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CLEANING LADIES:
THE POETICS OF ABJECTION
166
Chapter Seven
The Abject
Abjection is a very curious concept that is openly negative, yet invites us
to rethink the binary valuation of good and bad within such categories as
open/closed, white/black, solid/fluid. As Elizabeth Grosz notes:
The expulsion of the abject is one of the preconditions of the symbolic; and
it is also the by-product or excessive residue left untapped by symbolic
functioning. It is, as it were, the unspoken of a stable speaking position, an
abyss at the very borders of the subjects identity, a hole into which the
subject may fall. (Grosz 1990, 87)
The theme of abjection and the love of the impure was introduced by Freud in
his Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, where he describes the
need for the sacrifice of incestuous attachments to parental love objects. Kristeva,
as Elizabeth Grosz explains in her article The Body of Signification, shows that
this repression is never fully achieved. For example, the experience of the threat of
death through bodily wasteas an experience of abjectionis a reminder of the
primal connection with and love for the mother (the semiotic).
2
Mary Russo makes an opposition between the classical and grotesque bodies:
The classical body is transcendent and monumental, closed, static, self-contained,
symmetrical and sleek [] [while] the grotesque body is open. Protruding,
irregular, secreting, multiple and changing (Russo 1994, 8).
167
Purity and Danger (1969), the book which was the inspiration for Julia
Kristevas essay on abjection (1982), constructs a theory of defilement that
revolves around the idea of separating, purifying, demarcating and
punishing transgressions (Douglas 1969, 5). Douglas shows how we see
in the body a symbol of society (ibid., 142), and how, while building the
theory of a clean society, we construct the idea of the body without filth,
dirt, waste, through the classification of the proper and improper fluids and
waste of the body (such as tears, sperm, excrement covered by taboos, or
menstrual blood). To create categories of classification is a positive
attempt to impose system on an inherently untidy experience, to make
unity from the chaotic jumble of existence (ibid., 3, 5, 201). This
classification is followed by the practice of prohibition, while [t]he
construction of patterns of prohibition, of borders, boundaries and binaries
of behaviour, is essentially to define the identity (Hunt 2007, 14). Identity
becomes visible only by creating order and this is achieved by dismissing
the abjection, by exaggerating the difference between within and without,
above and below, male and female, with and against (Douglas 1969, 2).
Bodily waste and the pain connected with it reach beyond the order of the
symbolic system. Abjection points to the margins, the boundaries of the
body. Abjection leads to the border grounds between the subject and the
object, and opens up the body to its most disgusting, sensitive, painful and
material side. It opens up to the something that is left untapped by
symbolic functioning, as Elizabeth Grosz observes, and introduces the
danger of the subjects fall, the direct danger of the loss of identity, since
the place of the abject is the place where memory collapses, the place
where I am not. The abject threatens life; it must be radically excluded
(Kristeva 1982, 2). To accept the dangerous move of knowing abjection is
to allow the possibility of understanding corporeal experience, and what
follows from this: it is to allow the understanding of pain as an inseparable
part of our abject existencean existence which is founded on constant
confrontation with the painful loss of the body and the threat of death. This
is why the experience of the abject body, the body in ruins, has still to be
mapped. Yet, to allow this abject is also to oscillate on the thin line
between sanity and insanity, between language and melancholy silence.
168
Chapter Seven
The experience of the abject allows the subject to slip back towards
this primitive, pre-ordered world one once was in. Abjection works as a
flashback to the childs first movement against the unity with its mother
in order to constitute the separate self. To reach the necessary position of
the subject and self, the child must object to the corporeal claustrophobia
of the maternal entity with which it is entwined and, in this way, must
necessarily abject a part of itselfas Hunt recalls Kristevas standpoint
(Hunt 2007, 24). The rituals of cleanliness, toilet training, feelings of
shame towards the body, eating habits, which are oppressive to the body,
must then regulate the break with the semiotic connection. The mother and
the shamelessness of the corporeal associated with her must be forgotten
and replaced by sets of regulations which oppress the body, reshape the
body, and erase the body from filthy, stinking and sticky corporeality. The
body becomes transparent. Its parts, sufferings, filth and pains become
rather the function of the mind, the psychological state of the self rather
than particular material phenomena.