Talk:Abjection

message: 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)
replies: text: The concept of abjection is a contradictin of terms by definition. I'll do what I can to 'fix up' the article, but you're dissagreeing with points that you then later agree with. I do not see a problem with most of the points you disgree with, you simply do not understand the defintions I suppose. I'll do what I can to bring it down to an intelligible level I guess. --Thaddius 14:57, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awful 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Abject in Literature, Huxley 

message: 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)
replies: text: As I mentioned above (and I feel it needs reiteration because it is important) personal criticisms of the topic of the article are not relevant to the article. Should you wish to 'clean up' the article while maintaining a neutral point of view, it would be very welcome, but personal, unsourced gripes will be deleted. I assume that Habitus feels the same way seeing as how he seems concerned with these complaints being directed at Kristeva herself, not the essay the article discusses.. --Thaddius (talk) 17:38, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  To the writer of "Awful" 

message: 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)
replies: text: Feel free to make changes to the article yourself. Your problem with the 'fiction' part can be solved by simply changing the title\header to something like 'abjection in writings on fiction' or something more eloquent. As for suggestions on what to add, be bold. --Thaddius (talk) 14:38, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Just Passing Through 

message: 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)
replies: text: Seeing no explanation, I'm going to go ahead and remove the clause after the colon.  If someone can find a way to state this concept in a way that a layperson might understand, feel free.128.115.27.11 (talk) 22:46, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Un-namely? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Pornography 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Re the "In Critical Theory" section: 

message: 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)
thread_title:  French "abjection" and English "abjection"