Julia kristeva philosophy skin
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Abjection
State of being cast off
In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts.[1]Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.[2]
Kristeva's concept of abjection is used commonly to analyze popular cultural narratives of horror, and discriminatory behavior manifesting in misogyny, homophobia and genocide. The concept of abjection builds on the traditional psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund
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Ep. 202: Julia Kristeva on Disgust, Fear and the Self (Part One)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:34 — 42.7MB)
On Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), chapters 1 and 2.
What is horror? Kristeva’s book is about a process she calls “abjection,” where we violently reject things like corpses, bodily wastes and other fluids, and the Lovecraftian unnameable that lurks at the edge of our awareness, hideously inhuman and indifferent to our suffering.
The book is also all about the self, suggesting modifications to Freud’s Oedipal complex (in which we mature through the intervention of a father figure or civilization in general, breaking our bond with the mother) and Lacan’s mirror-stage story (where we gain selfhood by contemplating a unified, external image of ourselves, which is also informed by language, or what Lacan calls the “Name of the Father”).
For Kristeva, becoming a separate person from your mo
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A Womb of Words
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Do babies drink in language with their mothers’ milk? Peter Benson surveys the startling semiotics of Julia Kristeva.
Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria. She arrived in Paris on Christmas Eve 1965, as a ung linguistics lärling on a scholarship, and has lived in France ever since. She quickly established a reputation for herself in the heady intellectual milieu of the late sixties. Her colleagues, teachers and friends included the brightest stars in the Parisian firmament. Today, she teaches as a professor of linguistics, and practises as a trained psychoanalyst. Her many books include novels, histories of literature, and psychoanalytic studies of love and nedstämdhet. In 1974 she published her