The Speaking Abject in Kristeva’s

Powers of Horror
THEA HARRINGTON

This essay analyzes the implications of the perfonnative aspects ofJulia Kristeva’s
Powers of Horror by situating this work in the context of similar aspects of her
previous work. This construction and its relationship to abjection are integral compo-
nents of Kristeva’s notion of practice and as such are fundamental to her critique of
Hegel and Freud.

Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for

myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing
aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror
that they seize on in order to build themselves up and
function? I rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of
frustration and hollowing-probably the only counterweight
to abjection. While everything else-its archaeology and
its exhaustion-is only literature: The sublime point at
which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that
overwhelms us-and “that cancels our existence.”
(Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror)

PERFORMATIVE REVELATIONS:
PAS DE DEUX

In the afterward, from which the epigraph to this essay is taken, Powers of
Horror (1982)is revealed to be a “work of disappointment” that “overwhelms”
and “cancels” existence. Julia Kristeva as subject and object, as critic and text,
as analyst and analysand, speaks; and her doubled voice carries the echo of the
footsteps of the pas de deux between the “one” and the “I” (the on and the je).
One must ask why such a performative structure is necessary to Kristeva’s
Hypatiu vol. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1998) 0by Thea Harrington
 Thea Harrington 139

project in Powers of Horror. Indeed, the performative aspect of this text,

marked by a seeming autobiographical gesture, is extremely important to
Kristeva’s project in general. After all, it is the notion of a performance of a
practice, or of practice as performance of revolutionary acts, by which Kristeva
articulates the space for a new ethics.’
To understand the way practice and performance are connected, the curious
“I” as the sign of the abject in Powers ofHon-or must be examined in its relation
to the speakers in this text, both the one who articulates the theory from the
non-place of the third-person pronoun on and the one who confesses from the
comparable non-place of the “1.” Seeming to be a categorical faux pus, the
complicated construction in which “I” is the sign of the abject and in turn is
the signified of a primal manque reveals, in short, the question of subjectivity
that lies at the core of this text and of Kristeva’s work in general. To answer
this question, this essay asks four further questions: W h y must the abject be
approached through this performance-through these splits? What else is
revealed in these performative spaces? W h y must the abject speak, and what
does it say?
To answer these four questions, it is necessary to take a seemingly circuitous
route, beginning with an examination of the performative components in
some of Kristeva’sother texts and their link both to her notion of practice and
to the complex articulation of the subject in process/on trial. In addition, it is
necessary to explore how these interchanges underscore the complicated role
of theory in Kristeva’s work. To accomplish this project, the nature of
Kristeva’s own active engagement with the work of Hegel and Freud must be
examined, as it is in this often overlooked context that the manner in which
Kristeva links the categories of ethics and aesthetics is revealed.
This engagement, moreover, underscores what is at stake in the Kristevan
notion of the subject in process/on trial. The mobile subject she presents not
only alters the nature of ethics and aesthetics, it alters the very way one must
ask the question/write the text. Furthermore, as Kristeva tries to bring the
speaking body into the symbolic-into language, through these tense concat-
enations of stories and voices-it seems that the only way to engage Kristeva’s
project, her language, her theory-the only way one can tell the story of,these
tense contradictions-is to create/perform these ruptures as well.
To turn to one critical example, Dawne McCance (1996) analyzes the
relationship between Kristeva’s theory and the question of a postmodern
feminist ethics in her essay “L‘ecriture h i r e : Kristeva’s Postmodern Feminist
Ethics.” Kristeva, she states, does not allow for a “treatise on ethics” but
instead gives a “performance of ethics” that “exiles the unified subject.” Citing
Leon Roudiez, McCance says, “the text is the visible stage . . . of a performance
that actively involves writer and reader alike” (McCance 1996, 145 quoting
Roudiez 1974, 297); furthermore, she says Kristeva brings to theory “some-
thing unmistakably alien.” This reading of the nature of performance in
140 Hypatia

Kristeva and its connection to a feminist ethics helps to clarify the curious
component of some critiques of Kristeva that, in seeking to analyze her theory,
also seem compelled to enact the same gesture of speaking at the borders
(fron&res) in an interplay of voices (Oliver 1993a).*
Perhaps the only way to tell this story-this “history” of the subject-is to
choreograph this struggle to speak and as such then we are forced to perform
it to keep open the gaping wound-our own absence within the “practice” that
reveals it (Kristeva 1982).And if so, the repetition compelled by the perform-
ative nature of the work will reveal precisely how Kristeva’s revolutionary
practice and the enactment of a heterogeneity is necessary for a feminist
ethics?
Besides observing how critics read her work, we must note Kristeva’s own
specific engagement with the philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions,
exemplified by her work on Hegel and Freud, to see how the performative
nature bf her work reveals her own enactment of a practice that critiques these
traditions-to allow to speak that which cannot speak (the abject). As
Kristeva articulates her notion of practice, she draws on and, in some ways,
becomes “tributaire” to the theoretical history she presents. But in her analysis,
she attempts to show what these texts do not-what occurs behind and beyond
them. Turning to the “beyond” of the tradition to explain certain foundational
aporias represents one of the many ways Kristeva enacts, on the formal level of
the text, in its very manner of argumentation, the dynamic of abjection (the
subject matter); a dynamic, moreover, that cannot be separated from its
manner of expre~sion.~ In so doing, her analysis choreographs the paradox of
the speaking subject as theorist and patient-as “writer and topple” (Kristeva
1982,206).
It is in terms of this performance which begins and ends on the borders-a
kind of bilingual speaking-that Kristeva’s work must be reexamined. By
situating Powers of Howor in the context of the performative structure of her
previous work and the arguments in Revolution and Poetic Language (1984b),
this essay will explore the intricacies and implications of the performative in
Kristeva’s text.

PERFORMATIVE PARADOXICAL STRUCTURES: THETHEORIST’S

SCAR

The performative structure apparent in Powers of Horror is not at all uncom-

mon in Kristeva’s work. Indeed, she often writes on this border, where the two
voices of on and je are braided. Similar structures appear in some of her other
texts: Black Sun (1989), “Stabat Mate?’ (1986), and Strangers to Ourselves
(1991 1, among others. The propensity for personal pronouns in Kristeva’s later
work Kelly Oliver explains as an expression of Kristeva’s countertransference,
in which she enacts, as analyst, an identification with her patients to give the
patient words; that is, to name the unnameable. Oliver, furthermore, quotes
 Thea Harrington 141

from Kristeva’s own explanation of these gestures as revealing pain: the mute
and hidden sister of her philosophy (Oliver 1993a, 135).5That Kristeva links
the performative/confessionalaspects of her philosophy to the figure of a mute
sister makes these moments-which interrupt the controlled theoretical posi-
tion and are associated with both the scar in “Stabat Mater” and the speaking
abject in Powers of Horror-constitutive of that particular speaking; and as
Kristeva’s mute sister attests, constitutive of Kristeva’s own speaking or, at
least, the sister of her speaking. The attempt to speak, to trace the story of this
battle, is not intended just to reveal the narrow confines of one set of patients,
but to locate and articulate a fundamental set of problems, whose story and
struggle will, through the giving of language to the mute sister, allow us to
understand how Kristeva reveals the possibility of a link between ethics and
aesthetics in practice.
In the aftermath of the “FLASH” that ruptures the theoretical text of
“Stabat Mater,” for example, Kristeva speaks of words that are
always too distant, too abstract for this underground swarming
of seconds, folding in imaginable spaces. Writing them down is
an ordeal of discourse, like love. . . . Laugh. Impossible. Flash
on the unnameable, weavings of abstractions to be tom. Let a
body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with
meaning under a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to
the other, eternally, broken up visions, metaphors of the invis-
ible. (Kristeva 1986, 162)6
This interruption, this flash, marks more than a moment of countertransfer-
ence, or even identification, in a particular “talking cure.” It is part of an
eternal ordeal of speaking-of words that struggle and fail to encompass a
“broken up vision, metaphors of the invisible.” Between the word and the
flesh resides this battle. By telling the story of this battle in “Stabat Mater,”
Kristeva reveals not only how the figure of the Virgin, erased from the
Christian narrative, performs a similar function of interruption, but also
how her own telling of this story must perform this action, this battle, as
well. Examining how Kristeva’s texts perform, Oliver argues that Kristeva’s
use of split columns in her essay “Stabat Mater” is a way to show what is
missing from both discourses, those on the Virgin and those of the theore-
tician. Curiously, Kristeva, in an interview with Rosalind Coward, identi-
fies this split/scar as the mark not only of an omission but of a birth
(Kristeva 1984a). This absence is cicatrized on the text and in the discourse,
signaling a loss and a birth.7
“The split column of ‘Stabat Mater’ depicts what is silent out of the
discourse of the Virgin. The split column brings to the surface of the text the
mother’s sex, two columns joined together out of which the child is born”
(Kristeva 1984a, 24). Oliver says that this marked text sings this pain, the pain
142 Hypatia

that has been repressed in religious and scientific discourse and in theory
(Oliver 1993a, 53). Thus, in “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva’s split text performs the
act of revealing the process underlying the subject to make it possible to hear
the speaking, abject mute sister who swarms below. Kristeva’s work attempts to
force an engagement with these processes; to give them a voice through the
enactment of apas de deux between the voices she employs. “She is the theorist
who occupies the place of this scar” (Oliver 1993a, 142).
If the theorist is posited in the place of the scar, then her story is always the
story of her own speaking abject. Oliver even goes so far as to describe
Kristeva’s position as theorist as a painful moment that edges toward the
autobiographical.
For Kristeva then, the theoretician is posited on the place of the
scar because she is trying to elaborate a distance, a phenome-
non, very close to her own pain. . . . Between the two columns
both the child and the mother’s mother are born. Between
these two columns lie the pain and joy of separation and
reunion. (Oliver 1993a, 143-44)
Kristeva’s story, at least in “Stabat Mater,” tries to enact, on the page, a birth:
between one voice and the other emerges the child who perhaps always is not
or not yet, and whose story, like the abject, can only be told in the scar that is
an empty space on the page. Kristeva’s subject grows out of that scar and speaks
only in mute configurations. And thus she is linked to the abject. That the split
Kristeva observes in the borderline patient is reenacted in this text, and then
is tied to the signifier of want that is ‘hone but literature,” ties the form of
Kristeva’s text to its content (Kristeva 1982, 5).
For Kristeva, the role of the theorist as the historian of this story is predi-
cated on a particular understanding of the relationship between theory and
practice. Kristeva’s notion of practice emerges partly from a reading of
Hegel and Marx. She explores practice as something distinct from experi-
ence and yet tied to social practice and revolution. It is found in texts in
which “the heterogeneous contradiction is maintained as an indispensable
precondition for the dimension of practice through a signifying formation, and in
which, therefore, the system of representation that binds the text is also
rooted in social practice, or even its revolutionary phase” (Kristeva 1984b,
196, emphasis in original).
In the Hegelian dialectic, the point at which experience-as practice-
emerges is the moment when consciousness acts on itself, not as apprehension
but as something different. Consciousness turns back on itself in the process of
recognizing the object not simply immediately but as the “being-for-conscious-
ness of the in-itself’’(Hegel 1977,56).A kind of self-reflexive action, this shift
happens, Hegel states and Kristeva quotes, “behind the back” of consciousness;
and yet it is precisely this initial moment that Hegel identifies as an uprooting
 Thea Harrington 143

which “interrupts” the “conscious presence and its finitude” (Kristeva 1984b,
197). Kristeva sees the possibility inherent in Hegel’s notion of experience as
tied to practice, a practice that could affect a manner of understanding
“scientific, theoretical, or aesthetic activities but also all sociohistorical
transformation” (Kristeva 1984b, 197).
This understanding of practice indicates how the heterogeneity that is
fundamental to texts of practice opens the possibility of exploring new ways of
understanding theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic texts, along with a new way
of understanding how the three may be linked in Kristeva’s work through the
performative dance of voices, which, by trying to tell the “history of these
practices that streak through historical reasoning,” ultimately force a new way
of writing and of reading the subject (Kristeva 1984b, 232).
It is interesting that when she speaks on how a theoretical text can be a
practice, Kristeva argues that the theorist must become the historian of
practices in art. This possibility for theory reveals how art and ethics are linked
via the revelation of the practices of the “processes underlying the subject”
through the “negativizingof narcissism that assume[s] all positivity in order to
negativize it” (Kristeva 1984b, 233). It falls to theory as practice, she says, to
“mark off the scansions of the practices of history and thereby superimpos[e] a
logic and a language that marks the beats of this practice-that pluralizes,
pulverizes, and musicates the unity of the subject,” and thereby “make[s]
visible the process underlying [the subject]” (Kristeva 1984b, 233).8Much like
the scar out of which the child is born and the mute sister speaks, this space
from which theory can and must speak performs like a diacritical mark: it
points to the unspeakable inflection that marks the spoken, and it is a
“metaphor of the invisible” that is the only process of its own birth, bound, in
some curious way, by the anterior future.
Key to Kristeva’s understanding of how theory, art, and ethics are bound
together is the notion which underlies each of them: the Kristevan notion of
the subject. In a long passage in Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva argues
that,

The subject never is. The subject is only the signifying process
and he appears only as a signifying practice, that is only where
he is absent within the position out of which social, historical,
and’signifying activity unfolds. There is no science of the
subject. Any thought of mastering the subject is mystical: all
that exists is the field of practice where, through his expendi-
ture, the subject can be anticipated in an always anterior future;
“Nothing will have taken place but the place.” This is the
“second overturning” of the Hegelian dialectic, which came
about toward the end of the last century and was as fundamen-
tally radical as the Marxist overturning of the dialectic-if not
144 Hypatia

more so. If History is made up of modes of productivity, the

subject is a contradiction that brings about practice because
practice is always both signifying and semiotic, a crest where
meaning emerges only to disappear. It is incumbent upon “art”
to demonstrate that the subject is the absent element of and in
his practice, just as it is incumbent upon political economy to
prove history is a matter of class struggle. . . . “In order to close
the gap created by our lack of interest in what lies outside the
realm of aesthetics-Everything can be summed up in Aesthet-
ics and Political Economy.” (Kristeva 1982, 215, emphasis in
original; quotation from Mallarm6 1945,656)
In this dense passage, what seems to tie the realms of ethics, art, and theory
together, and also to link politics and aesthetics, is the subject+Practice is the
only manner in which the subject can appear where he is absent. Furthermore,
this appearance maintains a curious temporality as an anterior future. In the
space of temporal flux, of anticipation, the “contradiction that is the subject”
and “that brings about practice” shows the subject as the always absent
element in the practice that reveals him. The subject only ever is as process-
as “the crest where meaning emerges only to disappear” in a future space that
is anticipated and already passed.’

MANQUE,PHOBIA, AND ABJECTION

Kristeva argues that “[bleyond the unconscious” is a prior construction, a

prior dynamic in which (‘the fundamental opposition is between I and Other
or, in the more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside” (Kristeva 1982,
7). This prior opposition seems, at first, to preclude the conscious-unconscious
distinction; yet it is through this logically prior construction that a new
“sublimating” discourse can begin. Through this a priori construction (before
subject, before object) in the face of the primal loss, comes the discourse of
sublimation. Any sublimated articulation, in this case, is connected to, and, in
some ways, is as much a tributary of the river of Occidental philosophy as is the
dialectic of negation it attempts to subsume. Kristeva does not offer a theory
that supplants; she offers a theory that is beyond, perhaps beside, or before, in
the paradox of a paradoxa.
One of the clearest explanations of the Kristevan negative comes from Kelly
Oliver. Oliver states that Kristeva’s negative can best be understood by retum-
ing to the way she understands Lacan’s negative and its emergence from Freud
and Hegel, and by understanding the manner in which the semiotic emerges
prior to the negation that they make foundational. Oliver notes that Kristeva’s
reading of Lacan is akin to the way she articulates her notion of practice. For
Kristeva, Lacan’s desire combines Freud’s topography with Hegelian negativity
 Thea Harrington 145

“but raises them out of their biological maternal entrenchment into the
domain of social praxis where social means ‘signifying’ ” (Oliver 1993a, 33,
quotation from Kristeva 1974, 130). Furthermore, “the result is that the
desire’s basis in drives is ‘dismissed and forgotten’ ” (Oliver 1993a, 33, quota-
tion from Kristeva 1974, 131).Attention is focused on desire itself, which is
merely a reactivation, on the symbolic level, of a negativity that takes place in
the body.
In Kristeva’s understanding, negativity must be distinguished from negation.
By returning to a body-drive economy, she highlights a specific kind of
negativity that is “prior to the logical and material operators of signification”
(Oliver 1993a, 43). This negativity is to be understood as “both cause and
organizing principle” (Kristeva 198413, 109). Kristeva, furthermore, reformu-
lates the Hegelian negative by recourse to Freud, who, she argues, allows us to
think of negativity as the “very movement of heterogeneous matter” .(Kristeva
1984b, 113). Freud thereby underscores the heterogeneity that is suppressed in
the Hegelian system: “the Hegelian dialectic moves toward a fundamental
reorganization of these oppositions-one that will establish an affirmative
negativity, a productive dissolution in place of ‘Being’ and ‘Nothing’ ” (Kristeva
198413, 113, emphasis in original).
Later, Kristeva argues that “The sole function of our use of the term ‘negativity’
is to designate the process that exceeds the signifying subject, binding him to the laws
of objective sm&s in nature and society” (Kristeva 198413, 119, emphasis in
original). Kristeva argues that her reformulation of what the Hegelian nega-
tive, bound as it is to a notion of Becoming that “erases the productive
heterogeneity upon which it rests,” reflects what is contained within the very
structure of the dialectic. This production of heterogeneity is fundamental to
an understanding of the Kristevan subject as in process/on trial, and as such it
points to the space where production is put into practice as a continual
moment of rupture and of loss (Kristeva 1984b). In addition, the signifying
process that is the movement and dialectic between the semiotic and the
symbolic “will be replaced by a nothingness-the ‘lack‘ that brings about the
unitary being of the subject” (Kristeva 198413, 131). “The subject’s being is
founded on this lack and the drives are lost” (Oliver 1993a, 33). The beyond
that Kristeva extrapolates from the borderline patient, in particular, rests in
the activity of recognition. Instead of the relocational matrix of the Freudian
dynamic of thinking (that is, the attempt to refind an object), through the
working of abjection, the subject recognizes the manque itself. This recognition
is also fundamentally a misrecognition. Instead of locating the objective in a
series of replacements, the subject is displaced via the workings of loss. This
misrecognition, however, does not simply invert the dialectical subject-object
construction and make the subject objective. As the identification of desire
with external objects fails, the subject turns inward and, in the act of discov-
ering the impossible within, misrecognizes body and ego. “Abjection is elabo-
146 Hypatia

rated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the
shadow of a memory” (Kristeva 1982,5).In this misrecognition of what is most
near, all is rejected and a “territory” is created “edged by the abject” (Kristeva
1982,12).
Sometimes the activity of forfeiting the maternal, Kristeva argues, may turn
inward, and as a result, forfeit body and ego as repulsive.
Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable,
impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut his
impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations,
out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to
crop up-fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject.
(Kristeva 1982,6)
The missing object, reproducible in Freud’s system, is here not simply
missing but instead unspeakable. Lacking an objective outlet for the impulse,
the phobia becomes the object of the abject. The abject splits and becomes
signifiable as phobia. The object of this phobia is such that it cannot be spoken
of as what it is-the most near-the self. It can be spoken only in a kind of
ceaseless wordplay that does not mention fear, because recognizing the thing
one is afraid of would call into being the very loss that is repressed. If that
object is unveiled, it would reveal in utterance the unspeakable: the primal
manque and one’s own loss within it.
The maternal emptinesshatred that the abjected subject has swallowed is
constantly confronted but not as what it is. It is confronted, instead, as the
unapproachable and most intimate self as abjected (Kristeva 1982, 5-6).
Through these musings on the borderline patient, Kristeva examines the
relationship between fear and object. Indeed, she questions the archetypal
construct that positions the maternal as the prototypical object and posits the
possibility that as they engage in contests of repression, fear and object carry
on a second-order battle (Kristeva 1982).
Spoken fear, tied into the Oedipal chain of substitutions, Kristeva says, is
produced later than a more original fear that is unnamable. To examine this
thesis, she returns to a primary psychoanalytic text on fear: the story of Little
Hans (Freud, 1925). Entering into a dialogue about his fears, she argues, shows
that Hans has already joined the game of substitutions. Spoken fear of one
object is always revealed as fear of another. A prior fear exists that is, at base,
unpresentable and yet somehow there in the unreadable-yet replete with the
residual, heterogeneous “hieroglyph” that is the spoken fear. It is in phobia as
such that Kristeva sees the desperate dance of metaphors that must represent
the unrepresentable.
In a particularly dense section of Powers of Howor called “Phobia As
Abortive Metaphor of Want” (“JA phobie-mt’urphore m n q d e du manque”),
Kristeva explains that in the metaphor of phobia built up, by recourse to these
 Thea Harrington 147

word games, to protect the subject from having to face fear as such, the entire
spectrum of fears is revealed.” Just as the repressed is signaled in the not of
negation, the doubled manque in the French title of this section reveals that
phobia shows in its structure-by the very activity of its production-the
matter of fear that is the void on which it rests. Earlier in the text, Kristeva
alludes to this construction in an almost cryptic fashion reminiscent of the
“flash” in “Stabat Mater.”
But no sooner has it [fear] cropped up than it shades off like a
mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexist-
ence, with a hallucinatory, and ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear
having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it
ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent
and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and
intimate: the abject. (Kristeva 1982,6)

The fundamental fear, the dissolving of the subject in the face of arbitrary
signification, is, once glossed by the play of fears, lost to memory. The founding
denial contained in the metaphor of want glosses that void of being, of
meaning, that is death. Kristeva’s reading ties the Freudian notion of negation
to the Hegelian negative in terms of language and its revelatory action as the
space of a certain performative component. By revealing in the action of
language a primal manque and engaging in the very activity of a practice, this
gesture reveals the stakes of her own project. “In a world in which the other
has collapsed, the aesthetic task-a descent into the foundations of the
symbolic construct-amount to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking
being” (Kristeva 1982, 18).
As we have seen, phobia has as its fundamental construction the shape of
metaphor. The phobic construction, however, backfires as the heterogeneous
tensions of the metaphor play out not verbally between words but rather
psychically. Writing is, thus, the primary analog of a phobia: in the play of the
sign, Kristeva sees the heterogeneity that marks phobia and abjection. In such
an analogy, the metaphor becomes itself a metaphor, and the writer who
“succeeds in metaphorizing” and “com[ing] to life in signs” fights the same
battle with abjection as the Borderline patient. His struggle with “the language
of fear” is the struggle of the abject. And what then of analogy as the perfect
proportional?Does it take on the status of a metaphor of abjection in Kristeva’s
text? Where she proceeds by folding her own voice with that tool straying
upon that unnamable territory only in the space between the proportions-
where the metaphor reveals loss in the juncture of terms-the analogy reveals
what in the space of the proportion that attempts to speak about an unspeak-
able fundamental loss. By enacting as textual gestures, the moves of the deject,
she asks us also to question the ‘I’ (as sign of the speaking being) whose roots
in the “fragile limits” “closest to its dawn” even under the guise of Other sit at
148 Hypatia

the boundary of the “assimilable, thinkable: abject” (Kristeva 1982, 18).Is the
writer who “comes to life in signs” forfeiting again in some way his own already
forfeited existence by straying on the ground from which he is always already
excluded at the moment of his birth into the language that determines his
being as speaking subject?
He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps
.
receding . . but he cannot help taking the risk at the very
moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays the more
.
he is saved. . .For it is out of such straying on excluded ground
that he draws his jouissance. (Kristeva 1982,8)
When Kristeva turns to writing as the optimal mode of analysis, she is clearly
working from the Freudian construction of the analytic notion of remembering
as a kind of reviving. The borderline patient must be given a memory; this is
done by inserting images of fear into a system of signification, a language. The
heterogeneity of phobia as metaphor that creates the figure in the drives and
not in the language must be given a system by which the metaphor can become
verbal, and therefore objective.
The arbitrary nature of the sign is for Kristeva the nearest equivalent of fear.
Language becomes a sort of analogy to phobic constructions. The inherent
heterogeneity between signifier and signified, apparent on the battleground of
the sign, is therefore the best means to understand the abject. Language is tied
to memory in the relationship between langue and parole and in the temporality
of the sign itself. The activity of the sign, like negation as “the hallmark of
repression,” (Freud 1989, 667) also plays the game of representing the lost
object, and does so in such a way as to show the loss itself. By giving the patient
a language that is tied to an objective construct, the analyst gives the ability
to remove the unspeakable from the “frail signifying system” and to highlight
it as a component part of language.
But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish?
And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial (“I know
that, but just the same,” “the sign is not the thing, but just the
same,” etc.) and defines us in our essence as speaking beings.
Because of its founding status, the fetishism of “language” is
perhaps the only one that is unanalyzable. (Kristeva 1982,37)
Language is crucial to the Kristevan notion of the speaking subject and to
the complex construction of the “I” in her text. It would therefore be appro-
priate to analyze the previous passage from the vantage point of the speaker.
Kristeva herself draws from the psychoanalytic langue when she returns to and
enters into the theoretical memory of Freud’s case study of Little Hans. By
writing on abjection, she must shift from the theoretical aporia of a confession
to the objective reporting of a theory-to give the history of the abject, to
 Thea Harrington 149

show that scar. The shift to theory gives to her writing the same memory-
the same language-that the analyst must give to the analysand, and as
such it reveals the same primal manque. Because the langue can and does
exist without the individual subject, it carries in its construction the
“death” of the subject.
For Kristeva, Freudian theory is constructed in such a way as to void the
borderline subject who faces the abject; it also voids Kristeva’s own voice. The
tension between the text’s theoretical and confessional narrative is clear in the
reversion to Freud, in the shift from the je to the on, and in the language of the
passage itself. The language strains between positive and negative construc-
tions in such words as “unapproachable,” “unanalyzable,” and “unnameable”
(inaborduble, inanalysable, innommabk). The prefix un and verbal construction
of “is not” are marks of a non-defining definition: to define via negation is not
to say or to say “not.”
Thus these pages choreograph a complicated dance between voices that are
ultimately both subjects; or perhaps not. Is this return to the memory of a
theory the way to give a memory to the hallucinatory voice that speaks the “I”
that confesses itself as abject as it misrecognizes itself, and that analyzes itself
as abject? And if so, is the loss or the horror marked by such word-play
fundamental to Kristeva’s project?
Finally, and this is the second reason why phobia does not
disappear but slides beneath language [langue], the phobic
object is a proto-writing and, conversely, any practice of speech
[parole], inasmuch as it involves writing, is a language of fear. I
mean a language of want as such, the want that positions sign,
subject and object. . . not a language of desiring exchange, but
a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along
its edges. The one who tries to utter this “not yet a place,” this
no-grounds, can obviously only do so backwards, starting from
an over-mastery of the linguistic and rhetorical code. But in the
last analysis he refers to fear [il se refre]-a terrifying, abject
referent. (Kristeva 1982,38)
Speech, the specific moment of the hngue, betrays manque as the memory
“both repelled and repellent” of an “otherness,” of an abject. This language
positions. As it does so, it demarcates a “not yet a place” in the space that the
metaphors reveal and in the suspension inherent in the “but,” in “I know the
sign is not the thing but. . . .” The mastery from which one must move
backward toward fear is the same mastery of the code from which Little Hans
spoke, and is the same mastery from which Kristeva speaks. She writes to
articulate the “not yet a place” in the code from which she must speak. In the
end, or in the beginning, to write is to write the manque that positions “sign,
subject, and object.” If any writing is always self-reference (il se refhe), manque
150 Hypatia

is the site of the self. Such a space of “no-grounds’’is the territory of the writer
(“the signifier of the abject”).

The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places
(himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore
strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or
refusing. . . . Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichean,
he divides, excludes, and without, properly speaking wishing to
know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often he
includes himself among them, thus casting within himself the
scalpel that carries out his separations. (Kristeva 1982, 8,
emphasis in original)
The borderline patient operates via an internalized severance. A positional
logic forces reflexivity rather than objectivity. The existent abject as the most
near the self jettisons the self, not from any objective playing field, but from
itself. Trapped in misrecognized self-reflection, the subject, instead of acting
on the object, is repositioned. The experience of manque acts out within the
borderline patient the ambiguous position of the grammatical construction
effected by the se (“I/ se refere,” “un jete‘qui [sel place, [sel se‘ppare, [sel situe et donc
erre”). Like the je that is displaced in the predicates of the conjugated m q u e r ,
the one who recognizes the abject in himself-for whom the primal manque
has determined a relation with self as excluded-necessarily strays [erre].I1
The deject, furthermore, is the writer. The activity of writing is the enact-
ment of the straying, roaming, and erring in the borderline patient. The writer
builds, devises, demarcates, and defines, for it is only through the activity of
writing that she can ask “where?” and thus be sustained by approaching the
seductive and repellent unspeakable abject that is herself. She carries within
herself the scalpel by which the catastrophic (which is “not one”) excludes.
Indeed, the need to look at, and be repelled by, the abject constitutes her drive,
her sustenance.
A meditation on the unthinkable abject, in the end, draws an analogy
between the activity of literature and the activity of the borderline patient. By
always positioning the discussion of the abject at the vanishing point between
subject and culture, or between case history and theory, the text articulates an
aesthetic that questions the poles of subjective and objective perspectives,
while at the same time necessarily questioning something like a “speaking
being.” Wandering, like the deject, between salvation and condemnation,
Kristeva, too, builds languages and territories by folding and dividing the
subjects of this text. Indeed, in the last section of Powers of Horror she asks,
“does anyone write under any other condition than being possessed by abjec-
tion, in an indefinite catharsis?” (Kristeva 1982, 208).
Ewa Ziarek (1992) says that Kristeva’s use of the maternal figure is more
revolutionary, and more useful to ethics and feminism, than her use of avant-
 Thea Harrington 151

garde poetry. This may be so, but in order to unravel the relationship between
aesthetics and politics that underlies the speaking subject in process/on trial,
we must locate the “text as practice” as speaking against and revealing the
contradiction, the absence, the struggle in “text as practice” as the signifier of
the borders on which we and Kristeva speak. “The ethical cannot be stated,
instead it is practiced to the point of loss, and the text is one of the most
accomplished examples of such a practice” (Kristeva 198413,234).

IMPOSSIBLECATHARSIS

In light of the contradiction that is the subject in process/on trial, revealed

in practice, and specifically in the practice of art, we can see that by interro-
gating the space marked out by the abject, whose signifier is ‘hone but
literature” and whose subject as, borderline patient, forms analogues of the
process and problems of the subject, we can begin to discern the reasons that
explain Kristeva’s strange double voices.

One must keep open the wound where he or she who enters
into the analytic adventure is located-a wound that the pro-
fessional establishment, along with the cynicism of the times
and of institutions, will soon manage to close up. . . . It is rather
a heterogeneous, corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental
incompleteness: a “gaping,” “less One.” For the unstabilized
subject who comes out of that-like a crucified person opening
up the stigmata of its desiring body to a speech that structures
only on condition that it let go-any signifying or human
phenomenon, insofar as it is, appears in its being as abjection.
For what impossible catharsis! (Kristeva 1982, 27, emphasis in
original)

To show that abjection, while perhaps initially of religious concern, is

clearly tied to the processes of both psychoanalysis and philosophy, and to pull
her discussion into a cultural context, Kristeva turns to the term “catharsis.”
The patient’s initial entry into analysis is marked by a wound. By entering the
analytic process, the analysand reaches for and acts out the primal loss. Placing
the subject in the analytic language marks an initiation that is not a guarantor
of a “purity,” but is an ordeal that can have no catharsis (Kristeva 1982,27).
In the catastrophic moment, the patient is initiated into being as “gaping,” as
wound. In therapy, Kristeva sees the reenactment of the subject’s entrance into
signification. The same wound “marks” the abject as subject, and that lan-
guage “structures only on condition that it [the subject] let go.” Impossible
catharsis in the space of a “sublimation without consecration. Forfeited”
(Kristeva 1982, 26).
152 Hypatia

Tracing the gesture of catharsis, Kristeva begins with Plato and Aristotle and
moves to Hegel and Freud. In these texts, she notes, the terms of abjection
emerge. “Catharsis,” she says, “has been transformed, where transcendental
idealism is concerned, into philosophy” (Kristeva 1982, 28). Platonic purity
rests on the ability, found only in the philosopher-kings, to sever the corporeal
from the mental, and this purity culminates in death (Kristeva 1982). The
mode of catharsis is one of distinguishing, separating, and isolating.
Aristotle, Kristeva argues, turns to poetry to elaborate the concept of
catharsis. Taking up the notion of rhythm and poetry as purgation and purity
through repetition, Aristotle’s idea of catharsis acts in the moment of repeti-
tion that “defers,” “differentiates,” and “harmonizes” by “what is not yet or no
longer is meaning” (Kristeva 1982, 28). This structuring rhythm reveals the
silent abject that gestures in rhythmic repetition “on the near and far side of
language” (Kristeva 1982, 28).
Hegel, by contrast, situates the abject in “the negative side of conscious-
ness,” yet it is still constituted by “silence” (Kristeva 1982, 30). Hegel, like
Aristotle, incorporates the abject, but by incorporating it in the dialectic,
Kristeva argues, Hegel sets up the same kind of discourse of catharsis by which
the abject can be seen. Specifically, it is in the act of marriage, Kristeva argues,
that Hegel tries to get rid of the impure: lust is normalized. What remains of
the abject in Hegel’s work, for Kristeva, is a sadness that lingers as a residue of
a fundamental loss.’2
The same thrust toward normalcy that leaves sadness as a residue of the
abject is seen in the language of the analyst. In Freudian discourse, however,
Kristeva finds the most fruitful use of catharsis. In analysis, catharsis becomes
not simply the action of purging and cleansing but rather the incorporation of
the abject in a “rebirth” (Kristeva 1982,31). Analysis affords this positive look
at the abject because its participants enact, in mimetic play, a “cohabitation”
with the abject (Kristeva 1982,301. In identification (for Freud and Kristeva,
transference and countertransference), the analyst becomes, for the analysand,
that abjected other.
Identification allows for securing in their place what, when
parceled out, makes them suffering and barren. It allows one to
regress back to the affects that can be heard in the breaks in
discourse, to provide rhythm, to concatenate the gaps of a
speech saddened because it turned its back on its abject mean-
ing. (Kristeva 1982,30-31)
This identification, however, does not purge the abject; instead, by becom-
ing “incarnate,” it reenacts the moment when the abject came to exist. The
interpretive speech that provides the rhythm that enchains the gaps is also
“affected”: it is marked by a “bilingualism” that betrays its “cohabitation with
the abject” (Kristeva 1982, 30). The subject that is located in the wound,
 Thea Harrington 153

which must be kept open for the abject to be heard, is involved in the very
activity of signification through the concatenating rhythm. The interpretive
structure afforded by the analyst, as we have seen, involves giving to language
the memory of the loss that constitutes the subject’s being. Paradoxically,
identification enacts again that primal affective moment in which one must
sever oneself in order to be. The possibility of catharsis rests in the ability to
speak in two languages (literary and theoretical) and also to speak as an
other-to speak as the abject.
In the light of these discussions, we can now turn to the opening pages of
Kristeva’s text, which at first appeared cast in the first person-in the “I” of
the analysand-and see that they can be understood as choreographing a pas
de deux of identification and abjection; an identification, moreover, that forces
a bilingualism that reveals and secures on the page what makes one “suffering
and barren.” The “I” lifts off the page and becomes a sign of that which is
against the abject and that which leaves “me” abject. The moment of reading
evacuates (though never completely) one voice and inserts “my own” in
someone else’s language-there before “me.” “I” must let go in order to be. The
identification makes this “I” double: it is analysand and analyst; it is “me” and
(6you.”

There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My

body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such
wastes drop so that I might live, until from loss to loss nothing
remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-
cadere, cadaver. . . . It is no longer “I” who expel. “I” is expelled.
The border has become an object. How can I be without
border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or
that I hallucinate so that I might, in the present time, speak to
you, conceive of you-it is now here, jetted, abjected, into
“my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, Ifall in afaint. In that
compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in
that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer
signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that
has released its borders: fainting away. (Kristeva 1982, 3-4,
emphasis in original)
In this dialogue one must ask, Who is this “you”?Who is this “I”? Whether
they have signifieds, however, is a secondary’question. The ambiguity, which
above all constitutes the abject, is located and enacted in the impossible
identifications in this passage-indeed, in the whole first and second sections
of Powers of Horror. More than just an interesting narrative ploy, however, this
dynamic and unsettling language leaves us asking, what is the relationship
between the subject of this essay and the subject? And where in the end-
“under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that
154 Hypatia

they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking” amidst

“the horror that they seize on in order to build themselves up and function”-is
the voice of this text? (Kristeva 1982, 210). Is not the project of identifying
and severing in order to be reborn through catharsis also the project of facing
again, perhaps more productively, Hegel’s alien child, necessary to the dialectic
but also that “burst of beauty that cancels our existence”?

NOTES

1. For additional analyses of the specific nature of and the implications for the
ethical in Kristeva’s work see McCance 1996;Ziarek 1992 and 1993; and Oliver 1993a
and b.
2. Actually, when critics write on Kristeva their work often reflects this choreog-
raphy of speaking at the borders (fronti2res).Kelly Oliver’s excellent exegetical account
of the movements and productive contradictions in the body of Kristeva’s work, in
Unraveling the Double Bind (Oliver 1993a), returns often, in the introduction and
elsewhere, to a kind of autobiographical disclaimer in which Oliver says that she tries
to tell her story ofKristeva’s story. In one such instance, she explains that her book “can
be read as the story of Kristeva’s trip through the maternal body, the story of her
challenge to traditional psychoanalysis, pushed to its borders” (Oliver 1993a, 3). At
another point, she says “we must learn to live within the flexible and always precarious
borders of our subjectivities in order to live within the flexible, always precarious
borders of human society. We must unravel the double-bind between completely
inhabiting the Symbolic-and thereby taking up a rigid unified subject position-and
refusing the symbolic-and thereby inhabiting psychosis. This is what 1see as Kristeva’s
project. This is what I take on as my project” (Oliver 1993a, 13).
3. Judith Butler’s discussion of gender and the metaphysics of substance (1990)
takes up the question of the relationship between performance and gender construc-
tions. In this text and later (Butler 1993), she argues that gender is a performance
constituted by the very act of expression. In this way, she says gender is “not a doing by
a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (1990,25).This construction seems
to echo the way Kristevan performance is articulated and enacted, at least insofar
as the unified subject is called into question by the structure of a gender that
performs existence by the performance, not by any ground. When she discusses
Powers of Horror, Butler seems to say that the two works ask the same kinds of
questions, but that her own performance critiques a metaphysics of substance.
Kristeva’s notions of performativity, by contrast, emerge in a choreography that
reveals her practice through a ruptured text designed in part to force an engagement
that is both ethical and aesthetic (Butler 1990).
In Bodies That Matter, Butler’s notion of repetition is curious and provocative.
Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it would be especially useful to think
through her use of the term “sedimentation,” which “is always a provisional failure of
memory” (Butler 1990,244), and its connection to repetition in terms of the Kristevan
notion that the text as practice must keep open the wound ofthe subject’sentrance into
language. In similar terms, Kristeva’s performative structures could be seen as a manner
in which the analyst gives a language to that abject as it enters the text and thereby
 Thea Harrington 155

enters always the moment of the subject’s own coming into being, in process/on trial.
Butler herself argues that in terms of abjection and exclusion Kristeva’s work, although
different, is related to her own (Butler 1993,244).
4. Elizabeth Grosz (1987) reads Kristeva’s relation to the tradition differently.
Grosz believes that Kristeva relates to the work of Freud, Lacan, and Derrida as a
“prot6g6”: she argues over specificsbut does not question the assumptions and method-
ologies employed.
5. See Ziarek (1992) for an analysis of the implications of pain in this passage.
6. The “flash” in “Stabat Mater” echoes the abject and the question of catharsis
in Powers ofHorror.
7. Grosz argues that Kristeva’s interiorization of the subject fractured into two
“sites of discourse” is predicated on a necessary “indifference” that denies a specific,
sexualized body in favor of an androgynous view and is, therefore, particularly dangerous
to feminist concerns. “In the work of Kristeva, because sexual difference is located in
the interior of the subject, fracturing the subject into two sites of discourse, two modes of
organization, two kinds of sexual attachment, one feminine, plural, multiple, material,
the other, phallic, hier-archised [sic], singular, unified, law-abiding, it is a sexual
difference within a sexually indifferent subject and body. This androgynous model of
human subjectivity i n fact serves, as do all versions of androgyny, to cover over and deny
any specificity that might be accorded to women’’ (Grosz 1987, 140, emphasis in
original). To postulate an interior difference is not necessarily to deny the specificity of
women, but rather to underscore iddifference as an ethical condition (see Ziarek 1993),
which highlights a specificity that is even less likely to fall prey to the problems of an
egalitarian stance that Grosz identifies.
8. These are the same terms she uses to identify the ethical. See e.g., McCance
1996.
9. Lyotard 1984 discussing the specific conditions of knowledge in postmodemity,
defines the postmodern within the temporal paradox of a future anterior. This temporal
space is one he identifies with a strange state of a permanent naissance. Kristeva’s
construction of a subject in process/on trial contains a similar constituent mobility.
Although the parameters of this essay do not allow for an examination of the implica-
tions of such a similarity, elsewhere (1996), I compare these two constructions in order
to interrogate the notion of a postmodem subject. The relationship between the subject
and/or in the postmodern within the nexus of possibilities and paradoxes of a future
anterior is an important question.
10. The passage in question reads in full: “The metaphor that is taxed with
representing want itself (and not its consequences, such as transitional objects and their
sequels, the ‘a’ objects of the desiring quest) is constituted under the influence of a
symbolizing agency. Metaphor of want as such, Phohia bears the mark of the frailty
of the subject’s signifying system. It must be perceived that such a metaphor is inscribed
not in verbal rhetoric but in the heterogeneity of the psychic system that is made up of
drive presentations and thing presentations linked to word presentations. . . .
O n the other hand, taking that metaphoricalness into account would amount to
considering the phobic person as a subject in want of metaphoricalness. Incapable of
producing metaphors by means of signs alone, he produces them in the very material of
drive-and it turns out that the only rhetoric of which he is capable is that of affect,
and is projected, as often as not, by means of images. It will then fall upon analysis to
give back a memory, hence a language, to the unnameable and nameable states of fear,
while emphasizing the former, which make up what is most unapproachable in the
156 Hypatia

unconscious. It will also fall upon it, within the same temporality and the same logic,
to make the analysand see the void [vide] upon which rests the play with the signifier
and primary processes. Such a void and the arbitrariness of that play are the truest
equivalents of fear. But does it not amount to diverting the analytic process towards
literature, or even stylistics?Is this not asking the analyst to be rhetorical, to ‘write’
instead of ‘interpreting’?Does this not also imply holding up a fetishist screen, that of
the word, before a dissolvingfear?”(Kristeva 1982,35,37)
11. “Instead of sounding himself as to his ‘being,’ he does so concerning place:
‘Where am I?‘ instead of ‘Who am I!’ For the space that engrosses the deject, the
excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible,
foldable, and catastrophic. A devisor of territories, languages, works, the deject never
stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confine-for they are constituted of a
non-object, the abject+onstantly questions his solidity and impels him to start afresh.
A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray” (Kristeva 1982,8).
12. See the “Spirit” section of Hegel (1977, 273-74). The simple residue of sadness
reflecting loss that Kristeva identifies ignores the problematic figure that closes this
synthetic moment. Hegel’s alien child incorporates a seeming threat to the possibility
of an easy sadness, if only by virtue of its presence. In Hegel’s system, the consummation
of marriage sets the stage for the birth of yet another whose parents, witnessing the
development in the children of an independent existence, which they are unable to
take back again; the independence of the children remains an alien reality” (Hegel,
1977,273) that leaves the question of the abject, as Kristeva articulatesit, somehow the
source of more complexity than simply a resulting sadness. The dialectic can be seen as
a series of violent separations from and joinings to, and this action would incorporate
the Same structures of severing that Kristeva observes in the abject, which both seduces
and repels.

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