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RELIGIOUS FANTASY

RELIGION IN FANTASY X FANTASY IN RELIGION


Sharing abject = intimacy = religiosity
fantasy in religion and fiction:
https://www.google.com/search?
q=fantasy+in+religion+and+fiction&rlz=1C1KDEC_deDE930DE930&oq=f
antasy+in+religion+and+fiction&aqs=chrome..69i57.11824j1j7&sourceid
=chrome&ie=UTF-8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_ideas_in_fantasy_fiction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_religions
fiction and imagination in religion:
https://www.google.com/search?
q=fiction+and+imagination+in+religion&rlz=1C1KDEC_deDE930DE930&
sxsrf=APq-WBsIXPZPh9uGQ4n3ejc_JKlj1sq6zg
%3A1645820489067&ei=SToZYp3ZA4yAi-
gP9tiFgA8&ved=0ahUKEwjdofWM15v2AhUMwAIHHXZsAfAQ4dUDCA4
&uact=5&oq=fiction+and+imagination+in+religion&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l
6EAMyCAghEBYQHRAeOgQIIxAnOgUIABCRAjoECAAQQzoHCC4Q1A
IQQzoKCC4QxwEQ0QMQQzoGCCMQJxATOgQILhBDOgUIABCABDoI
CC4QgAQQ1AI6EwguEIAEEIcCEMcBEK8BENQCEBQ6BQguEIAEOgU
IABDLAToLCC4QxwEQrwEQywE6BQguEMsBOgkIABBDEEYQ-
QE6CggAEIAEEIcCEBQ6BggAEBYQHkoECEEYAEoECEYYAFAAWIJU
YOJYaABwAXgAgAHcAYgBuBaSAQYyOS41LjGYAQCgAQHAAQE&scl
ient=gws-wiz
How is imagination used in religion? Imagination is also important to
religion. In designing metaphysical explanations for the universe, our
planet, the biosphere, and their origins, imagination played, and
continues to play, a key role. Scriptures reflect the attitudes and values
of the people who lived at the time when those scriptures were written.

1 Cusack, Carole M. Invented religions: Imagination, fiction and faith.


Routledge, 2016. HAVE

1
2Behemot Und Leviathan: Studien Zur Komposition Und
Theologie...HAVE REVIEW
3Hector R. Briceno. El Arca de Noe Behemot Y Leviatan
4Carlos Franco. Dinosaurios: Behemot Y Leviatan
5Maryluz Guerrero Salas. The Behemoth Dinosaur in the Land of Uz, El
Dinosaurio...
6Lamuel, Ou Le Livre Du Seigneur. Histoire Authentique de...Sans
Auteur
7Spencer J. Weinreich. Thinking with Crocodiles: An Iconic Animal at the
Intersection of Early-Modern Religion and Natural Philosophy.
8 Cusack, Carole M. "Fiction into religion: imagination, other worlds, and
play in the formation of community." Religion 46, no. 4 (2016): 575-
590.HAVE
9 Carole M. Cusack. The Problem of Invented Religions, Routledge, 2016
10 Carole M. Cusack. Fictional Religions and Religious Fictions:
Narratives of Secularisation and Sacralisation at Play
11 Cusack, Carole M. & Kosnác, Pavol. Fiction, Invention and Hyper-
reality. London: Routledge, 2016 / 2017?.
12 Cusack, Carole M. Play, Narrative and the Creation of Religion: Extending
the Theoretical Base of ‘Invented Religions’
13 Creating a New Reality: Narrative and Language in Science Fiction
and New Spiritualities.POWERPOINT
14 ‘Imagination, Fiction and Faith: The Case of Discordianism’, Third
Alternative Expressions of the Numinous Conference, University of
Queensland, 15–17 August.
15 Sutcliffe, Steven J. & Cusack, Carole M. 2013. Introduction: making it
(all?) up–‘invented religions’ and the study of ‘religion’. Culture and
Religion 14(4): 353-361.HAVE
16 Carole M. Cusack, ‘Fake’ Religions, Fake News and the Allure of
Fiction: Adventures with Invented Religions in the Post-Truth World.
Invited lecture, University of Bern, Switzerland, 10 April 2019

2
‘Fake’ Religions, Fake News and the Allure of Fiction: Twenty-First
Century Developments in Religion and Spirituality. Albert Moore
Memorial Lecture, 19 October, University of Otago, 2017.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XwubVQ4-Fc
19Kranjec, Alexander, Louis Lamanna, Erick Guzman, Courtney N.
Plante, Stephen Reysen, Kathy Gerbasi, Sharon Roberts, and Elizabeth
Fein. "Illusory Body Perception and Experience in Furries." In CogSci, pp.
596-602. 2019.
20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
21. struggle with primeval monsters in the Old Testament, like Rahab in
Isaiah 51. Psalm 89 further tells how Yahweh cut up Rahab’s carcass,
whilst Psalm 74:13-14 refers to Yahweh’s dividing the sea with his might
and crushing the head of Leviathan. Job 3:8 also refers to Leviathan. Job
26:12 recollects Yahweh’s stilling the sea by his power and adds that by
his understanding alone he struck down Rahab.
22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_(psychology)
23 White, Murray J. "The statue syndrome: perversion? fantasy?
anecdote?." Journal of Sex Research 14, no. 4 (1978): 246-249.
24 Rodriguez, Leonardo S. "Fantasy, Neurosis and Perversion." Analysis 2
(1990): 97-114.
25 Stoller, Robert J. Perversion: The erotic form of hatred. Routledge,
2018.
26 Bak, Robert C. "The phallic woman: The ubiquitous fantasy in
perversions." The Psychoanalytic study of the child 23, no. 1 (1968): 15-
36.
27. Le corps comme miroir du monde
28 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. "Perversion, idealization and
sublimation." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 55 (1974): 349-
357.
29 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. "Reflexions on the connexions between
perversion and sadism." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 59
(1978): 27-35.

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30 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. "Perversion and the universal law."
International Review of Psycho-Analysis 10 (1983): 293-301.
31. CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL, J. A. N. I. N. E. "Devil's Religions."
Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium: 313.
32. Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. "The Devil Religion: Some Reflections on
the Historical and Social Meanings of the Perversions1." Journal of
Clinical Psychoanalysis 8, no. 3 (1999): 381-400.
33. Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, and Monique King. "Body and Cosmos:
Pasolini, Mishima, Foucault." American Imago 61, no. 2 (2004): 201-221.
34. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therianthropy
35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapeshifting
36. McAvan, Emily. "The postmodern sacred: Popular culture spirituality
in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and fantastic horror." PhD diss.,
Murdoch University, 2007.
37. McAvan, Emily. The Monstrous Sacred: the intrusion of otherness into
Stranger Things.
38. Hamblet, Wendy C. The sacred monstrous: A reflection on violence in
human communities. Lexington Books, 2003.
39. Kearney, Richard. Strangers, gods and monsters: Interpreting
otherness. Routledge, 2005.
40. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection
41. Morgan, David. "Perverse patients' use of the body—their own and
that of others." In Lectures on Violence, Perversion and Delinquency, pp.
193-201. Routledge, 2018.
42. Doak, Brian R. Consider Leviathan: Narratives of Nature and
the Self in Job. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2014.
43.drewermann on fantasy, fiction
44. Áron Németh. The ideal and the bestial human: anthropological
aspects of Dan 1–6.
45. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_positivity
46.furriesAZ

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47. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_birth
48. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster
49. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan
50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behemoth
51. Rojcewicz Jr, Stephen J. "Body image changes during guided
affective imagery." The Humanistic Psychologist 18, no. 3
(1990): 270-278.
52. Lehman, Edward. 1960, ‘The monster test’, Archives of
General Psychiatry 3(5): 535-544.
53. Tarver, Erin C., and Shannon Sullivan, eds. Feminist
Interpretations of William James. Penn State Press, 2016.
54. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perversion
55. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taryn_Brumfitt
56.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93animal_hybrid
57. body fluids or corporeal flows: tears, amniotic fluids, sweat, pus,
menstrual blood, vomit, saliva, phlegm, seminal fluids, urine, blood,
tears, saliva, faeces, urine, vomit, mucus –
but also the fetus/baby, ‘waters’, colostrum, breast milk, afterbirth
58. Holliday, Ruth, John Hassard, and Jon Binnie, (eds.), Contested
bodies. London: Routledge, 2001.
59 Unheimlich, verbergenden Rückzug in das Haus und damit auf ein Geheimnis, intim. Everything is
unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light; UNWELCOME
TRUTH; REVELATION.

uncanny return of the past abject with relation to the 'uncanny stranger'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny

See also
Creepiness, Evil eye, Liminality, Simulacrum
60. Compagna, Diego, and Stefanie Steinhart, eds. Monsters, monstrosities,
and the monstrous in culture and society. Vernon Press, 2020.
61. Beal, Timothy K. Religion and its Monsters. Routledge, 2014.

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62. Shildrick, Margrit. 2002, Embodying the monster: Encounters with the
vulnerable self. Sage, London / Thousand Oaks / New Delhi.
62. bar Judah in Beal (2002:63) Behold now its strength is in its loins [Job 40: 1 6a] -
this refers to the male; and its might is in the muscles of its belly [Job 40: 1
6br-this refers to the female.
63. ofel ("gloom ") in the sense of calarnity or cosrnic breakdown, see ,
e.g. , .Job 23: 1 7; 30:26
64.sexual preference for disabled (travesty or empathy?):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_to_disability
65.disorder in one of these sources??
66. Plate, S. Brent, and David Jasper, eds. Imag (in) ing otherness: Filmic
visions of living together. Vol. 7. Oxford University Press, 1999.
67. subtle x sublime
68. van Bekkum, Koert, Jaap Dekker, Henk R. van den Kamp, and Eric Peels,
eds. Playing with Leviathan: interpretation and reception of monsters from
the Biblical world. Brill, 2017.
69. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_beasts_in_folklore
70. Person, Ethel S. "Creativity and Perversion." Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 36, no. 4 (1988): 1067-1071.
17 Federico Palmieri di Pietro (Independent Scholar, Rome), Review of
Carole M. Cusack and Pavol Kosnáč (eds), Fiction, Invention and Hyper-
reality: From Popular Culture to Religion, Routledge, 2017.
18 Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality: An Introduction
Carole M. Cusack and Pavol Kosnáč
=these 10+11
3x Allen Dyssel+
24x RPsych+(= 37)
+9=46:Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and
Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds (Leo
Braudy)

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Michael Hagner (Hrsg.): Der falsche Körper. Beiträge zu einer
Geschichte der Monstrositäten. o. V., Göttingen 1995.
Compagna, Diego, and Stefanie Steinhart, eds. Monsters,
monstrosities, and the monstrous in culture and society. Vernon
Press, 2020.HAVE
Quiñones, Harry Vélez. Monstrous Displays: Representation and
Perversion in Spanish Literature. Vol. 5. University Press of the
South, Incorporated, 1999. Monstrous Displays explores how Spanish
literature from the early seventeenth to the twentieth century represents
some behaviors, ideologies, and identities as perverse. It shows the
ways in which narratives of perversion, steeped in religious, legal, and
scientific strictures, appropriate the language of a highly ambiguous
discourse, that of monstrosity, to render visible their abhorrent and
alluring qualities. Through readings of overlooked aspects of classic texts
(Lope de Vega's El Castigo sin Verganza, Benito Pérez Galdos´Doña
Perfecta) and non-traditional interpretations of lesser-known texts,
Vélez-Quiñones shows how the presence of a monstrous order of things
can sometimes conceal a more troubling and relevant domain of
perversion, and how sometimes, instead, it indicates a subversive
political program. With its use of a wide variety of theoretical discourses
- Renaissance teratological treatises as well as the work of Judith Butler,
Jonathan Dollimore, Marjorie Garber, and others - Monstrous Displays
will engage readers and scholars in the fields of Hispanic Studies, Queer
Theory, and Gender Studies.
Huang, Han-yu. "Monsters, Perversion, and Enjoyment: Toward
a Psychoanalytic Theory of Postmodern Horror." Concentric:
Literary and Cultural Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 87-110.
Beal, Timothy K. Religion and its Monsters. Routledge,
2014.HAVE
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
NEUROSEN UND PERVERSIONEN IN IHREM BEZUG ZUM
KÖRPERBILD in Widmer, Peter. Metamorphosen des
Signifikanten. transcript Verlag, 2015.151-164.
Wiki x alle tale behemoth
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Wiki x alle tale leviathan
Wiki x alle tale Monster
Wiki x alle tale Monstrosity
Wiki x alle tale perversion
Screl+
Monstrosities in religious fantasy fiction imagination
Ucronia
Utopia
Lies, myths, propaganda+ fake news x censure?!, fake fiction!
Postmodernism denounced order and ordering principles in favour of
otherness and difference and created a substantial distance between
language and reality
The genre of fantasy fiction grew from religion and folklore as writers
began to imagine worlds beyond our own. They borrowed themes and
ideas from the world around them and weaved them into their own
narratives.
Religious books can be either fiction or non-fiction. For instance, most
religious people view the holy texts of their religion to be non-fiction..
Fiction in religion
Religion in fiction
Fictional religion
papel de la imaginación y ficción en la construcción de la realidad
imaginación y la ficción en diversas performances literaria-poéticas o
mítico-religiosas
Disabled, abject, devil (male), Putin and political threats=???
Irony
subversion
All turned upside down, -clown, Lupercalia and carnival
Surreal
8
:::
The Play of the Imagination: Toward a Psychoanalysis of
Culture (Pruyser, 1983)
“Monster” bodies in the Hebrew Bible
Leviathan
B...?
disabled
product of sin, e.g. incest
monstrosities
animal bodies
the speaking serpent in Eden
the blessing ass in Numbers
figures
“Monster” bodies in the Hebrew Bible
Leviathan
B...?
disabled
product of sin, e.g. incest
monstrosities
animal bodies
the speaking serpent in Eden
the blessing ass in Numbers
figures
………………….
7 Key words:
1bod-, religio-, 2perver-, monst-, fict-, imaginat-, fantas-, 3creat-,
grotesque,

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Disabled, abject (female), devil (male), animal-istic, anima, shadow=id
(polymorph perverse), superego as demon, id through eyes of
superego, play, with transitional object, in transitional space, psych-,
anxiety, play, laughter, sublimat…
….Putin and political threats=???
Maar onder radar kan mens ander empaties bereik
Geen bedreiging
no anxiety, no arousal, just peace,
Irony
subversion
All turned upside down, -clown, Lupercalia and carnival
Surreal
…..
Either guilty due to superego or angry due to id
Either dominant through bullying with guilt-attribution as superego or
submissive as id
Even from condescending praise to make other dependent
Fetish and perversion as addiction, dependency, but not always oral
Ego (rescuer) should liberate id (victim) from superego (perpetrator) =
trauma
….
Abjection is a concept in critical theory referring to becoming? cast off
and separated from? norms and rules, especially on the scale? of society
and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that
which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts.[1]
Among critical interpretations of abjection is Julia Kristeva's, who
pursued an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980
work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Kristeva describes
subjective? horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual
experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva
calls one's typically? repressed "corporeal reality", or a breakdown in
distinctions between what is Self and what is Other.[2]

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Kristeva's concept of abjection is used commonly to analyze popular
cultural narratives of horror, and discriminatory behavior manifesting in
misogyny, homophobia and genocide. The concept of abjection builds
on the traditional psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques
Lacan, whose studies often narrowed in on the experience of the
disintegration of personal distinctions, through neurosis in Freud and
psychosis in Lacan.[2][3]
In literary critical theory
Drawing on the French tradition of interest in the monstrous (e.g.,
novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline),[4] and of the subject as grounded in
"filth" (e.g., psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan),[5] Julia Kristeva developed
the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by or disturbs social
reason – the communal consensus that underpins a social order.[6] The
"abject" exists accordingly somewhere between the concept of an object
and the concept of the subject, representing taboo elements of the self
barely separated off in a liminal space.[7] Kristeva claims that within the
boundaries of what one defines as subject – a part of oneself – and
object – something that exists independently of oneself – there resides
pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one's identity
that has since been rejected – the abject.

However, Kristeva created a distinction in the true meaning of abjection:


"It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but
what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."[8]
Since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to
face it is an inherently traumatic experience, as with the repulsion
presented by confrontation with filth, waste, or a corpse – an object
which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a
subject.[9] Thus the sense of the abject complements the existence of
the superego – the representative of culture, of the symbolic order:[10] in
Kristeva's aphorism, "To each ego its object, to each superego its
abject."[11]

From Kristeva's psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is done to the part


of ourselves that we exclude: the mother. We must abject the maternal,
the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity.[9]
Abjection occurs on the micro level of the speaking being, through their
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subjective dynamics, as well as on the macro level of society, through
"language as a common and universal law". We use rituals, specifically
those of defilement, to attempt to maintain clear boundaries between
nature and society, the semiotic and the symbolic, paradoxically both
excluding and renewing contact with the abject in the ritual act.[12]

The concept of abjection is often coupled (and sometimes confused) with


the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like",
or foreign, yet familiar.[13] The abject can be uncanny in the sense that
we can recognize aspects in it, despite its being "foreign": a corpse,
having fallen out of the symbolic order, creates abjection through its
uncanniness[14] – creates a cognitive dissonance.

Cases
Abjection is a major theme of the 1949 work The Thief's Journal (Journal
du Voleur) by French author Jean Genet, a fictionalised account of his
wanderings through Europe in the 1930s, wherein he claims as a
criminal outcast to actively seek abjections as an existentialist form of
"sainthood"[15]
The film Alien (1979) has been analysed as an example of how in horror
and science fiction monstrous representations of the female resonate
with the abject archaic figure of the mother.[16] Bodily dismemberment,
forcible impregnation, and the chameleon nature of the alien itself may
all be seen as explorations of phantasies of the primal scene, and of the
encounter with the boundaryless nature of the original abject mother.[17]
The 1990s-era Australian literary genre grunge lit often focuses on young
adult characters with "abject" bodies [18] that are deteriorating and
characters facing health problems. For example, the male and female
lead characters in Andrew McGahan's book Praise, Gordon Buchanan
and Cynthia Lamonde, both have diseased bodies, with Cynthia facing
skin that breaks out in rashes. Karen Brooks states that Clare Mendes'
Drift Street, Edward Berridge's The Lives of the Saints, and Praise
"...explor[e] the psychosocial and psychosexual limitations of young
sub/urban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed
boundaries defining...self and other" and "opening up" new "limnal
[boundary] spaces" where the concept of an abject human body can be
explored.[19] Brooks states that the marginalized characters in The Lives
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of the Saints, Drift Street and Praise) are able to stay in "shit creek" (an
undesirable setting or situation) and "diver[t]... flows" of these "creeks",
thus claiming their rough settings' "limnality" (being in a border situation
or transitional setting) and their own "abjection" (having "abject bodies"
with health problems, disease, etc.) as "sites of symbolic empowerment
and agency".[20]
In social critical theory
"Abjection" is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized
groups, such as women, unwed mothers, people of minority religious
faiths, sex workers, convicts, and poor and disabled people. From a
deconstruction of sexual discourses and gender history Ian McCormick
has outlined the recurring links between pleasurable transgressive
desire, deviant categories of behaviour and responses to body fluids in
18th and 19th-century discussions of prostitution, sodomy, and
masturbation (self-pollution, impurity, uncleanness).[21][22] The term
space of abjection is also used, referring to a space that abjected things
or beings inhabit.[citation needed]

In organizational studies
Organizational theory literature on abjection has attempted to illuminate
various ways in which institutions come to silence, exclude or disavow
feelings, practices, groups or discourses within the workplace. Studies
have examined and demonstrated the manner in which people adopt
roles, identities and discourses to avoid the consequences of social and
organizational abjection.[23] In such studies the focus is often placed
upon a group of people within an organization or institution that fall
outside of the norm, thus becoming what Kristeva terms "the one by
whom the abject exists," or "the deject" people.[24] Institutions and
organizations typically rely on rituals and other structural practices to
protect symbolic elements from the semiotic, both in a grander
organizational focus that emphasizes the role of policy-making, and in a
smaller interpersonal level that emphasizes social rejection. Both the
organizational and interpersonal levels produce a series of exclusionary
practices that create a "zone of inhabitability" for staff perceived to be in
opposition to the organizational norms.

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One such method is that of "collective instruction," which refers to a
strategy often used to defer, render abject and hide the inconvenient
"dark side" of the organization, keeping it away from view through
corporate forces.[25] This is the process by which an acceptable, unified
meaning is created – for example, a corporation's or organization's
mission statement. Through the controlled release of information and
belief or reactionary statements, people are gradually exposed to a firm's
persuasive interpretation of an event or circumstance, that could have
been considered abject. This spun meaning developed by the firm
becomes shared throughout a community. That event or circumstance
comes to be interpreted and viewed in a singular way by many people,
creating a unified, accepted meaning. The purpose such strategies serve
is to identify and attempt to control the abject, as the abject ideas
become ejected from each individual memory.

Organizations such as hospitals must negotiate the divide between the


symbolic and the semiotic in a unique manner.[26] Nurses, for example,
are confronted with the abject in a more concrete, physical fashion due
to their proximity to the ill, wounded and dying. They are faced with the
reality of death and suffering in a way not typically experienced by
hospital administrators and leaders. Nurses must learn to separate
themselves and their emotional states from the circumstances of death,
dying and suffering they are surrounded by. Very strict rituals and power
structures are used in hospitals, which suggests that the dynamics of
abjection have a role to play in understanding not only how anxiety
becomes the work of the health team and the organization, but also how
it is enacted at the level of hospital policy.

In sociological studies
The abject is a concept that is often used to describe bodies and things
that one finds repulsive or disgusting, and in order to preserve one's
identity they are cast out. Kristeva used this concept to analyze
xenophobia and antisemitism, and was therefore the first to apply the
abject to cultural analysis.[27] Imogen Tyler[28] sought to make the
concept more social in order to analyze abjection as a social and lived
process and to consider both those who abject and those who find
themselves abjected, between representation of the powerful and the
resistance of the oppressed. Tyler conducted an examination into the
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way that contemporary Britain had labelled particular groups of people –
mostly minority groups – as revolting figures, and how those individuals
revolt against their abject identity, also known as marginalization,
stigmatizing and/or social exclusion.

Exploration has also been done into the way people look at others whose
bodies may look different from the norm due to illness, injury or birth
defect. Researchers such as Frances[29] emphasize the importance of
the interpersonal consequences that result from this looking. A person
with a disability, by being similar to us and also different, is the person by
whom the abject exists and people who view this individual react to that
abjection by either attempting to ignore and reject it, or by attempting to
engage and immerse themselves in it. In this particular instance, Frances
claims, the former manifests through the refusal to make eye contact or
acknowledge the presence of the personal with a disability, while the
latter manifests through intrusive staring. The interpersonal
consequences that result from this are either that the person with a
disability is denied and treated as an 'other' – an object that can be
ignored – or that the individual is clearly identified and defined as a
deject.

In psychotherapy
By bringing focus onto concepts such as abjection, psychotherapists
may allow for the exploration of links between lived experience and
cultural formations in the development of particular psychopathologies.
Bruan Seu demonstrated the critical importance of bringing together
Foucauldian ideas of self-surveillance and positioning in discourse with a
psychodynamic theorization in order to grasp the full significance of
psychological impactors, such as shame.[30]

Concerning psychopathologies such as body dysmorphic disorder


(BDD), the role of the other – actual, imagined or fantasized – is central,
and ambivalence about the body, inflated by shame, is the key to this
dynamic. Parker noted that individuals suffering from BDD are sensitive
to the power, pleasure and pain of being looked at, as their objective
sense of self dominates any subjective sense. The role of the other has
become increasingly significant to developmental theories in
15
contemporary psychoanalysis, and is very evident in body image as it is
formed through identification, projection and introjection. Those
individuals with BDD consider a part of their body unattractive or
unwanted, and this belief is exacerbated by shame and the impression
that others notice and negatively perceive the supposed physical flaw,
which creates a cycle. Over time, the person with BDD begins to view
that part of their body as being separate from themselves, a rogue body
part – it has been abjected.[31]

There are also those who experience social anxiety, who experience the
subjectification of being abject is a similar yet different way to those with
BDD. Abject, here, refers to marginally objectionable material that does
not quite belong in the greater society as a whole – whether this not-
belonging is real or imagined is irrelevant, only that it is perceived.[32]
For those with social anxiety, it is their entire social self which is
perceived to be the deject, straying away from normal social rituals and
capabilities.

Studying abjection has proven to be suggestive and helpful for


considering the dynamics of self and body hatred.[33] This carries
interesting implications for studying such disorders as separation anxiety,
biologically centered phobias, and post traumatic stress disorder.

In art

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The roots of abject art go back a long way. The Tate defines abject art as
that which "explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of
cleanliness and propriety, particularly referencing the body and bodily
functions."[34] Painters expressed a fascination for blood long before the
Renaissance but it was not until the Dada movement that the fascination
with transgression and taboo made it possible for abject art, as a
movement, to exist. It was influenced by Antonin Artaud's Theatre of
16
Cruelty. The Whitney Museum in New York City identified abject art in
1993.[35][36]

It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese


actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's
idea of a gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) led to his setting up the radical
theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater. The group used
animal carcasses and bloodshed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time
in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas
Mekas. Nitsch organised a series of performances which influenced the
radical New York art scene. Other members of the Viennese Actionists,
Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on
performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly
urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade. Rudolf
Schwarzkogler is known for his photos dealing with the abject. In the late
1960s, performance art become popular in New York, including by
Carolee Schneemann. Mary Kelly, Genesis P. Orridge and GG Allin did
this type of art.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of
a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance
artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie
Lee and Kira O' Reilly. Kristeva herself associated aesthetic experience
of the abject, such as art and literature, with poetic catharsis – an impure
process that allows the artist or author to protect themselves from the
abject only by immersing themselves within it.[37]

In the late 1990s, the abject became a theme of radical Chinese


performance artists Zhu Yu and Yang Zhichao. The abject also began to
influence mainstream artists including Louise Bourgeois, Helen
Chadwick, Gilbert and George, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Jake and
Dinos Chapman who were all included in the 1993 Whitney show.[38]
Other artists working with abjection include New York photographers,
Joel Peter Witkin, whose book Love and Redemption and Andres
Serrano whose piece entitled Piss Christ caused a scandal in 1989.

17
In 2015, Welsh poet RJ Arkhipov wrote a series of poems using his own
blood as ink to protest the men who have sex with men blood donor
controversy in the United Kingdom.[39][40][41][42] The poems were later
published by Zuleika as Visceral: The Poetry of Blood alongside
photographs in which the author uses his own blood as an artistic
medium.[43][44]

See also
Abhuman
Alterity
Antihumanism
Georges Bataille
Limit-experience
Queer theory
Transitional object
References
Childers, Joseph (1995). Childers, Joseph; Hentzi, Gary (eds.). The
Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. p. 1. ISBN
978-0231072434.
Gross, Elizabeth (2012). "The Body of Signification". In Fletcher, John;
Benjamin, Andrew (eds.). Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of
Julia Kristeva. Routledge. pp. 92–93. ISBN 978-0415522939.
Sjhölm, Cecelia (2009). "Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the
Resistance to Commodification". In Oliver, Kelly; Keltner, S. K. (eds.).
Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva.
State University of New York Press. pp. 181–88. ISBN 978-1438426495.
Geoffrey Brereton, A Short History of French Literature (1954), p. 246.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
(1994), p. 258.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982)m p. 65.
Childers/Hentzi, p. 308.

18
Kristeva, "Powers of Horror", p. 4; Guberman, "Julia Kristeva
Interviews", (1996).
Kristeva, Julia (1982). "Approaching Abjection". Powers of Horror: An
Essay on Abjection (PDF). Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, p. 15.
Kristeva, p. 2.
Barbara Creed, in Ken Gelder, The Horror Reader (2000), p. 64.
Childers/Hentzi, p. 1
Winifred Menninghaus, Disgust (2003), p. 374.
Gene A. Plunka, The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet (1992), p. 49.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine (1993), p. 16.
Creed, p. 17 and p. 26–9.
Gelder K. and Salzman P. After the celebration: Australian fiction 1989–
2007. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009.
Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity
in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18 (4): 87–99.
Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity
in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18 (4): 87–99.
Sexual Outcasts. 4 vols., edited with introductions by Ian McCormick
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
Salih, Sara (2002). Judth Butler (PDF). p. 63. Retrieved 13 May 2017.
Kenny (2010); Bulter (2004); cited in Risque, "States of Abjection"
(2013), p. 1279–80.
"Powers of Horror", p. 8.
Sorenson, "Changing the memory of suffering: An organizational
aesthetics on the dark side" (2014), p. 281–3.
Risq, "States of Abjection" (2013), p. 1279.
Oliver, "Psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and politics in the work of Kristeva"
(2010).
"Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain"
(2013), p. 599
19
"Damaged or unusual bodies: Staring, or seeing and feeling" (2014), p.
198–200.
cited in Dryden, Ussher and Perz, "Young women's construction of their
post-cancer fertility" (2014), p. 1343.
Rozsika Parker (2014). "Critical looks: An analysis of body dysmorphic
disorder". British Journal of Psychotherapy. 30 (4): 440.
doi:10.1111/bjp.12119.
Schott & Sordengaard, "School bullying: New theories in context"
(2014).
Dryden, Ussher & Perz, "Young women's construction of their post-
cancer fertility" (2014); Parker, "Critical looks: An analysis of body
dysmorphic disorder" (2014); Schott & Sordengaard, "School bullying:
New theories in context" (2014).
"Abject Art". Tate.
Foster, Hal. "Obscene, abject, traumatic." October (1996): 107–124.
Kutzbach, Konstanze; Mueller, Monika (2007), The abject of desire : the
aestheticization of the unaesthetic in contemporary literature and culture,
Rodopi, ISBN 978-90-420-2264-5.
Kristeva, "Powers of Horror" (1982), p. 15; Spittle, "'Did this game scare
you? Because it sure as hell scared me!' F.E.A.R., the abject and the
uncanny" (2011); Oliver, "Psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and politics in the
work of Kristeva" (2009).
"Abject Art" Retrieved on 2010-11-09.
"This man is writing poetry in his own blood to protest gay blood
donations rules". PinkNews - Gay news, reviews and comment from the
world's most read lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans news service. 2017-
06-23. Retrieved 2020-03-18.
"Poet invited to present work at Elysee Palace in Paris by French
President Macron". South Wales Argus. Retrieved 2020-03-18.
"Welsh Poet RJ Arkhipov Works With His Own Blood to Protest Ban On
Gay Donors". www.out.com. 2015-09-25. Retrieved 2020-03-18.
"Gay poet writes in his own blood to protest donation ban". PinkNews -
Gay news, reviews and comment from the world's most read lesbian,

20
gay, bisexual, and trans news service. 2018-07-30. Retrieved 2020-03-
18.
"I wrote a book of poetry in my own blood to protest unfair blood donor
rules for gay men". inews.co.uk. 14 June 2018. Retrieved 2020-03-18.
"Visceral: The Poetry of Blood". Scottish Poetry Library. Retrieved 2020-
03-18.
Further reading
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (1966)
Frances, J. (2014). "Damaged or unusual bodies: Staring, or seeing and
feeling". Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. 4 (9): 198–210.
doi:10.1080/17432979.2014.931887.
Guberman, R.M. (1996). Julia Kristeva interviews. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Oliver, K. (2009). Psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and politics in the work of
Kristeva. SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis,
Literature.
Rizq, R. (2013). "States of abjection". Organization Studies. 9 (34):
1277–1297. doi:10.1177/0170840613477640.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet (1952) (Note: Jean Genet wrote a journal
in which abjection was an important theme)
Tyler, I. (2013). "Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in
neoliberal Britain". European Journal of Communication. 5 (28): 599.
doi:10.1177/0267323113494050.
https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/
kristevaabject.html
ACCORDING TO JULIA KRISTEVA in the Powers of Horror, the abject
refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in
meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object
or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a
reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own
materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open

21
wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm
milk.

Kristeva's understanding of the "abject" provides a helpful term to


contrast to Lacan's "object of desire" or the "objet petit a." (See Lacan
Module on Desire.) Whereas the objet petit a allows a subject to
coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of
meaning and intersubjective community to persist, the abject "is radically
excluded and," as Kristeva explains, "draws me toward the place where
meaning collapses" (Powers 2). It is neither object nor subject; the abject
is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic order.
(On the symbolic order, see, in particular, the Lacan module on
psychosexual development.) As Kristeva puts it, "Abjection preserves
what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the
immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another
body in order to be" (Powers 10). The abject marks what Kristeva terms
a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the
subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before
even the establishment of the opposition, conscious/unconscious.
Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development
when we established a border or separation between human and animal,
between culture and that which preceded it. On the level of archaic
memory, Kristeva refers to the primitive effort to separate ourselves from
the animal: "by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a
precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives
of sex and murder" (Powers 12-13). On the level of our individual
psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we
separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a
boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other." (See
the Kristeva Module on Psychosexual Development.) As explained in the
previous module, the abject is "a precondition of narcissism" (Powers
13), which is to say, a precondition for the narcissism of the mirror stage,
which occur after we establish these primal distinctions. The abject thus
at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and
constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a reestablishment of our
"primal repression." The abject has to do with "what disturbs identity,
system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Powers
4) and, so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes are

22
abject precisely because they draw attention to the "fragility of the law"
(Powers 4).

More specifically, Kristeva associates the abject with the eruption of the
Real into our lives. In particular, she associates such a response with our
rejection of death's insistent materiality. Our reaction to such abject
material re-charges what is essentially a pre-lingual response. Kristeva
therefore is quite careful to differentiate knowledge of death or the
meaning of death (both of which can exist within the symbolic order) from
the traumatic experience of being actually confronted with the sort of
materiality that traumatically shows you your own death:

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
encephalograph, 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. These body fluids,
this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition
as a living being. (Powers 3)

The corpse especially exemplifies Kristeva's concept since it literalizes


the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that is
crucial for the establishment of identity and for our entrance into the
symbolic order. What we are confronted with when we experience the
trauma of seeing a human corpse (particularly the corpse of a friend or
family member) is our own eventual death made palpably real. As
Kristeva puts it, "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is
the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject" (Powers 4 ).

The abject must also be disguised from desire (which is tied up with the
meaning-structures of the symbolic order). It is associated, rather, with
both fear and jouissance. In phobia, Kristeva reads the trace of a pre-
linguistic confrontation with the abject, a moment that precedes the
recognition of any actual object of fear: "The phobic object shows up at
the place of non-objectal states of drive and assumes all the mishaps of
drive as disappointed desires or as desires diverted from their objects"
23
(Powers 35 ). The object of fear is, in other words, a substitute formation
for the subject's abject relation to drive. The fear of, say, heights really
stands in the place of a much more primal fear: the fear caused by the
breakdown of any distinction between subject and object, of any
distinction between ourselves and the world of dead material objects.
Kristeva also associates the abject with jouissance: "One does not know
it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and
painfully. A passion" (Powers 9 ). This statement appears paradoxical,
but what Kristeva means by such statements is that we are, despite
everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject (much as we
are repeatedly drawn to trauma in Freud's understanding of repetition
compulsion). To experience the abject in literature carries with it a certain
pleasure but one that is quite different from the dynamics of desire.
Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject, rather, with
poetic catharsis: "an impure process that protects from the abject only by
dint of being immersed in it" (Powers 29 ).

The abject for Kristeva is, therefore, closely tied both to religion and to
art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: "The various
means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the
history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called
art, both on the far and near side of religion" (Powers 17). According to
Kristeva, the best modern literature (Dostoevsky, Proust, Artaud, Céline,
Kafka, etc.) explores the place of the abject, a place where boundaries
begin to breakdown, where we are confronted with an archaic space
before such linguistic binaries as self/other or subject/object. The
transcendent or sublime, for Kristeva, is really our effort to cover over the
breakdowns (and subsequent reassertion of boundaries) associated with
the abject; and literature is the privileged space for both the sublime and
abject: "On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the
apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical
conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where
identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double,
fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject" (Powers
207 ). According to Kristeva, literature explores the way that language is
structured over a lack, a want. She privileges poetry, in particular,
because of poetry's willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and
meaning, thus laying bear the fact that language is at once arbitrary and
limned with the abject fear of loss: "Not a language of the desiring
exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract
24
of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of
the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges" (Powers 38 ).
Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject." Introductory Guide
to Critical Theory.
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (French: Pouvoirs de l'horreur.
Essai sur l'abjection) is a 1980 book by Julia Kristeva. The work is an
extensive treatise on the subject of abjection,[1] in which Kristeva draws
on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror,
marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy,
the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist
criticism and queer theory.
According to Kristeva, the abject marks a "primal order" that escapes
signification in the symbolic order; the term is used to refer to the human
reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by
the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self
and the other.
Compared to Lacan
Kristeva's understanding of the "abject" provides a helpful term to
contrast to Lacan's objet petit a (or the "object - cause of desire").
Whereas the objet petit a allows a subject to coordinate his or her
desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of meaning and intersubjective
community to persist, the abject "is radically excluded and," as Kristeva
explains, "draws me toward the place where meaning collapses" (Powers
2). It is neither object nor subject; the abject is situated, rather, at a place
before we entered into the symbolic order. (On the symbolic order, see,
in particular, the Lacan module on psychosexual development.) As
Kristeva puts it, "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-
objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body
becomes separated from another body in order to be" (Powers 10). The
abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that
precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of
desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the
opposition between consciousness and the unconscious.

Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development


when we established a border or separation between human and animal,
between culture and that which preceded it. On the level of archaic
25
memory, Kristeva refers to the primitive effort to separate ourselves from
the animal: "by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a
precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives
of sex and murder" (Powers 12-13). On the level of our individual
psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we
separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a
boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other." (See
the Kristeva Module on Psychosexual Development.) The abject is "a
precondition of narcissism" (Powers 13), which is to say, a precondition
for the narcissism of the mirror stage, which occur after we establish
these primal distinctions. The abject thus at once represents the threat
that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a
breakdown: a reestablishment of our "primal repression." The abject has
to do with "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules" (Powers 4) and, so, can also include crimes like
Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject precisely because they draw attention
to the "fragility of the law" (Powers 4).

Eruption of the Real


More specifically, Kristeva associates the abject with the eruption of the
Real into our lives. In particular, she associates such a response with our
rejection of death's insistent materiality. Our reaction to such abject
material recharges what is essentially a pre-lingual response. Kristeva,
therefore, is quite careful to differentiate knowledge of death or the
meaning of death (both of which can exist within the symbolic order) from
the traumatic experience of being actually confronted with the sort of
materiality that traumatically shows one's own death:

"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
encephalograph, 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. These body fluids,
this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition
as a living being." (Powers 3)

26
The corpse especially exemplifies Kristeva's concept since it literalizes
the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that is
crucial for the establishment of identity and for our entrance into the
symbolic order. What we are confronted with when we experience the
trauma of seeing a human corpse (particularly the corpse of a friend or
family member) is our own eventual death made palpably real. As
Kristeva puts it, "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is
the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject" (Powers 4).

Comparison with desire


The abject must also be distinguished from desire (which is tied up with
the meaning-structures of the symbolic order). It is associated, rather,
with both fear and jouissance. In phobia, Kristeva reads the trace of a
pre-linguistic confrontation with the abject, a moment that precedes the
recognition of any actual object of fear: "The phobic object shows up at
the place of non-objectal states of drive and assumes all the mishaps of
drive as disappointed desires or as desires diverted from their objects"
(Powers 35 ). The object of fear is, in other words, a substitute formation
for the subject's abject relation to drive. The fear of, say, heights really
stands in the place of a much more primal fear: the fear caused by the
breakdown of any distinction between subject and object, of any
distinction between ourselves and the world of dead material objects
(reference page?).

Kristeva also associates the abject with jouissance: "One does not know
it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and
painfully. A passion" (Powers 9). This statement appears paradoxical,
but what Kristeva means by such statements is that we are, despite
everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject (much as we
are repeatedly drawn to trauma in Freud's understanding of repetition
compulsion). To experience the abject in literature carries with it a certain
pleasure but one that is quite different from the dynamics of desire.
Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject, rather, with
poetic catharsis: "an impure process that protects from the abject only by
dint of being immersed in it" (Powers 29).

Purifying the abject


27
The abject for Kristeva is, therefore, closely tied both to religion and to
art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: "The various
means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the
history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called
art, both on the far and near side of religion" (Powers 17). According to
Kristeva, the best modern literature (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust,
Jorge Luis Borges, Antonin Artaud, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Franz Kafka,
etc.) explores the place of the abject, a place where boundaries begin to
break down, where people are confronted with an archaic space before
such linguistic binaries as self/other or subject/object.

The transcendent or sublime, for Kristeva, is really our effort to cover


over the breakdowns (and subsequent reassertion of boundaries)
associated with the abject; and literature is the privileged space for both
the sublime and abject: "On close inspection, all literature is probably a
version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its
sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline
cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so
—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered,
abject" (Powers 207 ). According to Kristeva, literature explores the way
that language is structured over a lack, a want. She privileges poetry, in
particular, because of poetry's willingness to play with grammar,
metaphor and meaning, thus laying bare the fact that language is at once
arbitrary and limned with the abject fear of loss: "Not a language of the
desiring exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social
contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of
want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges" (Powers 38
).[2]

References
Fletcher & Benjamin, "Abjection, melancholia and love: The work of Julia
Kristeva" (2012), p. 93
Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject." Introductory Guide
to Critical Theory.
<http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevaabject.htm
l>
……………………………………………
28
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/leviathan>:
===========================

Leviathan
by Alessandro Rivera
Dexter Callender

Monsters inspire fear, pose an existential threat, and embody the


forces of chaos. For the biblical writers and their audiences,
Leviathan was just that, and perhaps more.

How is Leviathan typically portrayed?

Biblical references locate Leviathan within a widespread and venerable


tradition of watery serpentine beings. Such monsters embody chaos as
cosmic foes of an order-imposing deity. According to Isa 27:1 the Lord
will punish Leviathan, “the fleeing serpent,” “the twisting serpent,”
and “the dragon”—phrases that describe the similarly named Litan of
Ugaritic literature (KTU 1.5 i:1-3). Similarly, in Ps 74:13-14, the
psalmist seeks relief from God, who “broke the heads of the dragon in
the waters” and “crushed the heads of Leviathan.” Within this broad
tradition also stand Tiamat of the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Apopis of
Egyptian solar mythology, as well as other biblical figures such as
Rahab (see Job 26:12; Ps 89:10; Isa 51:10).

Is Leviathan always “evil” or a threat?

Most biblical portrayals cast Leviathan in starkly negative terms. In


29
the book of Job, Leviathan embodies the chaos behind Job’s misfortune
and provides a frame for the poetic dialogues that compose the main
section of the book. The dialogues open with Job cursing the day of
his birth, seeking even to expunge it by enlisting those “skilled to
rouse up Leviathan” (Job 3:8). The dialogues close with God
questioning Job’s knowledge of Leviathan (Job 41:1-34). It will not
submit to serving humans or be domesticated for play or trade (Job
41:4-6). It strikes fear into the gods (Job 41:25) and in the final
analysis “is king over all that are proud” (Job 41:34). Thus, Job’s
exemplary character (Job 1:1) is no match. His misfortune reflects a
chaos beyond human control. Yet this chaos remains under divine
control, which Job acknowledges in his final statement (Job 42:1-6).

One encounters a very different picture of Leviathan in Ps 104:26-27,


not of a monster but of a fully domesticated animal. Formed to play in
the sea or perhaps with the Lord (the Hebrew text supports either
reading), it looks to the deity for its food. Leviathan here is no
cosmic enemy to be vanquished; no threat or monster but almost a pet.
Yet the language reflects the control humans clearly lack over
Leviathan in Job 41:4-6. Leviathan’s transformation presents a
different image of the power of the Creator. Like the modern marine
park equivalent, the attraction is chaos held at bay.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alessandro Rivera is a senior at the University of Miami, majoring in
Religious Studies. He intends to continue his studies the field of
religion and is planning for a career in ministry or academia.
Alessandro is looking forward to starting his graduate studies toward
30
a Master of Divinity next fall.

Dexter Callender is associate professor of religion at the University


of Miami, Florida. He is the author of Adam in Myth and History
(Eisenbrauns, 2001). He specializes in myth theory and ancient Near
Eastern literature and history.
………………….
Is Religion Fiction?
If Jesus never lived, it would be another shocking example of religious
fakery.
Posted September 24, 2014

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As someone raised in a Christian country, I learned that there was a
historical Jesus. Now historical analysis cannot find clear evidence that
Jesus existed. If not, Christianity was fabricated, just like Mormonism and
other religions. Why would people choose to believe?

Given the depth of religious tradition in Christian countries, where the


“Christian era” calendar is based upon the life of Jesus, it would be
astonishing if there was no evidence of a historical Jesus. After all, in an
era when there were scores of messianic prophets, why would anyone
go to the trouble of making one up?

In History, Jesus Was a No Show

Various historical scholars attempted to authenticate Jesus in the


historical record, particularly in the work of Jesus-era writers. Michael

31
Paulkovich revived this project as summarized in the current issue of
Free Inquiry.

Paulkovich found an astonishing absence of evidence for the existence


of Jesus in history. “Historian Flavius Josephus published his Jewish
Wars circa 95 CE. He had lived in Japhia, one mile from Nazareth—yet
Josephus seems unaware of both Nazareth and Jesus.” He is at pains to
discredit interpolations in this work that “made him appear to write of
Jesus when he did not.” Most religious historians take a more nuanced
view agreeing that Christian scholars added their own pieces much later
but maintaining that the historical reference to Jesus was present in the
original. Yet, a fudged text is not compelling evidence for anything.

Paulkovich consulted no fewer than 126 historians (including Josephus)


who lived in the period and ought to have been aware of Jesus if he had
existed and performed the miracles that supposedly drew a great deal of
popular attention. Of the 126 writers who should have written about
Jesus, not a single one did so (if one accepts Paulkovich's view that the
Jesus references in Josephus are interpolated).

Paulkovich concludes:

"When I consider those 126 writers, all of whom should have heard of
Jesus but did not—and Paul and Marcion and Athenagoras and Matthew
with a tetralogy of opposing Christs, the silence from Qumram and
Nazareth and Bethlehem, conflicting Bible stories, and so many other
mysteries and omissions—I must conclude that Christ is a mythical
character."

He also considers striking similarities of Jesus to other God-sons such as


Mithra, Sandan, Attis, and Horus. Christianity has its own imitator.
Mormonism was heavily influenced by the Bible from which founder
Joseph Smith borrowed liberally.

Mormonism Fabricated in Plain Sight


32
We may not know for sure what happened two millennia ago but
Mormonism was fabricated in plain sight by a convicted conman.
According to Christopher Hitchens (1):

"In March, 1826, a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a 21-year-


old man of being a “disorderly person and an impostor.” That ought to
have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to
defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also
to claiming to possess dark or 'necromantic' powers."

Hitchens writes: “Quite recent scholarship has exposed every single


other Mormon “document” as at best a scrawny compromise and at worst
a pitiful fake…"

Smith’s legacy was cleaned up via subsequent “divine revelations” that


rejected first polygamy and then racism at convenient historical turning
points. So the historical development from fakery to respectable religion
is well-documented.

There is no reason to believe that the genesis of any major religion was
substantially different. This raises the question of why so many intelligent
people choose to believe religious fictions.

The most plausible explanation is that they cannot easily distinguish


between organized religion and confidence rackets.

Starting a Fake Religion

Religious people may find that hard to swallow, so it is interesting to see


what happens when someone sets out to found a fake religion. Would
this work, or would members see through the deception and promptly
leave?

33
American Indian film director Vikram Gandhi studied yogis and their
followers in India. He concluded that these holy men were confidence
tricksters, scores of whom plied their trade throughout India in the
manner of the Jesus story.

The filmmaker wondered whether he could pass himself off as a guru


here in the U.S. He cultivated a fake Indian accent, grew out his hair and
beard and reinvented himself as Sri Kumare, a mystic hailing from a
fictitious Indian village.

In the film, Kumare (2011) the director founds his cult in Arizona where
he unloads his bogus mysticism upon the unsuspecting public and soon
draws a group of devoted followers who seek his counsel on their life
problems and become frighteningly dependent upon his new-age advice.

The underlying psychology may be fairly simple. Common confidence


tricksters work their magic by telling victims what they want to hear. The
same is true of successful prophets who offer pie in the sky bye and bye
(2). The only reason that Jesus does not fit in this category is that he
probably never existed.

Sources

1. Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great: How religion poisons everything.


New York: Twelve.

2. Barber, N. (2012). Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of


earthly pleasures over pie in the sky. E-book, available at: Atheism-Will-
Replace-Religion
………….
Sogenannte Verschwörungstheoretiker
Oder wissenschaftliche Kritiker
34
Hermeneutics of suspicion
Subversive
resistance
Youngest child’s
As in Hebrew Bible
Ant-authoritarian
Media as voice / name (prohibited) of the father
Rebellion
Emancipation
Liberation
Freedom
Transgressive
Non-:repetitive, cyclic, compulsion, addictive, conservatism, non-creative,
preservation x destruction, in-finity, homogene, sameness, exclusive but
intrusive, on, trans-, re-ligio,
not inter-, re-ligio as integration to bigger unit!, +?
Certainty but boring obedience to ideal of superego
……………………………………………
Le corps comme miroir du monde
Auteur(s) :Janine Chassegué-Smirgel
Année de publication :
2003
Article rédigé par
Dominique Bourdin
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S'intéressant aux avatars de la représentation du corps humain dans la
psyché, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel montre les indices parfois éclatants
d'une désorganisation du rapport au corps révélant le fantasme d'un
corps éclaté, parfois inscrit jusque dans le réel. "L'explosion du corps
propre devient alors le reflet d'un monde dont le démantèlement est
ardemment souhaité". Relisant des auteurs chez qui l'extrémisme
politique était associé à des tendances suicidaires, elle met en évidence
l'orientation gnostique (formulée par le titre de la première partie :
"atteindre la lumière") commune au corps désarticulé tel qu'il est sensible
chez Michel Foucault et surtout chez Mishima, comme aux pratiques des
"extrémistes du sexe" qui ont besoin du jaillissement du sang pour en
quelque sorte faire advenir l'impossible. La perte de l'activité symbolique
est impliquée par la violence désintégratrice du corps, destructivité à
l'état pur dans le nazisme et le génocide, mais présente aussi dans
l'œuvre de Mishima ou chez Pasolini. Et Foucault décrit longuement le
supplice de Damiens au début de Surveiller et punir. La question du père
et celle du suicide sont envisagées à partir de l'œuve de Mishima
(notamment Le marin rejeté par la mer, de 1963).

La deuxième partie de l'ouvrage suit le fil de la révolte contre l'ordre


biologique. Une certaine façon de concevoir l'égalité des sexes au nom
de l'universalisme – l'idéologie queer de l'indétermination sexuelle – est
en fait une "réinvention de la misogynie", marquée par la fuite de la mère
et la destruction des différences ; la possibilité récente de choisir d'être
mère est en effet remise en question par une volonté de
"dématernisation", attaque contre le ventre maternel désireuse d'en
abroger la puissance, en particulier juridique (cf Marcela Iacoub),
maintenant qu'il ne s'agit plus d'un enfermement dans la fonction
procréatrice mais de l'acccomplissement d'un désir et d'une réalisation
de soi.

Un chapitre est consacré aux troubles alimentaires dans leur rapport à la


féminité, dans la mesure où l'adolescente se révolte contre son propre
corps confondu avec le ventre maternel ; les propos de l'auteur y sont
36
illustrés par des citations fortes et convaincantes de Petite, de
Geneviève Brissac ; anorexie et boulimie ont une visée autarcique,
traduisant le désir de se passer des êtres vivants. Une tendance
insistante à ignorer le développement et la maturation, et donc à tenir
compte de la prématuration du petit de l'homme qui implique qu'il ait à
apprendre, à tâtonner, à dépendre et à attendre est analysée sous le
titre "Animal, mon frère" (en mémoire de M. T. Neyraut-Suterman).

Un dernier chapitre, Œdipe et Psyché, résume des réflexions sur l'état de


la psychanalyse dans notre univers bouleversé, marqué par l'utopie de la
jouissance et l'utopie égalitaire dans laquelle l'égalité est trop souvent
comprise comme une négation des différences. Or la construction de
l'identité, nécessaire à l'équilibre psychique, est liée aux identifications
aux deux parents différemment sexués. Cette part de normativité est
incontournable, sous peine d'être ramené à l'attente d'un surhomme qui
est en fait inévitablement un dictateur, non pas tant mère du pervers en
ce qu'il berce d'illusions que figure combinée archaïque et dévoratrice.
Décréter les différences comme non significatives revient à refaire à
l'envers le chemin de l'hominisation pour retourner à l'indistinction et au
chaos, ce dont témoignent des œuvres littéraires, picturales et
cinématographiques d'une intense crudité, sans culpabilité décelable,
qui, tendant à promouvoir la déhiérarchisation des parties du corps entre
elles, au profit d'un corps sans différences, suscitent jouissance ou
terreur, perversion ou persécution – et visent finalement
l'indifférenciation entre la matière vivante et la matière morte.
………………………………………………………………………
According to the Swedish psychologist, Marianne Jeffmar, (1978:16;
1980:266) the imaginative processes of creative insight is the same as
the primary process and empirically measurable as syncretism or
association while ductive (both deductive and inductive), measurable as
flexibility or alternative interpretation, and annotative processes
measurable as exactness are the secondary process of psychoanalytic
theory. The former is most independent from the environment. The
cooperation of the imaginative and ductive processes results in creative
insight.
Jeffmar, Marianne. 1978. Intelligent eller kreativ?: synpunkter på kognitiv
aktivitet. Dejavu Publicering.

37
Jeffmar, Marianne. 1980. Den kreativa processen: pedagogiska
implikationer, Nordisk psykologi 32(3): 266-275.
…………….
ACCORDING TO JULIA KRISTEVA in the Powers of Horror, the abject
refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown
in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and
object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes
such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own
materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open
wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm
milk.
Kristeva's understanding of the "abject" provides a helpful term to
contrast to Lacan's "object of desire" or the "objet petit a." (See Lacan
Module on Desire.) Whereas the objet petit a allows a subject to
coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of
meaning and intersubjective community to persist, the abject "is radically
excluded and," as Kristeva explains, "draws me toward the place where
meaning collapses" (Powers 2). It is neither object nor subject; the
abject is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic
order. (On the symbolic order, see, in particular, the Lacan module on
psychosexual development.) As Kristeva puts it, "Abjection preserves
what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the
immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another
body in order to be" (Powers 10). The abject marks what Kristeva terms
a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the
subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before
even the establishment of the opposition, conscious/unconscious.
Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development
when we established a border or separation between human and animal,
between culture and that which preceded it. On the level of archaic
memory, Kristeva refers to the primitive effort to separate ourselves from
the animal: "by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a
precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives
of sex and murder" (Powers 12-13). On the level of our individual
psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we
separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a
boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other." (See
the Kristeva Module on Psychosexual Development.) As explained in the
38
previous module, the abject is "a precondition of narcissism" (Powers
13), which is to say, a precondition for the narcissism of the mirror stage,
which occur after we establish these primal distinctions. The abject thus
at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and
constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a reestablishment of our
"primal repression." The abject has to do with "what disturbs identity,
system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules"
(Powers 4) and, so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes
are abject precisely because they draw attention to the "fragility of the
law" (Powers 4).
More specifically, Kristeva associates the abject with the eruption of the
Real into our lives. In particular, she associates such a response with our
rejection of death's insistent materiality. Our reaction to such abject
material re-charges what is essentially a pre-lingual response. Kristeva
therefore is quite careful to differentiate knowledge of death or the
meaning of death (both of which can exist within the symbolic
order) from the traumatic experience of being actually confronted with
the sort of materiality that traumatically shows you your own death:
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
encephalograph, 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. These body
fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my
condition as a living being. (Powers 3)
The corpse especially exemplifies Kristeva's concept since it literalizes
the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that is
crucial for the establishment of identity and for our entrance into the
symbolic order. What we are confronted with when we experience the
trauma of seeing a human corpse (particularly the corpse of a friend or
family member) is our own eventual death made palpably real. As
Kristeva puts it, "The corpse, seen without God and outside of
science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject"
(Powers 4 ).
The abject must also be disguised from desire (which is tied up with
the meaning-structures of the symbolic order). It is associated, rather,
with both fear and jouissance. In phobia, Kristeva reads the trace of a
pre-linguistic confrontation with the abject, a moment that precedes??
39
the recognition of any actual object of fear: "The phobic object shows up
at the place of non-objectal states of drive? and assumes all the
mishaps? of drive as disappointed desires or as desires diverted from
their objects" (Powers 35 ). The object of fear is, in other words, a
substitute formation for the subject's abject relation to drive?. The
fear of, say, heights really stands in the place of a much more primal
fear: the fear caused by the breakdown of any distinction between
subject and object, of any distinction between ourselves and the
world of dead material objects. Kristeva also associates the abject with
jouissance: "One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys
in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully??. A passion" (Powers 9 ).
This statement appears paradoxical, but what Kristeva means by such
statements is that we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively
drawn to the abject (much as we are repeatedly drawn to trauma in
Freud's understanding of repetition compulsion). To experience the
abject in literature carries with it a certain pleasure but one that is quite
different? from the dynamics of desire. Kristeva associates this aesthetic
experience of the abject, rather, with poetic catharsis: "an impure
process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it"
(Powers 29 ).

The abject for Kristeva is, therefore, closely tied both to religion and to
art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: "The various
means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the
history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called
art, both on the far and near side of religion" (Powers 17). According to
Kristeva, the best modern literature (Dostoevsky, Proust, Artaud, Céline,
Kafka, etc.) explores the place of the abject, a place where
boundaries begin to breakdown, where we are confronted with an
archaic space before such linguistic binaries as self/other or
subject/object. The transcendent or sublime, for Kristeva, is really our
effort to cover over?? the breakdowns (and subsequent reassertion of
boundaries) associated with the abject; and literature is the privileged
space for both the sublime and abject: "On close inspection, all
literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me
rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions?? might be, on the
fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do
not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal,
metamorphosed, altered, abject" (Powers 207 ). According to Kristeva,
literature explores the way that language is structured over a lack, a
40
want?. She privileges poetry, in particular, because of poetry's
willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and meaning, thus laying
bear the fact that language is at once arbitrary and limned with the
abject fear of loss: "Not a language of the desiring?? exchange of
messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of
communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of the
fear that edges?? up to it and runs along its edges" (Powers 38 ).
…………….
Religion, Psychoanalysis

Jacques-Alain Miller

translated by Barbara P. Fulks

Dokoupil image

I. The Logic of the Great Man

I'm going to tell you what I was thinking, stuck in traffic for an hour and
fifteen minutes. I was thinking that this course was surely a ritual for me,
without my knowing it. I say this because it is clear that I was not paying
attention to exterior reality today. I heard at 8:00 am that there were
strikes in the transportation sector, but it slid like water off a duck's back.
I did not take the natural precautions because I was caught up in the
automaton that this practice entails, an automaton that implies what
Freud called — a denial of exterior reality. Anyway, this is what held me
up; I fell inside. When I finish this speech, I will reflect on what has just

41
happened to me, having perceived that this course is ritualized for me.
This can't go on.

1. Why Moses

Final message

Why Moses? Why did Freud need Moses, as Lacan asked himself in his
Seminar, L'envers de la psychanalyse? It's an historical fact that Freud
made Moses — his death, monotheistic religion, its survival, and its
persistence — the content of what Lacan called his final message. Of
course one takes into account the historical context in which Freud sent
this message: after having left Vienna and at a moment when the
scientific ideas — his own, stemming from the Enlightenment, with
modifications from Romanticism, these ideas which promised a future of
rationality and tolerance — were revealed to be only illusions.

This revelation, imposed on his contemporaries, echoed for more than


half a century and was carefully preserved in a certain number of
memorials from another time—from another time, as they say, that has
not been forgotten. Nonetheless, it was forgotten, as though what was
manifested from the resurgence of a barbarity—as one says, from
another time—could easily have been the entrance to the end of History.

Freud’s message thus remains a strange memento bequeathed to


posterity, initially bequeathed to those who took over from his discovery
and practice, in order that it be known that we remain tied to religion.
There is something of religion which continues to be written. And today
when religious belief flows into politics in multiple ways, how can we fail
to recognize it? One might predict that this is only a beginning. Religious
belief inspires unprecedented sacrifices, terrorist sacrifices which haunt
the planet, which disrupt international exchange, which have palpable
economic consequences. And then, here, in France, in a rather more
comic way at present, religion claims a new place in the common space,
in the public sphere, let us say even in the Republic itself.

42
Every day one can read in the press the tone with which an
interconfessional syndicate claims a new mode of presence. Ah! They
were all queued up there last week: the Papists supporting the Muslims,
who were agreeing with the Jews, and then, last in line, the Protestants,
even the most secular, who were claiming a right to the signifier, clothed
in vestments. This touches on the image of the body; they want to modify
the image of the body in the common space. The Republic does not
know what to do about these claims in which a marvelous vestimentary
ecumenicism is effected.

One is obviously forced to return to Freud’s illusion that religion had only
the future of an illusion in the age of science, and that it would be
effaced, exhausting what he called the interest—Interesse—of mankind.
He had isolated the element which is undemonstratable in religion yet
irrefutable, and he had the idea that the libido could be withheld by what
was irrefutable in religion.

Woman and Monotheistic Religion

Why did Freud need Moses? This is the main question of The Future of
an Illusion (1927). He released his Mosaic message from London and
seemed to say: “This illusion has a future.” Who is Moses? Many things.
A proper name. Someone. A man. The one Freud used in the title of his
book, L’homme Moïse et la religion monothéiste.

[...]

Art: Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Jesús dorado, inacabado, doble, acrylic on


canvas, 1986
courtesy of Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich.

43
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………
And the leviathan (=?) are portrayed as rather horrible, apparently
which is a body-image, including sexual fantasies(deleted). This will be
supported,
principles to an emotional fantasy principle (Adams 1996:8?), which
C ANIMAL BODIES???
water breaking forth towards? the behemoth’s mouth. As images the
hence the “supreme beast” [Clines 2011:1149]) ?? is mostly translated
as
probably imperfect but powerful bodies ? The former is grammatically
In sociology, Erving Goffman (1963:146) has already pointed out the
close
……………
Little used:
Van der Zwan, Pieter. 2021. The possible impact of animals on Job’s
body image: A psychoanalytical perspective, HTS Theological Studies
77(4): 1-9.

44
van Wolde, Ellen. "Leviathan’s Actions in Job 41: 22–24." Ve-’Ed Ya
‘aleh (Gen 2: 6), Volume 2: Essays in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern
Studies Presented to Edward L. Greenstein 6 (2021): 931. used?
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. 2003. Le corps comme miroir du monde.
Presses universitaires de France. Used?
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. 2006. Éthique et esthétique de la
perversion. Ceyzérieu: Editions Champ Vallon. Used?
Cusack, Carole M. & Kosnác, Pavol. 2017?. Fiction, invention and hyper-
reality: from popular culture to religion. London: Routledge.
Cusack, Carole M.2013. Play, narrative and the creation of religion:
extending the theoretical base of ‘invented religions’. Culture and religion
14(4): 362-377.
Cusack, Carole M. 2016a. Fiction into religion: imagination, other worlds,
and play in the formation of community. Religion 46(4): 575-590.
Dyssel, Allan. 2017. Sea monsters and other mythical creatures
associated with the primeval flood in the Old Testament: a history of
denial?. PhD dissertation. used?
Ansell, Nicholas, 2017, ‘Fantastic beasts and where to find the(ir
wisdo)m”. Behemoth and Leviathan in the book of Job’, in Van Bekkum,
Koert, Dekker, Jaap, van den Kamp, Henk R. & Peels, Eric (eds.),
Playing with Leviathan: interpretation and reception of monsters from the
Biblical world. Brill, Leiden, 90-114.
Beal, Timothy K. 2002, Religion and its Monsters. Routledge, New York /
London.
Not used:
Kranjec, Alexander; Lamanna, Louis; Guzman, Erick; Plante, Courtney
N.; Reysen, Stephen; Gerbasi, Kathy; Roberts, Sharon & Fein, Elizabeth.
2019. Illusory body perception and experience in furries, Cognitive
science: 596-602. used?
In a third to half of furries there is a sexual interest and they could collect
such animal toys as fetishes??. While one third of them identify as
exclusively heterosexual, there is about a ten times higher chance of
furries being LGBTQ compared to the average population (Bernstein,
Paolone, Higner, Gerbasi, Conway, Privitera & Scaletta 2008:206?).

45
Sutcliffe, Steven J. & Cusack, Carole M. 2013. Introduction: making it
(all?) up–‘invented religions’ and the study of ‘religion’. Culture and
Religion 14(4): 353-361. used?
Sutcliffe, Steven J. & Cusack, Carole M. 2017. The problem of invented
religions. London: Routledge. used?
Terrien (?:?), Habel (?:?), Newsom (?:?) and
Cusack (2016b:47?) discusses the therians as believing they are animal
Cusack, Carole M. & Kosnác, Pavol. 2017?. Fiction, invention and hyper-
reality: from
1939:29-30) or a wild buffalo (Couroyer 1975:418?; 1987:214?), and
and mythical (e.g. Caquot 1992:40?), fancifully hyperbolic (Alter
1984:40),
& Gray (1921:332?) even divides the passage about Leviathan into two
Klein (1975:73?). When the result is a monster, this need not be a
psychotic
In the tension between play and seriousness in this? transitional space
negotiated by the ego deals with the unbearable lightness of Eros before
it finally sediments in the depth of death.
religion as often ideological superstructure.
Why: When religion is regarded as symbolised idealism….
principles to an “emotional fantasy principle” (Adams 1996:8). This
implies that it must be different from the pleasure principle, something
which remains obscure. At the same time postmodern fascination with
why fantasies defence mechanisms in wiki on fantasy (klein)
As in the text, Leviathan has received more attention in reception history.
So, for instance, is Leviathan mentioned 274 but Behemoth only 72
times in the book of Beal (especially 2002:50; vide infra). Clines (2011)
mentions leviathan 260 and behemoth 171 times which is realistic
compared to the text devoted to each.
In the same ninth chapter the T-stem verb, ‫( ִיְת ַּפ ָּלצּון‬tremble, shudder),
occurs in verse 6 which is related to ‫( מפלצת‬monster, horrid thing), as it is
used in 1 Kings 15:13 and 2 Chronicles 15:16.
; “mère” (mother) mentioned 137 and “maternel” [maternal] 63 times
46
counterintuitive, typical of religious experiences, with a “limited number of
supernatural templates”, according to Boyer (2001:77-78).(EXPLAIN)
These bodies are not normalised and as such they could be regarded as
counterintuitive, typical of religious experiences, with a “limited number of
supernatural templates”, according to Boyer (2001:77-78).
or whether they are depicted as desexualised as people with disabilities
are done to by their public toilets (Munt 2001:102)
Munt, Sally R., 2001, ‘The butch body’, in Holliday, Ruth, John Hassard,
and Jon Binnie, (eds.), Contested bodies. London: Routledge, 95-106.
This is consciously opposed to the anti-essentialist, constructionist
insistence that even the body is relative to performative and discursive
negotiation (cf. Cream 1994:2; Butler 1993:10). That is suggested by the
opening verse, 40:15, which virtually equates Behemoth with Job who is
an ill man and would be suffering psychically from threatening body-
images. The body is mostly only experienced when in pain and
“disappear” when all is well (Leder 1990:26-27). In the former case,
efforts to ignore, dissociate and sublimate the irresolvable pain from
which it cannot escape could mean projections in the form of images.
Leder, Drew. 1990, The absent body. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Cream, Julia (1994) ‘Out of place’, paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco,
March–April.
Butler, Judith. 1993, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”,
New York: Routledge.
The description of Leviathan starts off with a major unit of three strophes,
40:24–29, 40:30–32 and 41:1–3,
Adding to the gloomy sense of abjection are ‫( ִר ָּק בֹון‬rottenness), and the
contemptuous ‫( ֶת ֶבן‬straw) in 41:19 and ‫( ַק ׁש‬stubble) in 41:20.
The boiling depths of the “watery” unconscious could be
psychosomatically metaphorised in 41:23-24, with ‫( רתח‬boil) being
reminiscent of Job’s body experience in 30:27 where the opposite is
meant, however. The abject Leviathan instils fear in 41:17 but is itself
fearless in 41:25.
repudiated, rejected and denied

47
F PERVERSE BODIES AND RELIGION
G DISABLED BODY AND RELIGION
The abject of boundaries of the body also represented in concepts
(mostly through swear-words?!).
such as prisons, ghettoes or even continents depending on the social
These substances crossing the body’s boundaries - and then not always
through the natural orifices - necessitate cultural regulation hiding the
resistance to corporeality and desiring to transcend it (Grosz 1990:88).
Grosz, Elizabeth.1990. ‘The body of signification’ in John Fletcher and
Andrew Benjamin (eds.), Abjection, melancholia and love: the work of
Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge, 80-103.
These creatures are so self-contained that no touch is necessary for their
existence, nor can any “touch” end their existence.
For Freud (1944:85-86, 161ff.) and Kristeva (1980:90, 140-141) the
abject as repressed lost object is rooted in sacrificial violence as base of
religion but covered up by religious laws until they fail and reveal their
monstrous foundation before the ego and the other. The subject before it
was based in body boundaries is ultimately rooted in filth, according to
Lacan (1973:240) and according to Kristeva the subject depends on the
abject,
Abjection, prior (really???!!) to the subject-object, the self-(m)other,
animal-human, nature-culture and the unconscious-conscious
distinctions, is the unsymbolised, prelinguistic reaction in horror and
vomiting to the threat and confrontation by the traumatic eruption of the
Real and thus by meaninglessness, recalled, for example, by the sight of
a corps, a wound or sewage, but originally by the violence of being torn
from another body in order to live as separate subject but then with
permanent desires. It is therefore opposed to Lacan's objet petit a, the
cause of desire. Being prior to identity, order and borders it is in one way
excluded as excess and even crime against the social system of which it
reveals the fragility, yet it can never be really externalised, due to the
memory traces left within since having been “evacuated” from the womb
(Shildrick 2002:54).
despite fantasies of monstrosities??
Monsters is a product of humanism??

48
This critique is not similar to the current social movement, “body-
positivity”, focussing mostly on women, where the Freudian axiom about
body-ego threatens to be denied, visual body-images are ironically
emphasised, the individual’s power is exaggerated over that of the
collective and where unhealthy living is ignored against science (Swift,
Hanlon, El‐Redy, Puhl, & Glazebrook 2013:passim). Further critique
comes even from feminists (Darwin & Miller 2021:passim) who discredit
the movement’s public strategies.
Darwin, Helana, & Miller, Amara, 2021, ‘Factions, frames, and
postfeminism (s) in the Body Positive Movement’, Feminist media studies
21(6): 873-890.
Swift, J. A.; Hanlon, S.; El‐Redy, L.; Puhl, R. M.; Glazebrook, C. (2013).
"Weight bias among UK trainee dietitians, doctors, nurses and
nutritionists". Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics. 26 (4): 395–402.
doi:10.1111/jhn.12019
Truth is centrifugal, imagined as marginal, peripheral, deviant, where one
least expect it.
Fantastic as fanatic, hyperbolic
Like perversion and transgression, abjection protests against the
repression caused by the superego and returns the ego to its non-egoic
source in the drives and in death, crossing over all dichotomies of
morality and identity (Kristeva 1980:20). This is shown by the fascination
with the cult of criminals and monsters in current popular culture
(Kearney 2005:90).
The generalised sentiment is that the superego excludes, but in the book
of Job “God” includes and even revels in the chaotic id. God is here
either the corrective and correcting ego or a superego judging abusive
superegos, embodied in the human interlocutors of the book.
The monstrous is not only threatening but factually also aggressive and
violent.
the abject through submission and finding the abject in a religious text as
repressed as archaic, primal order due to and before the (symbolic)
the ambiguous liminality inducing both repulsion of and seductive
attraction to trauma, disgust and ecstasy, “jouissance” and passion. She
idealises it as subversively disrupting the exclusive monopoly of the

49
the accursed share
This seems to be corrected and contrasted by Behemoth in 40:31a:
‫ַה ְת ַמ ֵּלא‬
projection of originally external (ja?!) objects throw the boundaries of the
psyche
One could speculate whether the monstrous pair refer to the
asymmetrical breasts of the rejected maternal body but this could only
happen when distinctions are symbolically managed.
pariah, delinquent, contested body
phantasmagoric, strange but perhaps also wonderful bodies.
The so-called “American” (sic!) father of psychology, William James,
(1988:373) distinguished between the hypnoid and the revelatory
bodies when discussing mysticism. With the former he discredited
feminine embodiment as resembling hypnosis being a state of absence
of consciousness in intense mournful or sexual daydreams, the base of
hysteria, when interpreting pain as pleasure (Freud ). The question can
be raised if the two monsters in the book of Job are also hierophanic,
invading and disorientating normalcy with their radically other “sacred
chaos”, just as his pain breaks down wisdom, breaching, cracking and
interrogating any pretence of certainty (Beal 2002:6, 36-37).
James, William. 1988, William James: Writings 1902-1910 (LOA# 38):
The Varieties of Religious Experience/Pragmatism/A Pluralistic
Universe/The Meaning of Truth/Some Problems of Philosophy/Essays.
Vol. 2. Library of America.
In sociology, Erving Goffman (1963:4, 146) has already pointed out the
close link between deviant and disabled, although the latter’s visibility not
only of the body but also of its (“in”)ability is the primary stigma, not
recognising the differently-abled. Diversity is virtually always hierarchical.
The anomaly of immorality and that of pathology are not that
different in the unconscious.
It can still be sensitive and sensual.
In the book of Job, 40:8-14 may be interpreted as ironic self-speech of
the “conscious”, social order, putting itself on a divine pedestal, to
discard the judged in 40:13: ‫( ָט ְמ ֵנם ֶּבָע ָפ ר ָיַח ד ְּפ ֵניֶה ם ֲח ֹבׁש ַּבָּט מּון‬Hide them in
the dust together; bind their faces in the hidden place) thus saving itself
from the wicked, to rephrase 40:14. Clines (2011:1184) summarises the
50
dangerous but tranquil Behemoth (as image of the abject) likening it to
God as ignoring “rules and rationality and principles of utility, even
aesthetics”.(now separated from first part)
Sacrifice embodies this monstrous in an often less visible way=?explain
…………….
Abject-body-religion:
Arya, Rina. "Recovering the Sacred: The Abject Body." In Abjection and
Representation, pp. 63-81. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014.
Lawless, Elaine J. "Woman as Abject:" Resisting Cultural and Religious
Myths That Condone Violence against Women"." Western folklore 62,
no. 4 (2003): 237-269.
Covino, Deborah Caslav. Amending the abject body: Aesthetic
makeovers in medicine and culture. SUNY Press, 2012.
Hodgkin, Katharine. "Abject Hypocrisy: Gender, Religion, and the Self."
Routledge, 2017.
Edmond, Rod. "Abject Bodies/Abject Sites." Islands in history and
representation 6 (2003): 133.
Viljoen, Louise. "” I have a body, therefore I am”: Grotesque, monstrous
and abject bodies in Antjie Krog’s poetry”." Antjie Krog: An Ethics of
Body and Otherness. South Africa: U of KwaZulu-Natal P (2014).
Oliver, Kelly, and Stacey K. Keltner, eds. Psychoanalysis, aesthetics,
and politics in the work of Julia Kristeva. SUNY Press, 2009.
……………
“Fantasme” occurs 50 times in Kristeva (1980), “étrange-“ 39,
“anima-(l/ux)“ 27, “perver-“ 30, “sinistre” (uncanny) 3 and “monstr-
(e/u-)” 6, “mère” (mother) 137 and “maternel” [maternal] 63, ,
“agress-“ 17, “sacr-“ 124, “intim-” 15 times. This overlap suggests
that these concepts all relate to each other.
Kristeva (1980:133-152) spends a chapter on abomination in the Bible.
This could be regarded as a subtheme in the book of Job where it is
expressed with a variety of vocabulary: ‫( תעב‬abominate, abhor) in 9:31,
15:16, 19:19 and 30:10; ‫( געל‬abhor, reject as loathsome) as H-stem
in 21:10; ‫( זור‬be loathsome, be abhorred) and ‫( חנן‬be loathsome) in
19:17; ‫ זהם‬as D-stem in 33:20; ‫( קוט‬feel loathing) as N-stem in 10:1

51
and as T-stem in 8:14; or expressed in a roundabout way in 5:16:
‫( ֵה ָּמ ה ִּכְד ֵוי ַל ְח ִמ י ֵמ ֲא ָנה ִל ְנּגֹוַע ַנְפ ִׁש י‬my self refuses to touch [them], they
are as the sickness / loathsomeness of my flesh)
……………………………………………………………………………
CHECK: These substances crossing the body’s boundaries - and then
not always through the natural orifices - necessitate cultural regulation
hiding the resistance to corporeality and desiring to transcend it (Grosz
1990:88).
+ Kristeva (1980:35) regards the abject as pervert because it ignores or
corrupts the superego, on which it ironically depends (vide supra).
Accursed share is the useless simply grazing or existing two monster-
animals.
……………..

52

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