Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives) (European Perspectives Series)

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What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. If you are horrified at the thought of wearing clothes your mother picked out for you, telling your father about your sex life, and living once again in your childhood home, it’s because you have differentiated yourself. The person you’re going to hate the most, and be the most abjected by, is going to be that big, fat person, eating an ice cream cone, waddling down the street. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) by Caitlin Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.

I should make it clear as well that I'm no expert, and I certainly have not read this book in the original language as my French extends no further than the edges of a menu. 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.After reading some of the reviews here I was a little worried that I was not going to like this "essay". I'd be interested in seeing what someone from a non-psychoanalytic background could do with the basic ideas in this book. As a post-modernist thinker, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva believes that the only way one can relate to or understand the world is through the medium of language, and anything that is completely non-linguistic is literally unintelligible. As Kristeva puts it, "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection.

Although she does pull a lot on Freudian theory (which I don’t always agree with), she provides plenty of helpful insights into understanding abjection. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.I could see how people could mix this up because of the fact that filth and impurity can absolutely be counted as abject. Critics who seek an alternative to sexist and, in general, imperialist practices in psychoanalytic writing will want to read [this book].