ABSTRACT
In her early linguistic work, centering on the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva’s maternal is not biological. However, as she began to focus on psychoanalysis in her works, she turned her attention from the non-biological maternal to engagement with biological mothers. Anne-Marie Smith pinpoints Powers of Horror (1980) as the turning point when Kristeva moved from linguistic categories to ‘a more concrete clinical and critical engagement with real women’ (Smith, 1998, 30). According to Kristevan theory, every society is founded on the abject, that which has to be suppressed in order for national identity to emerge. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes the abject as that which: ‘disturbs identity, system order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (Kristeva, 1982, 4). Abjection is the underside of the symbolic, what society must reject, cover over and contain, usually involving repudiation of our link with animality, sexuality and mortality. Defilement is present when the border between two identities becomes blurred. Abjection, then, is ambiguity: the corpse, which is both human and nonhuman and thus points up the fragility of identity, is an example of the abject, as are filth, waste, excrement, blood (especially menstrual blood), nail clippings, and hair, all of which blur the body’s boundary and for that reason may figure in ritual acts of purity, as Kristeva explains in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt:
In contemporary society it is not religion but art, literature and psychoanalysis which for Kristeva embody the therapeutic possibility of speaking the abject. A text like Dorothy Nelson’s highly experimental novel, In Night’s City (1982), is one which, I would argue, ‘speaks’ the abject. Through the voice of Sara, In Night’s City recounts a daughter’s sexual abuse by her father: ‘He was looking down on me and then he pulled the blankets off me an’ touched me funny’ (Nelson, 1982, 8). Through the voice of Sara’s mother, Esther, the novel tells a tale of wife-beating: ‘When he beats me I see violet reflections in the window and the shadows flitting by, armies of shadows of things not coming to pass’ (Nelson, 1982, 63).
