Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva examines the concept of abjection, identifying the experience of the abject as the source of human horror and disgust. Familiarity with Kristeva’s theory of human psychosexual development in a child’s individuation from the mother is a necessary first step before moving to an understanding of how and why a confrontation with the abject causes horror and disgust.

Kristeva’s theory posits that in the earliest stages of development, the infant does not differentiate its body from their mother’s body. At this preverbal Semiotic stage, the child has no notion of “self.” Between four and eight months of age, the child begins the process of separation from the mother. This separation is necessary for the child to become a fully formed mature speaking-subject, distinct from other objects. During this process, the abject arises. Kristeva connects the abject to “our earliest attempt to release the hold of maternal entity [...] It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (13). Thus, although the process of subject development is difficult and painful, it is also necessary for the child to exist and enter the Symbolic realm of language.