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Abjection is employed by Julia Kristeva¹ in an effort to destabilize the binary² logic of much psychoanalytic thought, where the notions of (desiring) subject and object (of desire) often represent a co-dependent oppositional pairing. In order to understand Kristeva's point it is necessary that we recognize 'subject" and "object" not only as opposed locations or two halves of a logical model, but also as supposedly discrete and complete identities in and of themselves. Each figure in the pair is accorded its own self-sufficient meaning with definable boundaries. Such boundaries are the psychic limits by which the self separates itself from its other within the psychoanalytic framework of Kristeva's text. Indeed, another way of positing the subject/object dyad would be to comprehend it, as already implied, in terms of 'self/other". The abject, says Kristeva, is "neither subject nor object"; instead it opposes the ego by "draw[ing] me to the place where meaning collapses". While the subject/object structure makes logical meaning possible, the abject produces, or is otherwise comprehensible as, an uncanny effect of horror, threatening the logical certainty of either the subject/object or self/not-self binarism. Abjection is thus the process or psychic experience of a slippage across the boundaries of the self, and with that a partial erasure of the borders of the psyche which define the ego. The abject is, amongst other things, the fluid locus of forbidden desires and ideas whose radical exclusion is the basis of the subject's cultural determination; in comprehending the process of abjection thus, we come to see, as Kristeva makes apparent, that that which threatens the self is not simply, necessarily locatable outside the self but rather emerges or erupts within subjectivity.

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-62940-0_1

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