Ep. 202: Julia Kristeva on Disgust, Fear and the Self (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 202 is something like, what is horror? Or maybe what is disgust? And we read the first two chapters of Powers of Horror, an essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva from 1980. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, armed with my secret Lacanian decoder ring in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:27 Seth: Oh, gosh. This is Seth Paskin, paddling furiously to stay afloat in the jargon in Austin, Texas.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:38 Kelly: This is Kelly Citron, pulverized by my own boundlessness in Utica, New York.

0:43 Seth: Welcome.

0:44 Kelly: Wow, it's nice to be here.

0:45 Mark: Yes, welcome. Kelly, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell the folks who you are. You're the one that suggested this particular text. Why don't you give us a little of your background and your background with the text?

0:55 Kelly: I attended Nazareth College of Rochester for my undergraduate. I was an international relations and Chinese language major. For a little while, I flirted with women's studies.

1:08 Unknown speaker: I came upon Kristeva. This is my introductory text to her. Never actually studied it in class, but I loved it.

1:15 Kelly: I know that this text has given everybody a little bit of trouble, and I admittedly read this over, like, a year and a half, so I didn't exactly have to cram for it. Yeah, this is one of my favorites, even since that I've read by her. I have always been interested in Freud, and I really thought it was an interesting revision to a lot of things that Freud said. I thought that it was an interesting, simple idea that had tendrils that worked out into a lot of different lines of thinking that, you know, you could use it as a metaphor for literature and politics and personal fetishes and all sorts of wonderful things.

1:52 Seth: Excellent.

1:53 Mark: Yeah. So Kristeva's been on our list for a while. Somebody had said earlier she's like the reward for having gotten through Lacan, that she's. I sort of see that there was something that was appealing about this, just in terms of the subject matter, that it wasn't as abstract as Lacan to me, but the actual writing style was. I re. Listened to our Lacan episode, and we were very mean about his writing style. This, to me, was more like Heidegger or Hegel, like one of those actually kind of pleasurable. You know, you have to read it paragraph by paragraph, and I would copy One sentence out and then riff on what I thought that sentence possibly meant. So it went extremely slowly. I actually started reading it sort of normally, and then it was about 12 pages in. It was like, no, I got to start over. I have no idea what's going on at this point.

2:36 Unknown speaker: Yeah, well, I'm happy that I got to skip all of the work of Lacan, because I never read anything by him.

2:42 Seth: That's heresy.

2:43 Mark: As we got closer to the recording time, Wes was recommending a bunch of things from Freud to help clarify, or, you know, just general psychoanalysis, language. Do you want to give your take on this, Wes, how this fits in with your studies?

2:56 Wes: Yeah, so I've taken courses at a psychoanalytic institute for longer than I care to admit. I'm now actually getting to the stage where I'm in earnest becoming a psychoanalyst, and I'm about to start seeing patients as part of field work.

3:11 Seth: That's awesome. Congrats.

3:12 Wes: Any day now. And I have been working as director of a halfway house for the mentally ill for a year and a half now, and I have a lot of experience with narcissistic pathologies. And I go to a school which is kind of focused on schizophrenia and narcissistic pathologies, which is sort of what, ultimately, Kristeva is getting at, really. The question for this episode I would have asked is, what constitutes the subject? And I think she's getting at what we would call pre Oedipal developmental issues that can lead to narcissistic pathologies. And so, coming from being steeped in a bunch of psychoanalytic literature on these topics and reading this, it's really fascinating.

And I've never read her before. I know a lot of people I have gone to school with really love her, but I've never gotten a chance to read her. So this is great. And it was also a good opportunity to brush up on Lacan once again. Each go round, I feel like I get a better footing. The Lacanian version of Freud. And it actually sheds a lot of light on Freud. Lacan's use of structuralism and Saussure's theory of language, I think is actually really helpful ultimately, in understanding Freud. So, yeah, this has actually turned out to be right up my alley.

These two essays, the very things that Kristeva is focusing on, this early pre Oedipal development of the subject and distinction between subject and object. And then in the second essay, some of the borderline experiences that failures in that development can lead to, is kind of like my area of Focus.

4:43 Seth: Yeah.

4:43 Mark: So I guess there are two main ways to approach this. I would say. One is by characterizing what her overall theory about disgust, or what she calls abjection. She's not inventing the term. Right. You're an abject terror. But she's certainly inventing this as a technical term. And I'm not sure what the French connotations are, if it seems as rare a word in French. But she's definitely getting at our reaction to bodily fluids, to corpses, things like that. So it's this mix of horror and disgust, and there's a fascination built in with it. So there's.

You can talk about that feeling and how she explains that. Or as Wes, you were just putting it. Ultimately, it just ends up in a very long discussion of how this feeling interacts with the growth of self that we talked about through Lacan's episode, this mirror stage where you see yourself as a baby, at least whether this happens. You know, this is a definable event or merely sort of a schema picking out the kind of thing that happens, but somehow we don't really have a sense of self. And then you see your image in the mirror and identify it as a unity in a way that you maybe hadn't before.

So you kind of get this imaginary unity and sort of how then this story changes with Kristeva's additions. Which of those do we want to start with? Or do you want to just kind of give your initial takes on either of those? I found the stuff about horror the most interesting. And when it got down to the nitty gritty, like, you know, I, to a point, appreciated the growth of self stuff, but then was like, there's five more paragraphs on this. I cannot read at that same slow speed. Dwelling on this. It got a little too technical for me. Kelly, what did you find compelling about this?

Give us an entry point into the topic here.

6:19 Unknown speaker: I think for me, what has always been challenging is that she kind of blends technical and also very poetic. And she talks about that a little bit. I think it's in the first essay, in approaching Abjection. But she talks about how the higher form of language is poetics. So she's bringing you along and, like, building a thesis. But I also think that she's emotionally exploring the topic a little bit too. Like, she. I know one of the things that really struck me this time, reading through, was the fading in and out of her personal experience of it. Like, even first page, when she's talking about the skin on the milk. Having her experience. Abjection. Some of that throughout was smeared through the text to the point of difficult to understand.

7:06 Kelly: But I also think that she's communicating something there about you can't really like escape the personal when it comes to abjection, because what you experience abjection with is going to be based in your own neurosis.

7:19 Seth: Isn't the concept of abjection that it's somewhere between the subject and the object, that you're not abjecting an object as a subject, you're not even a subject yet? That's a part that's unclear to me about whether you can have objection from within subjectivity or if it's a pre subjective thing. But the idea is that objection is a rejection of something from within you that's not an object yet. Presumably because you're not a subject yet or because it's part of you. But it's this weird transition period between you're not a subject yet, you're still very much part of the mother.

You don't have subjectivity. And abjection is somehow expelling something or reacting to something that's expelled out of yourself, which is not yet an object external to yourself, where you can be a subject which does whatever subjectivity does to an object, but that you react. Part of the point she's trying to make is the motivation to accelerate, to force you into subjectivity is abjection because it's this reaction to something that comes from yourself prior to true subjectivity and objectivity.

8:34 Wes: I think that's very good. I think it helps to use her examples when she gets concrete. In the improper unclean section, we're thinking of things that are me and not me at the same time. Right. So feces, for instance, or bodily fluids. Although ultimately we're thinking about the maternal body itself, the body of the mother. There's union at some point. And then at some point it has to become not me for me to separate and individuate and become a subject. So Kristeva will say something like, you know, I expel myself to establish the I. So we're thinking concretely of the expulsion of fluids and things like that.

But we're also thinking of developmentally. It sounds like something that's supposed to happen in the process of individuation. Or it's describing a state of being an adult which reflects a prior problem in that process of individuation. It's unclear. And psychoanalysis, often those two things go together.

9:36 Mark: So I'm interested in whether it's even possible to talk about abjection apart from her explanation of abjection. The way that you were just giving it is in the way that Seth was just describing it, is that it is something that is happening during the developmental stage. To me, that was an explanation. Certainly she thinks that abjection is a normal part of emotional life for us as adults, and the explanation is in developmentally. But clearly it has to work in both areas. And I'm not even completely sure this whole. It's not an object. And the way Seth was putting it is because, well, you're not a subject yet. Well, again, that might be part of the analysis.

10:13 Wes: He says explicitly, it's not an object.

10:15 Mark: No, I'm saying it's because you're not a subject yet. Okay, that seems to be part of the analysis. Whereas. So if I think about just what is horror? What is dread? Think about the HP Lovecraft sort of uncanniness. The. She. She says this is similar to the sublime. We've had an episode on that where there's something that's just overwhelming, you know, this overwhelming terror that in our emotional lives, the reason we don't see as an object is because we so reject it. And that it's, like, beyond understanding. It's too horrible to even consider as an object.

Which is strange because, you know, a corpse is clearly an object. But the dread that we feel about it, the thing that happens is that we. It's not our perception of the corpse that's it's not an object. It is because the abject is not an object facing me, which I imagine or name. The abject has only one quality of the object, that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it.

What is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. So it's that radically excluded part that it's sort of too intolerable to be considered an object.

11:28 Wes: So we should say, when we use this word object, we are talking about object in the psychoanalytic sense. For Freud, that was primarily the object of desire or the sort of target by which some sort of libidinal aim could be satisfied. And the paradigm for that is the mother or some other early caretaker who fulfills that function. The object is sort of the mother in the abstract. And the pattern for many of our other libidinal attachments are desires later on in life. So when we talk about the object. We are in a way, talking about a person, not a specific person, but the pattern for our relationships to persons.

12:11 Kelly: Talking about Freud, it seemed like her critique of the Oedipal relationship between mother, father and child, son, her critique of that was that the love or the affection or something like that is only a product of. Of narcissism and that it's inherently not a positive emotion. That Freud kind of places the mother as the object of desire, but she kind of pushes back on the idea of desire. And I think she focuses more on like, repulsion, that the repulsion from the mother is how the child establishes any kind of identity. That's kind of the husk where some of the pre linguistic terror about the world is emptied into.

And I found it really interesting that her big critique was that Freud put too positive a spin on the desire for the mother, because that just kind of places her as something that always is just desired. And that obviously isn't true, as we can see, with a lot of, I guess, highlighted male anger towards their mothers and how that kind of spreads out throughout other parts of their life. And that's the other thing with Kristeva is, you know, they call her a feminist philosopher and she offers feminist critiques. But in her own time, she really didn't strongly identify as a feminist.

She pushed back against feminist movements in France, thinking that they were too militant or too dogmatic. Like, I know she criticized Maoist interpretations of feminism, and she also rejected some, like, American brands of feminism, which kind

13:55 Unknown speaker: of hopes to move the woman away from a place of motherhood, being a center of her identity. And Kristeva is very interested in motherhood and relationships of birth and to children and sexuality being like the primary shapers of female psychology. And so I just think that's an important point when she's talking about the mother as the object of repulsion. I think she's also trying to speak to where some of that patriarchal rage comes from or what's the seeding ground of why are we so disgusted by women's bodily functions more so than men?

14:36 Wes: Yeah, I think that's really important and it's helpful to think about. So she's describing a sort of pre Oedipal sort of individuation. Right. So in Freudian terms, it's the Oedipal in a way, that's crucial to individuation. Lacan sort of takes this and runs with it. And the idea is that something has to come between you and the mother and that world. That idea of her as just this gratifying object. And then potentially in the Lacanian version of the story, yourself trying to turn yourself into the object of her desire. The father figure, or the paternal principle is meant to.

Basically, it's an indication that, hey, look, she's actually not just a gratifier, she's not just a breast, but she has desires for something that is not you. So the father, her desire actually can be turned elsewhere. And that's the sort of disappointing, lost. The resolution of the Oedipus complex is about saying, yeah, I can't fully have the object. That's what Lacan will say is basically castration for everyone when we have to give that up and become adults. So that is sort of like the primary sort of developmental step for Freud. And Kristeva is saying, no, we can go back to individuating principle.

And she's not the first to do this, by the way. There's Melanie Klein and other psychoanalysts who elaborated on Freud and developed these ideas about everything that goes on and the pre Oedipal, the importance of certain developmental steps. But this idea that there's some sort of individuating principle before the Oedipus complex is important and that it's about this fundamental repulsion and horror towards the mother, towards the maternal body. And it, you know, Kelly, as you just pointed out, it's a really important idea for trying to understand misogyny.

I think the Oedipus complex is too, but so is this.

16:30 Kelly: I think she ties in. So what you're afraid of, you know, you're afraid of your wastes because they transverse borders, because they remind you that in the end you are dead material that is waiting to die, you know, or you are not any different than your wastes. And I think that if you look at the circumstances of birth, I mean, the mother is expelling the child, and that that moment, that trauma of birth is a consistent reminder that at the end your identity is formed in blood. And for anybody who's aware of the birthing process, fecal matter, and the painful, violent, often fatal horrors of childbirth, and that that was your introductory moment into the world.

She's saying that the reason that these things are pre linguistic is because you experience that trauma at the moment of your entry into the world. So of course, you know, you don't have linguistic structures yet to mask some of the trauma of that you're fully participating in that trauma as you begin to kind of gain language. You cover up certain areas of that in order to adapt to society and in order to make it make sense to you. But the further that you cover that up or internalize narratives, the further that you remove yourself from that, the more that you realize that you.

You kind of can't escape it, the more you become aware of the fact that you can't escape it. And that's kind of the area that, like art and fetishes and all that stuff starts to develop.

18:13 Mark: Let's get a quote out there. So this is on page two. You had talked about, Kelly. You brought up the skin on the milk example, which I assume is probably the most famous thing in here. Just it was very quotable to me. So this is the second little subsection within this first chapter. Approaching abjection, the improper unclean second paragraph. Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk, harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail pairing, I experience a gagging sensation.

And still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly and all the organs shrivel up in the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire along with sight, clouding dizziness. Nausea makes me balk at that milk cream separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. I, in quotes, want none of that element sign of their desire. I do not want to listen, I do not assimilate it, I expel it. But since the food is not an other for me who am only in their desire, I expel myself. I spit myself out, I object myself within the same moment through which I claim to establish myself.

So it sounds like when she's starting here, that she's talking about something that disgusts her as an adult. But if that's the case, clearly she's then getting at sort of what the symbolic meaning is taking you to this experience of. So I didn't realize this was as far back as birth as Kelly just said. I was thinking this is the kind of, you know, when you're talking pre Oedipal, pre self, you're talking, you've got a baby that's out in the world, but doesn't understand that it is an organism different from the mother. So the first time that you would experience that, in fact, I am different, the first time you would grow a self is when you're rejecting something that the parents are offering.

19:57 Wes: So the idea here, right, is that, yeah, as an infant before you have a concept of subject and object, the milk, you're taking in. In a way, it's me at the point where you've taken it in. It's not like the way we think about eating now, where we have a firm concept of what is me and what is not me, even as what is not me is entering my body. The idea is that there's not this firm distinction for a newborn between self and other. There's no concept of self to ground that. And the taking of something into its body, you know, it's almost merger with the mother. And the act of spitting that milk out is an act of individuation. Kristeva will talk a lot just about the role of pure negativity, right. In establishing oneself or individuating. So, yeah, I think that is the idea.

20:47 Kelly: I also found the milk section interesting too, because I think in talking about abjecting things that are objectively horrifying or maybe something that you could find a biological reason why we would be repulsed by. So, you know, we're repulsed by the idea of a corpse because being around a corpse could make us sick. Same with fecal matter. What I found interesting about the food example that she used is that there is nothing inherent in the skin of milk that should make an animal for its own preservation, vomit. It's nutritious. You know, in humans we can, some of us drink and digest cow's milk. I think her talking about something that we don't have a biological reason to try to repel ourselves against underlines a little bit of a different aspect, I

21:43 Unknown speaker: guess, of what kinds of things can be objected or what kinds of things a person can experience. Objection due to.

21:52 Wes: Do you guys have this discussed? This is not. In America. We don't generally see milk like this. But in Europe and when I was a kid in England and Ireland, you would get milk and it would have some sort of creamy or skin layer on top of it.

22:08 Seth: Wes here. The analogous thing in the United States would be tapioca. There are people who just have a textural, a tactile sensation of tapioca or those little pearls in kind of that slimy pudding esque kind of thing. They just can't take it. It's similar oysters, right?

22:27 Wes: Okay, let's make sure we're on the same page. We're talking about that skin on milk that's not completely pasteurized. That's skin that will form on the top of it. Or am I wrong about that?

22:35 Mark: He was just giving another example. There's many things that fall into this category.

22:38 Wes: Yeah, I understand. We can Give other examples. I wanted to see first if any of us share this intuition.

22:43 Unknown speaker: Well, actually, I have a story along these lines. But when I was a kid, I had a parent give me a glass of milk, which was skim, skim milk.

22:53 Kelly: And I heard the word skin attached to the milk that I was drinking. And I had a psychological, physical reaction where I immediately vomited upon hearing the idea that my milk could potentially contain skin.

23:09 Unknown speaker: Skin.

23:10 Wes: Let's think about, though, why. What is the deeper reason there for becoming sick at the idea of the association of skin and milk? Isn't it the association of milk with a body?

23:24 Kelly: In my own analysis of my own childhood psychology, I can imagine if you were to compare someone's thigh with a chicken thigh and then watch that chicken thigh be eaten, a very similar idea could be also very disturbing. Just associating the human body or an animal body that you don't expect to be in your beverage, you know, connecting that to consuming could be something that disturbs you. I think that even kind of speaks to the borderlessness that Kristeva talks about. You know, the breaking down of the border between what is myself, what I consume, and what I expel. That all three of those elements kind of graying and merging together. The understanding that our own identities aren't solid. They exist inside of this soup of consumption and expelling something that can be very disturbing.

24:25 Wes: Yeah, and your comparison there reminds me that breastfeeding is essentially cannibalistic. And you can appeal to cannibalism and then our sense of disgust at that. But then we have to ask again, what's so disgusting about cannibalism?

24:40 Seth: Yeah, I'm not sure I can buy the thesis that breastfeeding is cannibalistic.

24:45 Wes: Well, you're using someone else's body as a source of food.

24:49 Seth: That's true. But the production of milk is not the same thing as like, eating a limb or an organ.

24:55 Wes: What about like tapping a cow's neck and drinking some of the blood out of it? Or not a cow's neck, but a human being's neck, I think drinking your

25:03 Mark: own blood, I was never afraid of that. You prick your finger, you suck on it. That's what you do. All fluids are not created equal.

25:10 Wes: So you guys are in denial about the cannibalistic nature of breastfeeding, is it? Whatever.

25:15 Seth: I don't think that breastfeeding has a cannibalistic connotation to it.

25:20 Wes: You don't even think it's a little bit like cannibalism to be using someone else's body as a source of food.

25:26 Kelly: I think it has less to do with whether or not you're using their body as a source of food. I mean, it's still something being secreted. And even though like the child's using it as a source of nutrition, you could still consider it like a form of waste. It's something that travels from inside of the mother's body and then becomes nutrition for the baby. So I think that in her metaphor of borderlessness of bodies, that could be something that metaphorically still makes sense.

25:55 Seth: Okay, so let's dig into that a little bit because I get what you're saying, Kelly, that it's a surplus, right? In the same sense that urine or feces or whatever, like breast milk is a surplus. It's a bodily secretion that. Let me just be transparent here. I have an 8 month old baby and we are dealing with this baby's relationship to not just our bodily secretions or the secretions of animals that we're substituting or food or whatever, but her own relationship to her own secretions. Poop. I mean, Jesus, it seems like 90% of what I talk about nowadays is this 8 month old's poop cycle, like whether she's pooping or not pooping and what kind of poop?

And was it solid, was it liquid, what color, what smell we have become fixated on? And I wish I could abject this, I wish I could reject and not be constantly in dialogue about this. But my point is, is that the biological function of breast milk, it's a nourishing, it's a nutritious thing. It's not, if you're focusing on it being expelled from the mother, you're not focusing on the way in which it's being received, the nourishing function and the life giving function that it has for the baby. So I just want to be cautious about the breast milk example as I think there are other things that we could focus on.

The key point being that the baby has to individuate, it has to separate. And from Kristeva's perspective, it's not some kind of rejection of. It's not a recognition of in the strictest sense that there is a. That the mother has no phallus and there's the oedipal structure which has a strong objectivity built into it. Kristeva's point is there are drives. There are drives which have no clear or defined object which motivate the move from no subjectivity to subjectivity. And it's these Objectless, sort of more amorphous drives which she associates with fear, horror, and so forth.

It's almost like the baby comes to realize that there is something abject in its own experience of itself, its own experience of pooping and drooling and sneezing and God knows what else, right? That is the motivation to then create the space which allows the movement into subjectivity.

28:34 Wes: The mother, of course, is a good thing, and the milk is a good thing. But the infant has to get away from the mother for individuation to occur. And if all you have is the good thing, if all you have is access to that good thing, unmediated, complete access to it, and you never escape it, then you never become a subject in the first place. Something else has to happen. And so, for instance, when she says, but since the food is not an Other for me who am only in their desire, the parents desire, I assume I expel myself. I spit myself out. I object myself within the same motion through which I claim to establish myself.

Spitting the milk out is spitting out myself, right? Because the milk, if it stayed within me, is going to become part of my body, is to become part of me. But in order to establish an identity, I can't just be this thing that an Other outside of me is filling me with. I have to be more than that other. Hence the spitting out.

29:36 Kelly: Kind of like what I was talking about earlier, with the moment of birth being traumatic and that trauma being the first time that a child learns that life is horror because of the violence of the birth trauma. I think that can also be expanded to talk about breastfeeding, though it's not horrific. But if you're still talking about, like, what is sustaining you is still waste. And if you're fixated on the mother's secretions, then being by what could be perceived as a waste speaks to you that that is what you consist of, that your identity is wrapped up in the things you reject, but that those things are fundamentally a part of your existence. And so you don't really have an identity because you've established an identity around rejecting things that are inherently and fundamentally a part of you. I understand about the breastfeeding, again, not being horrific, and it is nourishing.

30:40 Unknown speaker: But I think in the metaphor that

30:42 Kelly: Kristeva tries to paint, she's again talking about that movement between two bodies, which I still think that that signifies.

30:51 Mark: So it seems like we have to make clear this doubling. So it's not a simple. When we go back to our Hegel episode, we had a relatively simple compared to this sort of dialectic that you have two individuals and they're dealing with each other. And somehow through the power relationships of one to the other, one of them gains self consciousness. So that the slave, the master is using basically the slave like a tool. So the master doesn't gain any sense of self through dealing with the slave, any more than the master would gain a sense of self through dealing with a hammer or something.

But by not being a perfect tool, the slave gains the sense of, I'm not the master. He has a sense of how the master is treating him, the slave, and then he's the one who's out doing the things that the master has told him to do. Shaping rock into something, let's say. So he has these experiences with objects. You know, between the experience of the object, the things he's working with, and the master or ordering him around, we get some sort of sense of self. And Lacan explicitly read Hegel and seemingly applied this to the mother and the child.

That we have something similar going on, which we can see Kristeva's giving a version of. But it is not as simple as, you know, I object. I say, this is not me, and therefore I've identified myself. That would be a simple story of, first there's no self, but then once I create an object, I create a self. Well, you create subject and you create object at the same time. I think that's part of the story here. But that's not all. You know, what's going into. Objection. You have split the self. So she says, I abject myself within the same motion through which I claim to establish myself.

So in other words, I reject a thing I have said. I am not that thing. Therefore I am an individual. However, part of the thing that I'm rejecting kind of fascinates me. There's a part of me that is attached to that thing. This is her version of Lacan's split subject, where we don't have a whole story here. This is pre mirror stage.

32:49 Unknown speaker: Right.

32:49 Mark: And pre Oedipal. Oedipal lines up with mirror stage developmentally. Is that right?

32:54 Wes: No, it doesn't. So the mirror stage would be like six to 18 months. And the Oedipus complex would happen after toddlerhood, basically.

33:03 Mark: Okay, so this is prior to both of those things. But then that also has a descendant in how we as adults react to things that we are disgusted by. Because it's not the just that we are disgusted by and we reject them. It's that they hold some weird fascination for us. So there's the part of us that is enjoying the thing, and then there's the part of us that says, no, that's bad to enjoy the thing. So we're splitting the self, in effect, rejecting part of ourself.

33:30 Wes: In either case, you're right to point to the mirror stage because it's analogous. Right. I'm not sure exactly how this lines up with the mirror stage, but there's at the very least an analogy here. Right. The idea of the mirror stage is that we sort of misrecognize ourselves. We identify ourselves with an ego, which is to say in the most concrete way as a body, as something that we see in the mirror that is unified and whole and a single thing over and against our subjectivity, the experience of which is as a bundle of chaotic drives at that point.

And so our moment of self recognition, or misrecognition as it's sometimes translated. It's also a moment of alienation in the sense that we've sort of erected this. It's not a false self exactly, but we've identified ourselves with something that we're not really. We are the subject, but we identify ourselves with this ego, which is imaginary in the sense of it's depicted as being unified and as being a sort of object and all of that stuff. I think that lines up in the sense of. Well, I don't know. I'd actually have to think about that more for the details.

34:44 Mark: That was my question is how is that parallel? I thought that she addresses this specifically and introduces the abject as sort of a wrinkle in the Lacanian picture, that there's something about what you just described is the Lacanian mirror stage that is too simple and that this is adding some sort of counterforce. I don't know.

35:03 Wes: Yeah, I think it would have to be prior to the mirror stage, but I don't know.

35:07 Mark: I just searched for mirror here. So on page nine, this is in the section jouissance and affect shows. Jouissance is let's just refresh ourselves. That's a. Taking pleasure out of something that is too much pleasure. Pleasure to the point of pain. Right. And is essentially. Isn't it inherited from a third party that basically, like you're getting jollies out of something kind of because you think somebody else desires it.

35:30 Seth: So your.

35:30 Mark: Your jouissance is taking pleasure in something by kind of vicariously trying to be like somebody. Is that right? Am I missing that, Wes?

35:37 Wes: So I'd have to refresh myself, but it's a kind of enjoyment that goes beyond mere pleasure. I don't know. I'd have to think about this more. We should have gone back to our Lacan episode.

35:48 Mark: I did. I listened to it. And the way we had discussed it in there, that is, Jouissance is connected invariably to the name of the Father. In other words, the desire of the other. Let's just say that. So we'll keep exploring that. In any case, this quote here in the middle of page nine, as in Jouissance, where the object of desire, known as objet a in Lacan's terminology, object a bursts with the shattered mirror, where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the other. There is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the other, having become alter ego, drops so that I does not disappear in it, but finds in that sublime alienation a forfeited existence.

Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up, but in which the other in return keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims, if not its submissive and willing ones. So I brought that up first with the shattered mirror, where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the other. Right. So you were telling the story, Lacan's story of the growth of the self. And there was something we kept in our Lacan episode. I kept saying it was an illusion, and you kept saying, no, no, it's just.

It's an image. But it is a legitimate way that, you know, we identify ourselves. There's more wrinkles in the story than simply, I look at myself in the mirror and I say, that's me. A unified thing, and the story is over. No. And in fact, Kristeva in this thing calls that moment of recognition brittle. But one of the reasons that's brittle is because there's something undermining it. What I just described as the splitting of the subject, where when you abject something, it's like a love hate relationship, and there's the part of you that is built.

Just like when you're looking in the mirror and saying, that's me, when you reject the feces, reject the scummy milk, reject the. For me as a kid, it was eggs then. You are positing yourself as a self in opposition to that, but you are also kind of in its grossness. You're fascinated with it and you're splitting. So you create an alter ego. It is a repulsive gift that the other capital O, having become an alter ego, drops so that the I does not disappear in it, but finds the sublime alienation, a forfeited existence. So, you know, what does this mean to split the subject over the me that is hating the eggs and the me that is somehow part of the eggs.

Well, I experienced this sublime alienation. My alter ego that is in the eggs, in the rejected stuff has a forfeited existence. Is this simply weird or what do you guys make of this?

38:26 Kelly: Well, that actually kind of reminds me in the section about Proust a little bit later in the literary examples, she talks about the Marquis de Sade and Pliny, I believe that was what the reference was talking about. The orgies of the Marquis de Sade, saying that there's nothing abject about his experiences. The quote here being methodical, rhetorical and from that point of view, regular. It broadens meaning, body and universe, but is not at all exorbitant. Everything is nameable for it. The whole is nameable. Sade's scene integrates it allows for no other, no unthinkable, nothing heterogeneous, rational and optimistic.

It does not exclude. Later on, in that same paragraph on page 21, she talks about Proustean writing to the contrary never gives up a judging prerogative, perhaps a biblical one, which splits, banishes, shares out or condemns. It is in relation to it, with it and against it that the web of Proust's sentence, memory, sexuality and morality is elaborated infinitely, spinning together differences into a homogeneity. So seeming like the idea is some sort of hierarchy of judgment, there's something in maybe your experience with yourself and your philosophy and your actions being unified and like not hiding from your.

Your own. I guess things that you desire wouldn't be the. The right way to say it, but the things that you are participating in. There really isn't a desire, I guess, in the way she's saying, because there's nothing dirty that you're hiding from yourself. If you like the Marquis de Sade very, you know, open and happy about sexual conquests and all those sorts of things, even though the rule of law at the time, like those people would have judged him, but he doesn't judge himself. So he's not in abjection, something like that.

40:30 Mark: Right. The self hating part of that. Yeah, the part of me that is fascinated with the. The thing I'm rejecting, it becomes the alter ego. It has a forfeited existence.

40:41 Kelly: Right. And it Seems like she thinks that, like, she talks a lot about Christianity, that this imposition of a hierarchy or an imposition of things for which everyone must be ashamed, that that kind of feeds the same sense of having to reject things more strongly, you know, so almost like increasing the stakes of the mental games that you're playing with yourself, so you kind of become attracted to those things that you're most trying to suppress in yourself because it takes such a great degree of energy.

41:17 Mark: So how is this different? Wes, you can probably fill us in on the Freud here. Kristeva emphasizes repeatedly how this is different than simple repression. It's not just a matter of you have a desire for something that you're not supposed to have a desire for and so you repress it. In fact, when we are disgusted with a corpse or with some disgusting piece of food, it's not that we just kind of deny the existence of the corpse or deny that we're even fascinated by it. It's more that we condemn the fact that we're fascinated by it, but it's not repressing. It kind of keeps conscious. So there's something fundamentally different from repression here.

41:51 Wes: She doesn't explicitly talk about that though, does she?

41:54 Mark: I thought she did repeatedly. She was saying something like, repression is boring. Repression is drab.

42:02 Wes: I can't remember the word that's on page two, she's saying. And yet from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master without a sign for him. It beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out to each ego, its object, to each superego, its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights and discourse. Rather, it is a brutish suffering that I puts up with, sublime and devastated for I deposits it to the father's account, I endure it. For I imagine that such is the desire of the other, right?

42:44 Mark: So the ego and the object being opposed. That's kind of like the mirror stage, but the superego, its abject, he's saying.

42:51 Wes: So the object, right, is the psychoanalytic object, the object of desire, the patterned on the mother. So when you think of an object, when she says object, what you want to think of is libidinal tendrils, sort of branching out from the subject towards things and especially people out there in the world, as distinct from narcissistic libido, which would sort of be self directed, but the paradigmatic objects are people, especially the original caretaker. What this sounded like to me on the first reading was just when we're talking about the superego.

We're talking about having internalized the desire of the other. It could be anything from prohibitions, right? Don't do this, don't do that. Moral prohibitions that we internalize to ideals. I want to become a doctor because others will admire me for that. Or mom will admire me for that, and things like that. So we internalize the desire of the other in the form of a superego. So when she says, that is the brutish suffering that I puts up with. Sublime and devastated. I think of the inevitable suffering that those identifications cause. I deposits it to the father's account, meaning those identifications.

That superego formation is also the moment of castration. Where we say, okay, I can't have the object. I can't have mom all to myself. But I am compensated in the form of being gratified by identifications. In other words, I take the libido that was originally for the object. And I direct it towards myself. I say, okay, I don't get mom, but I get to be a doctor and love myself for that. And that's compensatory. And that may even involve an identification with a parental figure or some authority figure. And so I sort of become like my own ego. Becomes like a pacifier.

I suck on that instead of the thing outside of me. That's one sort of narcissistic moment. That's the idea of having deposited that to the father's account. The way Freud and Lacan think about this process of identification is identification with the father. Which we associate with this internalization of the desire of the mother. The task is to escape the mother's desire. The psychotic person on this theory, has never escaped the desire of the mother. Never escaped the desire to be everything to the mother. And to stay with the mother. That is, in Lacanian terms, to be the mother's phallus.

You have to move beyond that. So that's my reading of a passage like that. But it's uncertain. This is, I think, one of the more difficult passages. Where I feel a little bit at sea. And trying to exactly understand what she's saying.