An excerpt

The stones which lead out into these waters are built heavily on Kristeva’s Approaching Abjection, the first chapter of Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Abjection is a concept of a nameless other, and by its very definition it is resistant to definition – I will define it, for purposes of simplicity here, as something that is understandable only as other. Early in her book, Kristeva says that it is “The spasms and the vomiting that protect me” (Kristeva 3), describing the abjection of food as a “basic” form. She later speaks also of the corpse, which is the ultimate form of abjection (it expels the self, and so we try desperately to expel it) and other examples – all of them are united by the common bond that the abject is that which is expelled or rejected. She also briefly talks of the “exile”, the deject, who exists as the abjected, who “strays instead of getting his bearings” (Kristeva 8). These, I believe, are two sides of the same idea – to abject, I argue, also means to be deject. While to abject is to get rid of an other, the other is rarely something indefinable: the concept of the abject cannot be bound, but the abjected often has a corporal form, be it food, a person, or that which was a person. To abject, then, is to deject another, to turn the other into a stray – but since that other, once dejected, is not a mere something but an object, a ‘real’ item rather than a concept, the person who abjects creates two categories: I and the Other, and to abject is to automatically remove oneself from the possibility of the other, and thus deject oneself from whatever the other may be.