. Céline was a physician and Bataille a respectable librarian at the
Bibliothèque Nationale.
Concluding Remarks
1. See also Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996).
2. For an excellent account of the descent into the abject as represented by
Sherman’s work see Foster (1996a, pp. 148–149).
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Index
Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes.
abjection and the abject, 2–4, art and abjection, 14–15, 62, 82–8,
189–91 109–10, 111–12, 193–4
ambiguous and anomalous, 46, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in
47–8, 89–90 American Art, Whitney
Bataille, 2–3, 12, 13–14, 71–6, Museum (1993), 82, 109–12,
80, 81 113, 118; see also Whitney
disgust, 13, 33–9 Show, exhibition of Abject Art
dual aspect, 3–4, 6 (1993)
the formless, 125–9 abject viewing, 114–15
human response to, 192–3 art-as-trauma, 194, 195–6
phenomenology of, 9–11, 13 the body, 84–8
primal moment, 15, 17–19, 20–2 censorship, 109–10
embodiment, 85–7
the sacred, 70–1
the grotesque, 55, 89–92, 134
social and cultural, 7–9, 12,
motivations of the artists, 114
42–4
pervasiveness of, 113–17
subject and object, 4, 28–9
political dimensions, 108–13, 190
theory of, 4–7
precarious boundaries, 86
threat to boundaries, 6, 27–8,
transgression, 84, 193
40–2, 44, 49–50, 60,
use of bodily fluids, 86–8
164–5, 193
see also body/performance art and
transgression of boundaries,
abjection; Whitney Museum of
41–2, 192
American Art
universality of, 13, 44 Artaud, Antonin, 94, 100, 157, 162
see also Kristeva, Julia, theory of Athey, Ron, 99
abjection Augustine, 120
Abramović, Marina, 99, 104–5, 115
audience involvement, 104–5 Bacon, Francis
Incision (1978), 105 the abject, 93–4, 102
Rhythm O (1974), 104–5 Figure at a Washbasin (1976), 94
Ades, Dawn, 93, 203 n. 9 the human body, 92–4
Alien (dir. R. Scott, 1979), 134–5, 136 Portrait of John Edwards (1988),
Aliens (dir. J. Cameron, 1986), 139 93, 94
Allport, Gordon, 49–50, 61–2 Three Studies for Figures at the Base
animal nature of humanity, 60, 61, of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), 93
65, 77, 81, 85, 93–4, 120, 171 Baker, Phil, 183
Aristotle, 147 Baker, Simon, 128–9
Arnold, Matthew, 167 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 55, 90
222
Index 223
Barthes, Roland ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’

Barthes and Kristeva, 208 n. 4 in Documents issue 1
‘The Death of the Author’ (1930), 77
(1968), 108 Critical Dictionary in Documents,
‘The Metaphor of the Eye’ (1982), 121–2, 124, 206 n. 10
180–1 Eroticism (1987 [1957]), 42, 64,
The Pleasure of the Text (1990 65, 69
[1973]), 163, 165 Madame Edwarda (1989 [1956]),
Base materialism (Bataille), 77–80 175, 208 n. 13
‘Mouth’, 78–9 ‘The Notion of Expenditure’
‘The Big Toe’, 79–80 (1933), 65, 164
reconfiguration of the body, 78–80 Œuvres complètes (1970–1988), 58,
the visual arts, 83, 90, 109, 110–11 71, 189
Bataille, Georges, and abjection, 2–3, On Nietzsche (1992a [1945]),
12, 13–14, 71–6, 80, 81, 83, 74, 167
174–5, 191 ‘The Psychological Structure of
civilization, 58, 65 Fascism’ (1933–1934), 66
novels, 157, 158, 167, 175 Story of the Eye (1982 [1928]), 15,
poetic language, 164 157, 175–81, 187, 206 n. 13,
socio-political study, 71–4, 191 209 n. 15, 209 n. 16, 209 n. 22
Surrealism, 120 Theory of Religion (1992b [1973]),
on writing, 167–8 64, 75–6
see also Base Materialism (Bataille); ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade’
formless, l’informe (Bataille); (1985), 67, 72
Story of the Eye (Bataille) Beardsworth, Sara, 17
Bataille, Georges, the sacred, 64–71, Becker, Ernest, 59, 171, 206 n. 11
74–6, 175, 191 Bellmer, Hans, 91–2, 116, 203 n. 3
communal unity, 68–9, 70, 191 Bennett, Andrew and Royle,
eroticism, 69–70 Nicholas, 166–7
excess and restriction, 65, 66–8 Biles, Jeremy, 177, 179
function of sacrifice, 69 bodily waste, the flow of the body,
in modern life, 64, 81 60–2, 85
pre-modern society, 13, 63 body, the
recovery of, 13–14, 64–71, 81 abjection, 12, 60, 62
relationship with abjection, 65, boundaries under threat, 60, 193
70–1, 74–5 the carnivalesque, 55–6, 65, 141
threats to homogeneity, 67–8, the corpse, 25, 27, 29, 41, 60, 61,
72–3 190, 193
transgression of boundaries, 75–6, cultural attitudes to, 58–60
81, 100 the leaking body, 57–62,
Bataille, Georges, works 92, 193
‘L’Abjection et les formes locus of transgression, 55–6
misérables’ (1934), 71 mind/body separation, 51–2, 64–5,
The Accursed Share Vols. I (1991 77–8, 171
[1967]), II-III (1993 [1976]), regulation/ ’civilization’, 53–7, 60,
65, 67 62, 65, 81, 192
224 Index
body, the – continued Breton, André, Second Manifesto of

as a regulatory system, 51–7 Surrealism (1929), 120
sociology of, 52–3 Buchloh, Benjamin, 118
body in art, the, 82, 83, 84 Buñuel, Luis
abject art, 85–8 Un Chien Andalou (1929), 124
fragmentation and dissolution, The Phantom of Liberty (1974),
90–4 130–1, 152
the grotesque, 89–90 Burden, Chris, 96, 99
as locus of abjection, 84–8 Deadman (1972), 96
representations of the body in Shoot (1971), 96, 100
Western art history, 88–94 Burke, Edmund, 150
body/performance art and abjection, Burroughs, William, 181–6, 187,
14–15, 95–101, 111 188, 208 n. 3, 209 n. 17
AIDS and the male body, 98–9 Junky (1953), 182, 209 n. 19
catharsis, 14, 94, 100–1, 108, Naked Lunch (1982 [1959]), 15,
147, 152 158, 166, 174, 182–6, 187–8,
expression of the artists’ identity, 209, n. 20
96–7, 109 Butler, Judith, 7–9, 72, 190–1,
feminist art, 97–8, 115–16 200 n. 6
male artists mocking the paternal
law, 116 Calder, John, 187, 188
orgiastic violence and catharsis, cannibalism and capitalism, 153–4
100–1 carnivalesque/Dionysian liberation
politics, 108–13 of the body, 55–6, 65,
as provocation, 96, 109 141, 192
sado-masochistic, 95, 96–7 Carrie (dir. B. de Palma, 1976), 132,
self-expression and identity, 96–7, 134, 141–3, 151, 207 n. 4, 207 n.
108–9 10, 207 n. 11
’theatre of cruelty’, 100–1 Carroll, Noël, 136, 147, 150, 166,
the use of pain, 95–7 199 n. 18, 207 n. 15
the viewing experience, 101–18 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 15, 71, 157,
see also performance/body art 158, 168–70, 181, 187, 188, 208
Bois, Yve-Alain n. 6, 208 n. 8, 209 n. 24
on Kristeva’s theory, 30 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Kristeva’s
L’informe exhibition, 118 study of, 168–71, 172–4
‘The Use Value of “Formless”’, 122 anti-Semitism, 168, 169–70
and Krauss, R. Formless: A User’s view of abject humanity, 170–2
Guide (1997), 118, 120, 122, writing style/technique, 173–4,
123–4, 128 184, 208 n. 11
Borges, Jorge Luis, 157 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, works
Botting, Fred and Wilson, Scott, 72 Death on the Installment Plan (1971
boundaries [1936]), 172–3, 208 n. 9
abjection, 6, 27–8, 40–2, 44, Journey to the End of Night (2012
49–50, 60, 194 [1932]), 157, 170–2, 173,
classificatory systems, 44–51, 80–1 187, 188
Brassaï, Nu 115 (1932–1933), 124–5 censorship, 109–10
Index 225
Chadwick, Helen, 115 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 157, 188

Chanter, Tina, 133, 144 Douglas, Mary, 13, 43–8, 49–51, 57,
Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 113 60, 63, 89–90, 136, 197–8 n. 10,
Chicago, Judy, 97–8, 204 n. 17 199 n. 3, 200 n.7, 201 n. 24,
civilization and the body, 53–7, 58, 202 n. 8
81, 189, 192 Dubuffet, Jean, 124
classification systems, 44–51, 80–1 Durkheim, Émile, 52, 65, 69, 192,
Indian caste system, 45, 81, 200 n. 10, 204–5 n. 21
199 n. 1 Dworkin, Andrea, 177
Jewish food laws, 47–8, 81
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 148 Eisenstein, Carl, 120
Conrad, Joseph, 159 Elias, Norbert, 54–5, 56–7, 62,
Creed, Barbara 200 n. 14
abjection and the eroticism, the abject and the sacred,
monstrous-feminine, 15, 32, 69–70
131–2, 137–9, 141, 155, 207 n. exhibitions
2, 207 n. 8 Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in
the archaic mother, 131–2, 137, American Art, Whitney
139, 144 Museum (1993), 82, 109–12,
film theory and abjection, 15, 32, 113, 118
131–2, 134, 144–5, 154–5 Freeze, London Docklands (1988),
on viewing horror in film, 151–2 112–13
Cronenberg, David, 135–6, 149, L’informe: Mode d’emploi Centre
207 n. 6 Georges Pompidou (1996), 15,
see also The Fly (dir. D. 82, 112, 118–19
Cronenberg, 1986) Rites of Passage: Art for the End of a
Century, the Tate (1995), 82,
Dali, Salvador, and Buñuel, Luis, 124 112, 116
Darwin, Charles, 10, 35, 48–9, Sensation, Royal Academy (1997),
199 n. 15 112, 113
de Kooning, Wilhelm, 92 The Exorcist (dir. W. Friedkin, 1973),
Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 94, 185, 186, 132, 134, 137, 140–1, 142–3,
203 n. 9 148, 207 n. 4
Descartes, René, 51
dirt and pollution, 43–51 Falk, Pasi, 42, 67, 202 n. 9
the body, 49–50, 51–61 film theory and abjection, 131–2
categories and boundaries, 44–51 the dinner party, 130–1, 152–3
classification of food, 47–9, 51, social abjection, 15, 145–6
200 n. 4 socio-political role, 133
cultural systems and practices, 45 The Fly (dir. D. Cronenberg, 1986),
scientific understanding, 46 135–6
disgust and abjection, 13, 33–9, Ford, Russell, 144
57, 192 formless, l’informe (Bataille), 15, 80,
Documents, co-edited by Bataille 110–11, 112, 118, 119–25
(1929–1930s), 71, 77, 78–9, Bataille’s account, 121–2, 128, 129
120–1, 123, 204 n. 11, 206 n. 10 evades classification, 128
226 Index
formless, l’informe (Bataille) – Helms, Jesse, 109, 112

continued Hirst, Damien, 112–13
‘horizontality’, 119, 120, Hobbes, Thomas, 53–4
122–3, 125 Hollier, Denis, 71, 118, 122,
Kristevan abjection, 15, 118, 119 205 n. 29
reaction to modernism, 120, 123 Hopkins, David, 108, 206 n. 6
Foster, Hal horror films and abjection, 15,
abjection/the abject, ix, 3–4, 30, 132–43, 152–5, 193
38, 111–12, 115–16, 126–8, Alien, 134–5, 136
205 n. 26 ‘alien’ births, 139
the formless and the abject, 118, Carrie, 132, 134, 141–3, 151, 207
125, 128 n. 4, 207 n. 10, 207 n. 11
the gaze, 102, 111–12, 194–5 The Exorcist, 132, 134, 137, 140–1,
Hans Bellmer, 91 142–3, 148, 207 n. 4
Franko B, 106, 115 female adolescence, 140–3
Freeland, Cynthia, 144, 154 The Fly, 135–6
Frege, Gottlob, 161 the monster, 15, 133–7, 147, 149
Freud, Sigmund, 19, 22–3, 26, 27, the monstrous-feminine, 131–2,
31, 32, 33, 35–6, 54, 66, 69, 70, 137–9, 143, 144, 152, 154, 155
77, 122, 137, 138, 190, 192 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
Friedrich, Caspar David, 6–7 145–6, 207 n. 4, 207 n. 14
Psycho, 132, 138–9
Giacometti, Alberto, Suspended Ball Rosemary’s Baby, 134, 139–40, 142
(1930–1931), 124 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Ginsberg, Allen, 181, 184 152–5
Gintz, Claude, 119 transgression of boundary, 132
Gober, Robert, 98 see also viewing horror, audience
Goldberg, Rosie, 100 motivation
Greenberg, Clement, 84, 119, 124, Hume, David, 149–50
206 n. 5 Hussey, Andrew, 164
Griffiths, Paul, 36, 37
Grosz, Elizabeth, 11, 29, 31, 61, 160, the informe, see formless, l’informe
198 n. 10, 201 n. 24, 202 n. 25, (Bataille)
207 n. 9
grotesque in art, the, 89–92 Jay, Martin, 94, 169
Gysin, Brian, 184 Jenks, Chris, 42
Jones, Amelia, 116
Hallier, Jean-Edern, 163 Journey to the End of Night (2012
Hanich, Julian, 10, 132, 150, 199 n. [1932]), 157, 170–2, 173,
14, 207 n. 3 187, 188
Haraway, Donna, 90, 207 n. 8
Harris, Oliver, 182 Kafka, Franz, 156, 157
Harvey, Marcus, 113 Kant, Immanuel
Hatoum, Mona, 116–17, 205 n. 34 Critique of Judgment (1952
Hegarty, Paul, 42 [1790]), 120
Helena Rubinstein Fellows, 109 the sublime, 6
Index 227
Kelly, Daniel, 35 maternal body, rejection of, 5, 12,

Kerouac, Jack, 181 16, 17–19, 24–7, 28, 29, 30–1,
Klein, Melanie, 18 31–2, 132, 139
Kolnai, Aurel, 35, 37, 39, 50–1, 192, phenomenology of abjection,
199 n. 16, 200 n. 7, 201 n. 24, 9–13
206 n. 3 reworking Lacan, 22–7
Korsmeyer, Carolyn semiotic and symbolic, 20–2,
Savoring Disgust: The Foul 23–4, 31, 32, 62, 158, 159–64
and the Fair in Aesthetics the speaking subject, 16–17, 20,
(2011), 35 29, 65
and Smith, Barry ‘Visceral Values: subjectivity and language, 16–17,
Aurel Kolnai on Disgust’ 20–2
(2004), 36–7 threat to subject’s boundaries,
Krauss, Rosalind 27–9, 108
see also Céline, Louis-Ferdinand,
the abject, defined in terms of
Kristeva’s study of
subject-object positionality,
198 n. 11 Kristeva, Julia, works
About Chinese Women (1977), 31,
the abject and the formless, 119,
208 n.1
125–6, 127, 128
Black Sun: Depression and
Bataille’s concept of abjection,
Melancholia (1987; 1989),
71, 124
17, 24
debunking modernist reading,
Powers of Horror: An Essay on
110–11
Abjection (1980; 1982), viii–x,
Kristeva’s theory, 3, 30, 2–3, 4, 9–13, 14, 17, 21, 22,
125–6, 127 25, 27–8, 34, 36, 41, 42, 43,
social abjection, 197 n. 7 44, 57–8, 60, 61, 71, 76, 88,
with Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A 156–7, 159, 162, 163, 164,
User’s Guide (1997), 118, 120, 168, 169, 199 n. 12, 199 n. 14,
122, 123–4, 128 208 n. 1
Kristeva, Julia, theory of Revolution in Poetic Language
abjection, viii–x, 4–6, 9–12, 17, (1984), 16, 20, 21, 161, 162,
33–4, 64, 70, 71–2, 74, 85, 112, 163, 164, 198 n. 1
189, 191 Strangers to Ourselves (1991), 190,
the abject in art, 14, 76, 96 197 n. 9
the artist, 83–4 Tales of Love (1983), 17, 27
Bataille, 71–2 Kubota, Shigeko, Vagina Painting
criticism of the theory, 30–2, (1965), 97
125–7
disgust, 34 Lacan, Jacques
formation of the subject, 12, 20, psychoanalytical theory,
21, 22, 26, 62, 65 22–7, 31
language, 16, 20, 21–2, Mirror Stage, 22–4
159–64 The Four Fundamental Concepts of
literature style and transgression, Psycho-Analysis
156–9, 167 (1979[1973]), 194
228 Index
Lacan, Jacques – continued Manet, Edouard, Olympia (1863), 83,

‘the gaze’, 102, 194 202–3 n. 1
influence on Kristeva, 198 n. 6 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 110, 116
Lampert, Catherine, 87 maternal body, 47, 62
language see also Kristeva, Julia, theory of
linguistic and non-linguistic, 20–2, abjection
159–64 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and
the subject, 16–17, 20–2, 190 Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Lautréamont, Comte de, 157, 164 Societies (1988 [1967]), 202 n. 3
Leavis, F. R., 167 Menninghaus, Winfried, 28–9, 35,
Lechte, John, ix, 17, 31, 164, 208 n. 36–7, 38–9, 69–70, 123, 192,
4, 208 n. 11 197 n. 8
Leiris, Michael, 93, 120 Merrit, Naomi, 153, 154
literature and abjection, 156–88 Miller, Henry, 166
avant-garde/experimental, Miller, William Ian, 35, 37–8, 39, 50,
158–9, 163 54–5, 104, 151, 192, 200 n. 5,
Bataille, 166, 167–8 201–2 n. 24
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Kristeva’s Molesworth, Helen, 118
study of, 168–74 monster in horror films, 15, 133–7,
Kristeva’s literary analysis, 147, 149
156–9
contaminating potential,
literature of horror, 187–8 133–5, 136
Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 15, 158,
semiotic versus Symbolic, 136–7,
166, 174, 182, 183–6,
142–3
187–8
threat to stability of boundaries,
reading and the reader, 164–8
133–4, 136
the semiotic and the symbolic,
159–64
social critique, 187–8 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 182,
Story of the Eye (Bataille), 15, 157, 183–6, 187–8
175–81, 206 n. 13, 209 n.15, abjection, 185–6, 187–8
209 n.16, 209 n. 22 an anti-novel, 183–4
writing style, 158, 163 experimental technique, 84–5
the written word, 158–9 illogic of the body, 185–6
Lydenberg, Robin, 185 obscenity charge, 186
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 100,
McCarthy, Paul 200 n. 9
Family Tyranny (1987), 116 Nitsch, Hermann, 101, 107
Pinocchio Pipenose Household Noys, Benjamin, 126
Dilemma (1994), 116 Nussbaum, Martha, 35
themes in work, 95, 107, 116, 205
n. 27
McGinn, Colin, 35, 59, 62, 81, 87, Offenbach, Jacques, The Tales of
199 n. 20, 201 n. 22 Hoffmann (1819–1980), 91
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 157, 164 Ofili, Chris, The Holy Virgin Mary
Maloney, Martin, 113 (1996), 113
Index 229
Oliver, Kelly Rabelais, François, 55, 188

Kristeva’s use of the term ‘the Radford, Colin, 148
symbolic’, 24 Reader, Keith, 72, 177, 199 n. 13
Trigo, Benigno, Noir Anxiety reading and the reader, 164–8
(2003), 144 abjection and Bataillean
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. communication, 167–8
M. Forman, 1975), 145–6, 207 n. an ‘aesthetic of evil’, 167–8
4, 207 n. 14 antithetical pleasure, 165–6
Orlan, 107, 115 the function of literature, 166–8
other, fear of the, 7, 190
‘Real’, the
political aspects, 108–9, 190–1
in contemporary art, 106,
Otto, Rudolf, 5, 150
193–4, 195
in psychoanalysis, 23, 24–6, 102
Pane, Gina, 96, 99, 102–3
and trauma, 194
audience involvement, 102–3, 105
Rembrandt, Slaughtered Ox (1655), 89
Lait Chaud (1972), 102–3, 105
Richardson, Michael, 77–8, 175, 202
Nourriture/Actualités télévisées/Feu
n. 4, 208 n. 13
(1971), 96, 116
Richman, Michèle H., 179, 180–1
paradoxes of fiction and horror, 147,
148, 149 ritual, role in pre-modern societies,
performance/body art, 95, 99–101, 63–4
102–8, 204 n. 14, 205 n. 24 Rosemary’s Baby (dir. R. Polanski,
audience-artist relationship, 1968), 134, 139–40, 142
101–18 Ross, Christine, 87, 88, 126,
‘the real’, 106, 107, 194 199 n. 19
threat to boundaries, 108 Roudiez, Leon, 162
use of technology, 106–7 Royle, Nicholas, see Bennett, Andrew
the viewing experience, 101–18 and Royle, Nicholas
see also body/performance art and Rozin, Paul (studies on disgust
abjection carried out individually or
The Phantom of Liberty (dir. L. collaboratively), 30, 33, 35, 50
Buñuel, 1974), 130–1
Plantinga, Carl, 150
Saatchi, Charles, 112
Plato
sacred, the, 63–4
the chora in Timaeus, 20
see also Bataille, Georges, the
Phaedo, 51
sacred
poetic language (Kristeva), 163–4
political dimensions of abject art, Sade, Marquis de, 72–3
108–13, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 35, 87, 156, 197–8
Pollock, Jackson, 124 n. 10
drip paintings, Number 27 Saville, Jenny, 115
(1950), 110 Scarry, Elaine, 22, 86
reinterpretation, 110–11 Schilder, Paul, 4–5, 7
pollution and taboo, 43–8 Schneemann, Carolee, 115
Psycho (dir. A. Hitchcock, 1960), 132, Interior Scroll (1975), 98
138–9 Meat Joy (1964), 101
230 Index
semiotic and symbolic (Kristeva), Symbolic order overturned, 178–9

20–2, 23–4, 31, 32, 62, 159–64 transgression, somatic/
art and literature, 162–4 semantic, 179
identity and order, 62, 160 symbolic, see semiotic and symbolic
interaction, 20, 21–2, 160–2, (Kristeva)
163–4 symbolic, the, order of patriachy and
language and syntax, 24, language, 32, 62, 160, 163,
160–1, 164 164, 195
Serrano, Andres, Piss Christ (1987),
109, 110, 111 Taxi Driver (dir. M. Scorsese,
Sherman, Cindy, 110, 115, 124, 194 1976), 145
Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), Taylor, Simon, 98, 109–10
194, 209 n. 2 ‘technologization’ of the self, 106–7
Sibley, David, 145 Tel Quel, 163
Smith, Barry, 36, 37 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. T.
see also Korsmeyer, Carolyn Hooper, 1974), 152–5
Smith, Kiki Thomas, Calvin, 8–9, 72, 98, 191
the abject body, 2, 87–8, 110, Titanic (dir. J. Cameron, 1997), 150
114, 115 transgression of boundaries, 40–2,
Pee Body (1992), 1–2, 5, 87 75, 81, 83, 192
Tail (1992), 87 in abject art, 84
Train (1993), 87 Trigo, Benigno, 144
Untitled (1990), 87–8 Turner, Bryan, 52, 53, 85–6,
Virgin Mary (1993), 87 200 n. 11
social abjection in film, 143–6 Turner, J. M. W., 6
socio-political study and abjection, Turner, Victor, 202 n.1
7–9, 191 Tyler, Imogen, 9, 32
Sollers, Phillippe, 163
Sontag, Susan, 159, 162, 177, 193 van Alphen, Ernst, 102
Spence, Jo van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of
abject art, 115 Passage (1992), 64, 202 n.1
‘photo-therapy’, 99, 115 Viennese Actionists, 100–1
The Picture Of Health (1982), 99 viewing horror, audience
Putting Myself in the Picture motivation, 147–52, 195
(1986), 99 abject viewing and
Stelarc, 107 body/performance art, 101–8
Story of the Eye (Bataille), 157, attraction-repulsion dynamic,
175–81 150–2, 195–6
abjection and fear of death, 177–8, paradox of negative pleasure,
187, 188 149–50
demonization of female sexuality, suspension of disbelief, 107, 148–9
176–7
destabilizing use of metaphor, Walton, Kendall, 149, 150
180–1 Warhol, Andy, 124
plot, 175–7 Oxidation Paintings (1970s), 111
pornographic imagery, 176–7 Weber, Max, 65, 200 n.15
Index 231
Whitney Museum of American Winterson, Jeanette, 58

Art, 109 Wright, Elizabeth, 31
Whitney Show, exhibition of
Abject Art (1993), 82, 109–12, Young British Artists,
113, 118 112, 113

Rina Arya (Auth.) - Abjection and Representation - An Exploration of Abjection in The Visual Arts, Film and Literature-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2014)

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Abjection and Representation

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ISBN 978-1-349-35111-4 ISBN 978-0-230-38934-2 (eBook)

Preface and Acknowledgements viii

2 A Cultural History of Abjection 40

3 Recovering the Sacred: The Abject Body 63

4 Abjection in the Visual Arts 82

5 The Formless 118

6 Abjection and Film 130

7 Abjection in Literature 156

Concluding Remarks 189

My motivation for writing this book came from teaching criti-

it or its effects. This runs the risk of ‘abjection’ being conceived

abjection precedes its conceptualization; we understand what abjec-

my collaborator and friend on both projects, Nick Chare, for his

We are beasts burdened with self-consciousness

Kiki Smith’s Pee Body (1992) is a life-sized wax body of a woman

closed doors and, in particular, when it occurs in such an unsavoury

Abjection is a complex theoretical concept and a pervasive cultural

in relation to contemporary artistic practice’ (Krauss, 1996, p. 91).

For her [Kristeva] the operation to abject is fundamental to the

Foster’s observation raises an important question about the com-

subject).4 The dual aspect of abjection correlates with whether we are

The theory of abjection

‘Abjection’ describes an experience between a subject and a source of

(Schilder, 1978, p. 213). In Chapter 1 we see that in Kristeva’s theory

The dual nature of the abject explains the precarious nature of

Both, as extreme forms of experience, overwhelm us and tem-

Friedrich wanted to encapsulate the forces of nature that have a hum-

Fear of the other is central to abjection. Through the course of the

versions of this (homosexuality). ‘This exclusionary matrix by which

The abject [note omitted] designates here precisely those ‘unliv-

In order for control to be maintained, the excluded need to remain on

power’ in Male Matters (1996) and also in Masculinity, Psychoanalysis,

[o]ne cannot productively address the productions of men’s

Butler’s study signiﬁes the importance of thinking about the social

The phenomenology of abjection

In Powers of Horror Kristeva takes the reader on a rich intellectual

paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down,

By employing such a familiar example of skin on milk Kristeva makes

thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring’ (Kristeva,

arts, anthropology, ﬁlm studies, psychology and literary studies.

of her adherence to patriarchal models – and the plausibility of these

homogeneity of social and economic systems in favour of a resolute

The various means of purifying the abject – the various catharses –

be expressed as artists used their bodies as visual and political plat-

In this chapter I want to lay down the foundations for a study of

drives back into philosophical discourse (Oliver, 1999). The ‘subject’s

The primal moment of abjection

According to Kristeva, the most ‘primitive’ expression of abjection

the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as

One of the deﬁning features of abjection is its inability to be elimi-

The semiotic and the symbolic

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva puts forward a theory of

bodily drives. Through the various stages of development, the infant

of what is uttered would be meaningless. The combination of the

In her theory of abjection Kristeva builds on and modiﬁes established

the murder of the father is integral to the formation of the social.

and the symbolic is less of an order and more part of an ongoing

that which has not yet been symbolized, remains to be symbolized,

The corpse . . . that which has irremediably come a cropper, is

In the two forms of representation that Kristeva presents, one denotes

that perforate the boundaries of comfortable understanding, leaving