While cleaning your room, you find a thread on the carpet.
If it were red or blue or some other non-natural colour, you may assume it to be a fibre from your clothing or your blanket and vacuum it with the other dust. However, suppose the thread was clearly blonde or brunette: a strand of hair. You aren’t sure whose hair exactly (and maybe this uncertainty conjures up immediate doubts as to your partner’s fidelity or your room’s vulnerability to burglars), but the mere recognition that you’re holding someone’s hair, and not merely some frayed thread, unsettles you greatly.
While hair is not necessarily more unhygienic than cotton, even if that hair were provably sterile, that proof of sterility would be missing the point. It’s not your connection of that hair to any danger that stirs up feelings of uneasiness, but to a latent identity seemingly both absent and present in this moment; this you hold belonged to someone’s body, as opposed to a bundle of dental floss or a skein of yarn, and that fact sends a shiver down your spine.
This hard-to-label—and even more difficult to dispel—discomfort we feel is what the philosopher Julia Kristeva calls ‘abjection’: a “massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (p2). Our experiences of abjection, Kristeva argues, are necessary for the continual maintenance of our subjectivity as we distinguish ourselves from sites of ‘the abject’: that murky zone of flux between objects and subjects, between entities and identities, where the line between someone and something is disconcertingly blurred.
In her seminal (mind the pun) work,Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, Kristeva provides and examines a range of matters that give rise to this process: semen and discharge; menses and blood; spit and mucus; pus and vomit; urine and feces; loose hairs, dead skin, and nail clippings; mouldy food and milk’s skin; and, “the most sickening of wastes”, the corpse: “a border that has encroached upon everything” (p3).
For Kristeva, the abject confronts us with the porosity of the subject-object divide which, for much of the history of philosophy, has been stabilised and solidified into a taken-for-granted binary. That false divide comforts a human race which separates itself from and elevates itself above its environment, and justifies an assumption of the human as pure, clean, or sanitary. But by presenting a third option beyond the subject-object binary, the Kristevan zone of the abject impugns the very foundations of subjectivity itself; abjection threatens the stability of the ‘I’ and recentres the ‘that’ behind the exclamation “I reject that”. Abjection is thus a necessary yet oft-excluded contributor to our subjectivating relations—the connections between ourselves and other subjects and objects (other selves) that develop and nurture our understanding of the self.
However, despite its utility in (re-)constructing the self, we are socially conditioned to hate, conceal, marginalise, and denigrate the abject, through what Kristeva describes as “meticulous rules of separation, rejection, and repulsion” which serve to maintain social civility and prevent spectres of unruliness, of abjection. But this policing of the abject—the controlled harnessing of its function to either objectify or subjectivate the body—occurs frequently according to an illogic of gendered, racial, and other cultural double standards.
Take blood: the abject fluid which, for Shakespeare, famously ‘makes civil hands unclean’. Sex and religion play a significant role in our perception of blood, a substance which would otherwise remain a merely biological phenomenon, like cartilage or enzymes. Contrast the patriarchal culture of menstruation shame, which presumes menstrual blood to be necessarily dirty and a cause for embarrassment, against the heralded iconography of Christ’s forehead, abraded by a crown of thorns, and the consecrated consumption of his ‘blood’ through wine, a ritual practised to align oneself with the Lord.
In fact, Kristeva devotes an entire chapter of to Biblical representations of the abject, presented often as (male) sacrifice in circumcision but subordinated when corresponding with maternal expressions like in breastmilk. The nonconformist rejection of symbolic blood in Communion wine is apostasy, while the equally nonconformist celebration of material blood in menstruation—sexual or otherwise—is either fetish, accident, or taboo.
In the context of bloodborne viruses, where an otherwise neutral abject is ethicised and defiled even further, blood functions as a vector both of pathogens and of power, whereby some communities (such as Africans and homosexuals who face contemporary constraints on donor eligibility) are assumed to possess and circulate a blood which is untouchably tainted. In 1987, Princess Diana was essentially canonised in our cultural zeitgeist for daring to shake hands and hug AIDS patients and publicise the scientific truth that HIV spread not through touch but through blood.
Thirty years later, seemingly to continue his mother’s noble act, Prince Harry took an HIV test on live television… right. But the in situ communities of care who served queer, Indigenous, Latin, and African HIV/AIDS patients during the epidemic were not afforded the same theatre of the royal stage. Are the corporeal politics of renewal and recovery reserved only for the platform of a pristine body?
A similar hypocrisy emerges in representations of war, conflict, and genocide. For a war’s victors, spilt blood on a battlefield transmits shared, collective valour, poetised in the Anglosphere through the symbol of hemoglobin-red poppies; for a genocide’s victims, the russet wash of innocent blood over a once-lush landscape of yarrow, olive, and cactus remains a stark yet silenced reminder of the indeterminate loss of bodies who perish nameless under rubble. Kristeva writes that a body excluded from sociolegal power is mutated into a “source of evil and mingled with sin, abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh and the law.”
All around us, the abject both thrills and frightens, liberates and controls, as we constantly interact with and produce sites of abjection. This is most notable in the birth, nourishment, metabolism, and loss of life: the semen required to conceive; the amniotic fluid that sustains a fetus; the flesh and yolks we swallow for nutrition; the pungent, rotting groceries we discard; the spit we use as lubricant; the menstruation, urination, and defecation which each conclude the cycles of our reproductive, renal, and digestive systems.
The abject is closely connected to both desire and disgust. For some, acts of pleasure involve intimate, paraphilic engagement with the abject, such as for coprophiles (faeces) and urolagniacs (urine), for whom the abject and the (sexual) ego are inextricably linked and mutually constituted through an identification with waste. As Kristeva writes in her opening paragraph, the abject “beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects” (p1).
In recent years, the abject has erupted into the mainstream. In December, I went into knowing little else beforehand besides that Jacob Elordi—a heartthrob clutching onto our dwindling obsession with Euphoria—was starring alongside Rosamund Pike—the mastermind behind my all-time favourite film protagonist, Amy Dunne of Gone Girl. In Saltburn, opening shots of Felix (Jacob Elordi) and Oliver (Barry Keoghan) misled me into anticipating two gay hours of thespian student romance between a pair of men closer in age to my tutors than to my classmates (but young enough that I could squint and place myself there in the camera’s gaze/gays!).
A brilliant misdirection on the screenwriters’ part, not a soul in that cinema could have preempted the slew of on-screen abjection to follow: costumed teenagers vomiting after excessive drinking; a corpse copulated and inseminated by the murderer; menstrual blood accompanying an impromptu act of cunnilingus; a bulimic girl’s razor-facilitated, literal bloodbath; a wad of semen sucked from the same bathtub’s drain; an oxygen-starved body, withering away in hospital.
Besides , the ‘cannibalism as an expression of desire’ trope has gained recent popularity in songwriting, poetry, and art (or, in the case of Ethel Cain, all three), with many turning to the visceral extremities that the grotesque provides as means of capturing the intensity of limerence and lust. At the same time, skincare products involving snail mucus, salmon sperm, and human plasma are all on the rise; beauty gained through excrement. None of us can escape Kristeva’s irresistible powers of horror.
We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Woroni, Woroni Radio and Woroni TV are created, edited, published, printed and distributed. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. We acknowledge that the name Woroni was taken from the Wadi Wadi Nation without permission, and we are striving to do better for future reconciliation.