Abjection

According to Kristeva, when a child is first born, it hasn’t yet entered the social order and has no sense of itself as separate from the mother (because it’s grown inside the womb, been attached by a placenta and fed through an umbilical cord).  In order to recognise itself as a separate individual the child has to establish a psychological distinction between itself and the mother.  This is achieved by rejecting everything associated with the maternal body – blood, the placenta, the umbilical cord and so on.  These elements are cast out; they become abject, or vile and disgusting.  Kristeva calls this the ‘mapping of the clean and proper self’.  The clean surfaces of the body are contrasted with the abject elements and this permits the formation of an individual identity.

The abject marks the moment when we separate ourselves from the mother, when we first recognize a boundary between the self and the other.  We must abject the maternal, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity.  This means that on a subconscious level the maternal is horrifying. 

Kristeva argues that we have a fear of the abject throughout our lives.  The abject consists of all the things that threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety.  It includes anything vile or disgusting, like the interior workings of the body, bodily fluids or waste.  Kristeva argues that being forced to face the abject is inherently traumatic.  For example, she says that encountering a corpse is repulsive because you’re forced to face an object which has been violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a person, a subject.  A corpse reminds us that we are ultimately just organic matter that will rot away.  Kristeva writes:

Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.  There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (Powers of Horror, p3).

Barbara Creed uses Kristeva’s theory of abjection in her analysis of the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979).  She argues that the film represents the female as horrific and abject.  Birth is depicted as a horrifying process.  The process of a male being impregnated with a creature that gestates in a being that has no womb and rips itself free in a shower of blood is one way in which this film abjectifies female roles.  Alien is about humans being forced to confront the abject which they have tried to suppress.  The first scene has the crew waking up from hyper-sleep.  The crew have been cryogenically frozen for the voyage back to Earth.  The ship’s computer wakes them up and in a sense gives life to them.  The hypersleep vault is a uterine or womb-like space, but it is thoroughly clinical and sanitised.  This suggests that in the future birth is managed by technology; it is a controlled, clean and painless process.  There is no blood, trauma or terror.  The scene in the hypersleep vault suggests that in the future birth has been sanitized and sterilized.  Technology has been used to banish the abject.  However, the alien, with its monstrous reproductive cycle and horribly visceral nature, forces us to confront the true nature of humanity as abject and organic.