Abjection

“It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated” (Kristeva). Does the notion of abjection preclude experience? If not, then what is the aligning affect: fear, repulsion, horror? But don’t all these modes of embodiment and affect fall back into the abject? The more pressing question is: if we follow Kristeva in defining abjection as that which is “neither subject nor object,” then how do we gain a foothold in attempting to describe it? Yet, the nameless horror that the abject speaks of lacks a “definable object.” Experientially unsound, the abject contests the very being of phenomenology’s mode of intentional analysis. All that remains is an opposition to the “I,” as Kristeva says: “A ‘something’ that I do not recognise as a thing.”What remains after the “I” has been annihilated is the corpus of the body, the mute and nameless body. Nameless, but also visible.

There is a humming in my body: is that my body speaking to me? Am I of my body, or is my body of me? There is a sight of my body in the mirror: but a distance between my movement and that of the reflection. When I move, I lose sight of myself, and my reflection recedes into the distance. Merleau-Ponty would have us believe our movements “dovetail” into one another, but the movement also exposes itself to a lacuna, a black horizon. My movements are swallowed by my body. When I lie on my bed at night, my body still moves, and although I am flat on my back, I feel myself topple into the ground beneath.