ABSTRACT

ABJECTION A term developed by Julia Kristeva (1982) to name the horror of being unable to distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ of which the first, primary instance is the embryo’s existence in the mother’s body. The abject is what the subject seeks to expel in order to achieve an independent identity, but this is impossible since the body cannot cease both to take in and expel objects. The latter include tears, faeces, urine, vomit, mucus, which in the infant are the site of future erogenous zones as well as of cultural taboos. The abject is a troubled marker between the unclean and clean, and between the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal, the sign of an undecidable boundary line between the inside and the outside of the body, and therefore of a divided subject: it is, says Kristeva, the ‘in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (1982: 4).