![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This essay is awful. The terms are undefined, it's a narrative, there's no examples, and it its dense and confusing.
The term is first defined as rejection... isn't there an aspect of horror to it though? "Abject poverty"? How can the abject be "taken out of our system while bits of it remain in our selves": that's a contradiction, and implies a second-party actor as well. "The act of "selfing" ("identitying") ourselves is the only common feature of all people" - that's not true! All people have brains, too. And spinal columns. And a cardiovascular system. And, if we exclude the severely brain-damaged, things like thoughts and feelings and emotions are pretty universal too.
There clearly needs to be more than one source used, because either Kristeva is being sorely misrepresented... or Kristeva is full of crap. We feel horror at the sight of a dead body because it's "outside the symbolic order"? Really? I thought it was because it confronts us with our own mortality, and because it violates our mental habit of looking for signs of life in our fellow humans - a corpse is "wrong" because we are genetically predisposed to prefer the living over the dead. Further, we are (perhaps instinctively) wary of dead bodies as being possible sources of infection or disease.
"This act is done in the light of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: un-namely – the mother." What the hell? Total non-sequitor, nevermind that "un-namely" isn't a word. This entire paragraph is again asserting as factual, what is (at best) a tenuous hypothesis about the development of human children's psyche.
Sorry about the rant. I hope I'm not the only one who finds this entire entry worse than useless. -- Leperflesh 06:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with the first poster. As an intelligent layman I find the article too dependent on psychological terms to understand. Further, when a definition or explanation uses as part of its exposition the word it supposedly defines, I find it worse than useless. mujerado ( talk) 02:53, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
Can't objects be abject? Like blood or sperm? People don't want to see abject things because they belong ín the body and not outside? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.98.75.222 ( talk • contribs).
What exactly does being anal retentive have to do with a fear of losing one's excrement? Anal retentive gets its name from the anal stage of development. Also, it has to do with an over attention to details, not any type of fear of loss. Furthermore, the poster Leperfish, above, does not seem to be accepting then denying things. Also, what does it mean for a thing to have a definition that is inhernelty contradictory? You say that someone failed to comprehend the definition and you will make it more inteligible; but do you realize that a contradiction is neccesarily unintelligible. This article is absurd, sadly it's probably not your fault; Kristeva's orginal essay was extremely absurd...if you disagree, please respond with something meaningful, don't simply say that I failed to understand the definitions involved. Phoenix1177 ( talk) 07:09, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
While Huxley doesn't define the term abjection, he uses the word abject gratuitously in his masterpiece Brave New World and the subsequent essays of Brave New World Revisited. When I return to school in January, I can find references if this would help.
I think it's faulty to attribute this word to Kristeva as if she invented its philosophical meaning in some quasi-Hegelian sense. A clarification of this would be nice, and maybe even structuring articles such that the pre-Kristeva usages of abject in literature do not look like they were influenced by her. -- Tedpennings 19:38, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
The word abject means existing in a low or downcast state, Kristeva (if she was indeed the one to come up with the idea) just took the word for this idea. Maybe a link to its Wikitionary page?-- Absurdity 03:19, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I think that what you wrote about the abjection article being awful is more directed at Kristeva. Have you read "Powers of Horror"? It makes a lot of statements that seem to be contradictions and I *think* that that is part of what Kristeva was trying to do. Habitus2007 ( talk) 13:27, 25 November 2007 (UTC)Habitus
I'm sorry, but making contradicitions is the same as making nonsense. My point, if what someone writes somehow requires them to contradict things, they should not bother writing it in the first place. I know this is not the place for it, but Kristeva's essay reads like it was written by a third grader who was using vocabulary from psychoanalysis to make it look smart, but then failed. Phoenix1177 ( talk) 12:03, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Neither of the examples under the title "Fiction" are, strictly speaking, works of fiction.
This needs to be a much larger article, and what is here mostly belongs on another page. Consider Johnson's definition: "mean, base, vile, contemptible. / Meanness of mind, servility, baseness."
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.211.73 ( talk) 21:27, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
On reflection, I was too harsh on this article. I have made some small alterations in an attempt to broaden the subject, and I think that with these the article stands alone well enough. In this spirit I have also merged Abject Art. It was a good suggestion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.132.164.74 ( talk) 16:33, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
This act is done in the light of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: un-namely – the mother.
I'm having trouble making sense of this statement. It seems to suggest that the mother is a part of the self (or several parts?), and that the act of abjection is done in the light of the mother. It also implies that calling these parts of self (which are excluded in order to illuminate the act of abjection) by the name "the mother" somehow is not to name these parts of the self. Obviously, most people have a proper human name for their individual mother; is "un-namely" just a cute way of saying that the author of this article doesn't know the reader's mother's name?
Were you trying to say that the act of abjection exemplified by the exclusion of one's mother from one's own identity? If so, I might choose defecation and the cutting of hair and nails as examples that often find an earlier place in a person's memory. In this case, "in the light of the parts..." might be less appropriate than "in the light of our exclusion...".
But perhaps there's a lot of critical theory jargon that has gone over my head here.
Joel ( talk) 01:25, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
The abjection of women in pornography would be worth mentioning in this article, I think. I'll try to get some good citations. -- TyrS chatties 04:48, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
While Mary Douglas's work was important, it is almost certainly wrong to identify her work as the "origin" of the analysis of concepts like "sin", "taboo" and "defilement" in terms of semiotics and the symbolic. At the very least, this statement overlooks the work of Mirceau Eliade, beginning in the late 1940's, and Paul Ricoeur's early works FALLIBLE MAN and THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL, both first published in 1960. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Meherlihy ( talk • contribs) 17:35, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
Sorry, forgot to sign.... One general note: this article is sadly lacking in rigor. My overall impression is that it's trying to cover way too much ground from too narrow a base of knowledge. It could use attention from a Kristeva expert, a comparative religionist, an anthropologist, an art historian specializing in contemporary performance art, and so on. Meherlihy ( talk) 17:44, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
Both words mean "cast down," but they differ considerably in nuance. Larousse defines French "abjection" as "Dernier degré de l'abaissement, de la dégradation morale ; ignominie." Oxford refers one to "abject": "(of a person or their behavior) completely without pride or dignity; self-abasing." Carolyn Forché's use of "abject" to quite different effect illustrates this clearly: "I had not yet…conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation; to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in supplication and without need of response." Employing faux amis in translating French theorists is a common source of misunderstanding and conflict. Jackaroodave ( talk) 21:39, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This essay is awful. The terms are undefined, it's a narrative, there's no examples, and it its dense and confusing.
The term is first defined as rejection... isn't there an aspect of horror to it though? "Abject poverty"? How can the abject be "taken out of our system while bits of it remain in our selves": that's a contradiction, and implies a second-party actor as well. "The act of "selfing" ("identitying") ourselves is the only common feature of all people" - that's not true! All people have brains, too. And spinal columns. And a cardiovascular system. And, if we exclude the severely brain-damaged, things like thoughts and feelings and emotions are pretty universal too.
There clearly needs to be more than one source used, because either Kristeva is being sorely misrepresented... or Kristeva is full of crap. We feel horror at the sight of a dead body because it's "outside the symbolic order"? Really? I thought it was because it confronts us with our own mortality, and because it violates our mental habit of looking for signs of life in our fellow humans - a corpse is "wrong" because we are genetically predisposed to prefer the living over the dead. Further, we are (perhaps instinctively) wary of dead bodies as being possible sources of infection or disease.
"This act is done in the light of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: un-namely – the mother." What the hell? Total non-sequitor, nevermind that "un-namely" isn't a word. This entire paragraph is again asserting as factual, what is (at best) a tenuous hypothesis about the development of human children's psyche.
Sorry about the rant. I hope I'm not the only one who finds this entire entry worse than useless. -- Leperflesh 06:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with the first poster. As an intelligent layman I find the article too dependent on psychological terms to understand. Further, when a definition or explanation uses as part of its exposition the word it supposedly defines, I find it worse than useless. mujerado ( talk) 02:53, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
Can't objects be abject? Like blood or sperm? People don't want to see abject things because they belong ín the body and not outside? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.98.75.222 ( talk • contribs).
What exactly does being anal retentive have to do with a fear of losing one's excrement? Anal retentive gets its name from the anal stage of development. Also, it has to do with an over attention to details, not any type of fear of loss. Furthermore, the poster Leperfish, above, does not seem to be accepting then denying things. Also, what does it mean for a thing to have a definition that is inhernelty contradictory? You say that someone failed to comprehend the definition and you will make it more inteligible; but do you realize that a contradiction is neccesarily unintelligible. This article is absurd, sadly it's probably not your fault; Kristeva's orginal essay was extremely absurd...if you disagree, please respond with something meaningful, don't simply say that I failed to understand the definitions involved. Phoenix1177 ( talk) 07:09, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
While Huxley doesn't define the term abjection, he uses the word abject gratuitously in his masterpiece Brave New World and the subsequent essays of Brave New World Revisited. When I return to school in January, I can find references if this would help.
I think it's faulty to attribute this word to Kristeva as if she invented its philosophical meaning in some quasi-Hegelian sense. A clarification of this would be nice, and maybe even structuring articles such that the pre-Kristeva usages of abject in literature do not look like they were influenced by her. -- Tedpennings 19:38, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
The word abject means existing in a low or downcast state, Kristeva (if she was indeed the one to come up with the idea) just took the word for this idea. Maybe a link to its Wikitionary page?-- Absurdity 03:19, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
I think that what you wrote about the abjection article being awful is more directed at Kristeva. Have you read "Powers of Horror"? It makes a lot of statements that seem to be contradictions and I *think* that that is part of what Kristeva was trying to do. Habitus2007 ( talk) 13:27, 25 November 2007 (UTC)Habitus
I'm sorry, but making contradicitions is the same as making nonsense. My point, if what someone writes somehow requires them to contradict things, they should not bother writing it in the first place. I know this is not the place for it, but Kristeva's essay reads like it was written by a third grader who was using vocabulary from psychoanalysis to make it look smart, but then failed. Phoenix1177 ( talk) 12:03, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Neither of the examples under the title "Fiction" are, strictly speaking, works of fiction.
This needs to be a much larger article, and what is here mostly belongs on another page. Consider Johnson's definition: "mean, base, vile, contemptible. / Meanness of mind, servility, baseness."
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.211.73 ( talk) 21:27, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
On reflection, I was too harsh on this article. I have made some small alterations in an attempt to broaden the subject, and I think that with these the article stands alone well enough. In this spirit I have also merged Abject Art. It was a good suggestion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.132.164.74 ( talk) 16:33, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
This act is done in the light of the parts of ourselves that we exclude: un-namely – the mother.
I'm having trouble making sense of this statement. It seems to suggest that the mother is a part of the self (or several parts?), and that the act of abjection is done in the light of the mother. It also implies that calling these parts of self (which are excluded in order to illuminate the act of abjection) by the name "the mother" somehow is not to name these parts of the self. Obviously, most people have a proper human name for their individual mother; is "un-namely" just a cute way of saying that the author of this article doesn't know the reader's mother's name?
Were you trying to say that the act of abjection exemplified by the exclusion of one's mother from one's own identity? If so, I might choose defecation and the cutting of hair and nails as examples that often find an earlier place in a person's memory. In this case, "in the light of the parts..." might be less appropriate than "in the light of our exclusion...".
But perhaps there's a lot of critical theory jargon that has gone over my head here.
Joel ( talk) 01:25, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
The abjection of women in pornography would be worth mentioning in this article, I think. I'll try to get some good citations. -- TyrS chatties 04:48, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
While Mary Douglas's work was important, it is almost certainly wrong to identify her work as the "origin" of the analysis of concepts like "sin", "taboo" and "defilement" in terms of semiotics and the symbolic. At the very least, this statement overlooks the work of Mirceau Eliade, beginning in the late 1940's, and Paul Ricoeur's early works FALLIBLE MAN and THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL, both first published in 1960. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Meherlihy ( talk • contribs) 17:35, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
Sorry, forgot to sign.... One general note: this article is sadly lacking in rigor. My overall impression is that it's trying to cover way too much ground from too narrow a base of knowledge. It could use attention from a Kristeva expert, a comparative religionist, an anthropologist, an art historian specializing in contemporary performance art, and so on. Meherlihy ( talk) 17:44, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
Both words mean "cast down," but they differ considerably in nuance. Larousse defines French "abjection" as "Dernier degré de l'abaissement, de la dégradation morale ; ignominie." Oxford refers one to "abject": "(of a person or their behavior) completely without pride or dignity; self-abasing." Carolyn Forché's use of "abject" to quite different effect illustrates this clearly: "I had not yet…conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation; to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in supplication and without need of response." Employing faux amis in translating French theorists is a common source of misunderstanding and conflict. Jackaroodave ( talk) 21:39, 11 May 2021 (UTC)