Talk:Abjection

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[edit] Awful

This essay is awful. The terms are undefined, it's a narrative, there's no examples, and it its dense and confusing.

The term is first defined as rejection... isn't there an aspect of horror to it though? "Abject poverty"? How can the abject be "taken out of our system while bits of it remain in our selves": that's a contradiction, and implies a second-party actor as well. "The act of "selfing" ("identitying") ourselves is the only common feature of all people" - that's not true! All people have brains, too. And spinal columns. And a cardiovascular system. And, if we exclude the severely brain-damaged, things like thoughts and feelings and emotions are pretty universal too.

There clearly needs to be more than one source used, because either Kristeva is being sorely misrepresented... or Kristeva is full of crap. We feel horror at the sight of a dead body because it's "outside the symbolic order"? Really? I thought it was because it confronts us with our own mortality, and because it violates our mental habit of looking for signs of life in our fellow humans - a corpse is "wrong" because we are genetically predisposed to prefer the living over the dead. Further, we are (perhaps instinctively) wary of dead bodies as being possible sources of infection or disease.

"This act is done in the light of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: un-namely – the mother." What the hell? Total non-sequitor, nevermind that "un-namely" isn't a word. This entire paragraph is again asserting as factual, what is (at best) a tenuous hypothesis about the development of human children's psyche.

Sorry about the rant. I hope I'm not the only one who finds this entire entry worse than useless. --Leperflesh 06:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Abject Objects

Can't objects be abject? Like blood or sperm? People don't want to see abject things because they belong ín the body and not outside?