A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. The institutions which wield power in the modern world, which she believes to be oppressive and inhumane, are built upon the notion that man must be protected from the abject. Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is a massively important text for any scholar interested in horror or the abject. When on a roll, I also wonder if the desensitization is permanent: suppose your duties (sorry) change, does the desensitization degrade to extinction over time? So, see: the real tension is between our careful Me/not-me mental construct of selfhood and the abject within.

The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, [1] in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory. Kristeva has the idea that we are 'subjects in process' and that there is no such thing as a fixed or stable identity. One of the book's most compelling aspects is Kristeva's exploration of the abject as a force that blurs the boundaries between self and other.

which is to say, a precondition for the narcissism of the mirror stage, which occur after we establish these primal distinctions.

The orphaned turd, once of us, is now abject, viscerally other, yet unlike many other others it has no function; it has no place; it has no purpose: it is shit. When mentally feeling my way about such matters, I like to switch stuff out: (a version of Roland Barthes' "commutation test") imagine pious believers bowing before a grand plinth holding up a revered brown coil of crap, or tourists lined up in an American museum to look at glass boxes containing the preserved vomit of our Founding Fathers. After you expelled the spit, it became other; but a special kind of other, an other that has been abjected. From the basic introduction, she delves into a more rigorous definition through different aspects of her subject matter, which in parts became far too complex and challenging for the likes of me. The reason for this ambivalence is because differentiation is not the only good thing to be pursued.Reading this book makes you feel like you're uncovering the darkest, most sinister secrets of the universe. He argues that one way to create a monster is to make sure that it jams categories, for example, living/dead. Some of the theory went absolutely over my head, and some I thought were absolutely nonsense, but I actually enjoyed a lot of it.