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

0:00 Mark: So if you say that the opposite of the. For every ego, its object. At least get this idea, this Hegelian sort of idea. That when you objectify something that just by its correlative. Then you're saying, I am not that thing. So in Heidegger, we talked about that as the presence to hand, right? If you're using something as A tool, then you're not thinking about it as a distinct object. You're not thereby establishing yourself in opposition to it as a self, as distinct from it. You're just moving like it's your arm. But as soon as you objectify the thing, bam, you get at least some hint of the growth of a self.

And so we can have all sorts of wrinkles to that story about when you create a word for something, then you're creating a certain structure that is abstracting yourself. Even so you could get these wrinkles in the story. But the abject is something that you've. It's not an object. It's like a nameless dread. Even though you're disgusted by something in particular. The result of that is not the creation of a self in. In reaction to the object, it's the splitting of the self such that the self is disintegrated. Partially.

1:08 Seth: Right.

1:08 Mark: Because it's like you're condemning part of yourself for enjoying this thing.

1:12 Wes: So I just want to say, when you see this word object, this is not like an object in philosophy. This is mother. That's what it means essentially, to be very simplistic about it. Or this is a sort of mother based paradigm for the target of one's desire, typically another human being. Right. But we're talking about. It's a way of talking about this in an abstract sense. And the reason there's a whole branch of something in psychoanalysis called object relations, where you talk about the psyche in terms of relationship to the object, the relationship to this, and the ways in which the object is internalized, and something called the good object and the bad object.

The good object being what's a source of satisfaction and the bad object being a persecutory figure. I think it's important. Like that's the theoretical apparatus that's being deployed here. And we're not thinking about objects of cognition, things out there in the world. We're thinking of other. It's not necessarily other real subjects because it's part of one's psychic configuration to be related to these objects that are in a sense part of one's psyche, but form a basis for one's relationships to actual people. But in the end, we really are talking about relationships to actual people.

2:34 Mark: So I'm going to argue against that interpretation in that, in fact, the psychoanalytic dictionary or something that you sent us to said these are both uses of the word object and in fact both are meant. So the first use is in the first sense of the second paragraph of the Essay when I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an object facing me, which I name or imagine. Right. So this really sounds like we're not talking about.

I mean, if you bring in desire, then yes, when you have a desire, as we were saying earlier, when you start with just drives, drives are unfocused. But it becomes an actual desire when an object of desire is picked out. But certainly that is related to it being an object of desire. Is it related to being an object in philosophy? You know, an object, as opposed to the background of shifting chaos of stuff? It's one and the same thing here,

3:33 Wes: I think, in this context, I don't think so. She's just using psychoanalytic jargon. And this is. You could read thousands of papers which talk in the same way, and we're talking about the object as psychoanalysts think about it.

3:46 Mark: So what is the significance of object in that sentence? The abject is not an object facing me, which I name or imagine.

3:56 Wes: She's playing around, right, with the language. So abject, literally, the Latin language, is something that's thrown outside of me. Iacio, something that's been ejected. Basically, it's outside of me. But it's not an object in the sense that an object is a right. My desire tendrils are shooting out towards that thing and connecting me to that thing. Just the abject. Because it's a object of horror. Right. Because our primary relationship to it is negation and rejection. It's precisely not an object. It's not something towards which our libido is directed.

4:38 Seth: So I hear you say, Wes, that the object is not the same as the object in philosophy, meaning intention, A subject which grasp or tries to understand or conceive. Right. It's not a conceptual relationship. But I still think, whether you think of it as a psychoanalytic object or a philosophical object, the point is, is that the intentional structure is still there. Whether that structure is mediated by understanding and knowledge or whatever philosophical or desire that you're talking about, there's still the concept of a particular object, something specific at which desire or intentionality is focused.

And Kristeva's point, and I'm willing to be wrong here, is that the non intentional object is not the object of desire. It's that there is a drive, the drive of abjection, for example, or it's a fear or a horror not related to a specific object. It doesn't have a definitive object. It's that there's some kind of non object, non objective thing which drives the experience of horror or fear.

6:07 Kelly: I think that's also what she's talking about later when she talks about little Hans.

6:11 Wes: Yep.

6:12 Kelly: And the fact that the horse was never really a part of anything. The horse was just an arbitrary being that all of the mortal terror and dread was wrapped into. And it was a way for the child to rationalize that fear and to try and give it some kind of form. But was the phobia ever really addressed? Because you. Okay, so the child's no longer afraid of horses, but did that actually kill the fear? That was the wellspring of. Of the choosing of that object or of that being as the receptacle for all of those negative feelings.

7:07 Wes: Let me just give some background on little Hans. So Freud corresponded with a friend who had a son who had become. Developed a phobia towards horses. And there's lots of stuff going on in the household. One, this kid, I think he was four years old, he was playing with his penis a lot. And his mother got to the point where she told him he would be castrated if he kept doing it. He witnessed a horse. They lived next to a place where there's a lot of traffic, a horse bearing a large load, fall down and die. I think the phobia started directly after that.

He had its new sister who was just born. So there was some sibling rivalry. But the theory is that. So this is like a paradigmatic example of the Oedipus complex, where he wants his mother all to himself. Right. He has the sort of incestuous desire for the mother, who is the object. That is the object, that maternal figure. But he's threatened with castration. That is the paternal principle which will bar you from the mother, keep you from having the object in totality. And what's repressed is this idea that, first of all, that he has the incestuous desire towards his mother and that his father will punish him for that via castration.

And so the fear of his father gets translated into a fear of horses. In fact, part of the case material is that he's actually most scared of horses, which have little black marks near their mouths and something to do with their eyes. It makes them look like his father, who has mustache and glasses. So, yeah. And as far as how the case was resolved, I forget exactly. I mean, ultimately, Freud, I think, advised him, basically, look, just tell him about. Because the kid was confused about whether the mother had a penis as well, tell him about the birds and bees.

I can't remember exactly, but apparently Freud saw him later on when he was 19 and he was a perfectly well functioning adult. But, yeah, so that's the Freudian take on little Hans. But what's important about it in this context is the constitution of the subject. She's trying to relate phobias. The Oedipus complex is an important part in the constitution of the subject, which means that the phobic object is important. Assuming that we get this sort of displacement of a fear onto a phobic object and that she says, I mean, I think she paradoxically called the phobic object, is our abject object, let's say, is the thing towards which the abject is directed.

And again, it does create individuation and separation in the sense of creating the fear that separates us from the object. Right. Our individuation depends upon this separation, the undoing of complete merger between mother and child, such that we get some sort of separation from the object. And the threat of castration, or actual metaphorical castration, as Lacan would put it, is what does that. It's what makes us a subject developmentally. We have to have that or we are psychotic. But I think there's a lot more to be said about how that relates to the abject and the way she's innovating that story and that picture of things.

10:13 Mark: Well, so right. Beginning of chapter two, which is right before the phobia stuff, chapter two is something to be scared of. So it's a second essay in here. She doesn't call them chapter numbers. It's unclear whether you could publish these separately or whether she's developing a unified thing throughout these different essays in this book. But in any case, Right. She starts by criticizing this, Freud's take on the Oedipal triangle, where for Freud, the mother is the first object. Right. And this is why again, and we can just set this aside, this difference between the psychoanalytic object and the philosophical object.

But distinguishing yourself as a self, for Freud, is naming the mother as an individual object of desire as distinct from you. Right. That's part of what makes the self grow, as opposed to looking in the mirror and seeing. That's me. According to what she's criticizing here, part of the Oedipal triangle story is the mother, according to Freud, is the first object that we have. Right. The first focus of our desire.

11:12 Wes: She's criticizing the idea that our subjectification has to wait until the Oedipal triangle. The Oedipal triangle is the intercession of the father with castration anxiety between the child and the mother. That's what subjectifies them. That's what turns them into subjects. The father being the law and the mother being the prototype of the object. She's not rejecting those things outright, but she's saying that something happens before that. And she's actually taking something that Freud said in The Ego and the Id, and running with it. Which is that before we even reach that point.

Before we even have an object we identify. She doesn't use the word identification like Freud, but she uses this phrase, mimetic yearnings, this desire to imitate. So that when she says the mother is my first object, both desiring and signifiable. What she's saying is that the mother is not just so. The previous theory is that the father is primarily the object of identification. That's really, psychologically the way in which he intercedes. We compensate ourselves for the loss of the object with identifications which form our superego. We do adult things.

We have aspirations. We want to be doctors and lawyers. Instead of having Mommy, we want to do all this. We want to do all that. That's the point of identification. What she's saying here is that happens at some more primal level. Even before the father is on the scene. The mother, yes, is an object of desire, but she's also a signifiable. In other words, she's signifiable in the sense that she carries with her some of that symbolic dimension. Which depends on her being an object of identification. I'm not sure if any of that's clear, but that's.

12:57 Mark: It's definitely not. Let's look at this text here. So this is the first page of that second chapter. Do we not find sooner. Right, sooner than the Oedipal triangle, chronologically and logically speaking, if not objects, at least pre objects, poles of attraction of a demand for air, food and motion. Do we not also find, in the very process that constitutes the mother as other. A series of semi objects that stake out the transition from a state of indifferentiation to one of discretion? Subject, object, semi objects.

13:28 Wes: All right, so now she's talking about transitional objects. Do you know what a transitional object is? So a transitional object is something like a teddy bear or a blankie. So the famous psychoanalyst Winnicott came up with this theory. But he sees it as an important developmental stage. Which is in between having the mother as an object and going out into the world and having other people as objects. And so what we have Are these transitional objects, these in between objects, like a teddy bear or a blankie? A blankie that might smell like mom, for instance, that never gets washed, which in some way is not mom, but is really symbolizes her in some sense. So it's not. I've not totally gotten beyond the maternal at that point. I'm in this transitional stage. So these are the semi objects that are involved in this transition towards becoming a full fledged subject.

14:26 Kelly: So you mentioned the transitional objects smelling like the mother. And I wonder what those semi objects kind of like transition to or away from. Because it smells like mom is a small piece of mother. I suppose smell triggers memory. But have you guys consider what those transitional objects like, what space that they occupy, you know, in the child's new conception of the world in this, like, sort of framework?

14:58 Wes: Yeah, that's a good question.

15:00 Mark: See, I find myself oppressed by the tyranny of Wes's interpretation of object here, such that I can no longer make sense of this at all. So he says semi objects that are precisely called transitional by Winnicott in your story, Wes, about transitional objects. After the mother has been established as an object. And then it's a transition to. What was it a transition to? Was to full desire to be a doctor.

15:24 Wes: Yeah, not just that, but, you know, having relationships with people. To having a lover, for instance.

15:29 Mark: Okay, but this is talking about pre objects. This is not post mother. And before mature relationships.

15:36 Wes: Well, she's giving several examples. She's saying, look, this picture. If we take a picture in which you're born with an object and then at some point identify with the father. No, there's a richer picture. And she's just describing what psychoanalysts did after Freud in fleshing out this picture. But there's a richer picture in which we can say that actually identification occurs before the object, not after. That's one emendation of the picture. We can think of air and food as, in a sense, objects like mothers. And also there's something called part objects, which psychoanalysts talk a lot about.

So that before the mother is really an object, the breast is the object. In fact, often psychoanalysts will use the breast in that way. We'll talk about the breast as this sort of primitive object. So the pre object might be food, but the transitional object is something we get after mother. I understand that it may look in that paragraph like she's saying a transitional object is a form of pre object, but it's not. It's pre object object. Then transitional object, transitional objects Are transitions on the way away from mother.

16:46 Mark: I guess, skipping to the next page, top of 33. Here the matter of the object sets in motion or implicates the entire Freudian structure. Narcissism, beginning with what or when does it allow itself to be exceeded by sexual drive, which is drive toward the other? Repression. What type of repression yields symbolization and hence a signifiable object? What other type, on the contrary, blocks the way towards symbolization and topples the drive into the lack of object or image of asymbolia or the auto object of somatization? Here's the point. The connection between the unconscious and language.

What is the share of language learning or language activity in the constitution of object relation and its transformation? So there was something that Lacan added to Freud's picture in bringing in language. Right. That in the Oedipal structure, it's not just I want the mother, but the law. The father says, I can't have the mother. And so that creates this primary break that allows the growth of the self and creates sort of a permanent hole in me that I'm always going to be trying to fill in some way, but that it's the father's symbolically father imposition is introducing language to the whole thing.

That. That is, in fact, the mechanism that breaks the connection between me and the mother are the same thing, and I want the mother, and the mother is my object. Is language the connection between unconscious and language?

18:06 Wes: Yeah, because our relationship to raw experience can never be the same after language. And therefore the relationship to the mother can never be the same after language. So language itself cuts us off from true, intimate, immediate, merged contact with the world in general. And it is just inherently separating. And so it is a paternal principle in that sense. So he's drawing together in a really interesting way, this idea of the fathers interceding between mother and child, and this idea that language intercedes between us and the world.

18:41 Kelly: Do you think that Kristeva would say that without language, we would not abject? If linguistics never came into the picture for us to describe the relationships that we have with our family members, do you think that that would take up more of a space, like how she described, with the Marquis de Sade, of just this is how it is. And I am not in conflict with this relation. And I have no repression, no need to purify the abject, because I don't have a vehicle to even really understand that somehow that would subside, or maybe I am more consistent as a being so that mortal terror subsides So I

19:27 Mark: thought she addressed this directly that on the one hand by saying that the correlate of the superego is the abject, when the superego goes with the name of the father, which goes with language. And so a lot of what we're doing when we abject is we talked about this in our Lacan episode, that when you name something and you sort of make an object out of it, but then there's the residual, the stuff that you have not named that in fact maybe is unnamable, that is, according to Lacan's terminology, rests in the real right that you always have sort of an underside.

So in that sense, the abject, that which is ejected from the realm of language, it cannot even be spoken of, it is a nameless dread, is in that picture, just straightforwardly a product of language. I think that she introduces a little more subtlety into this, that if you want to say that the child rejecting the milk for the first time is abjecting, well, that child doesn't have language yet. But it's a language using type of creature. So there's something, just the fact that in pre linguistic stages of a language using creature that there can still be something that parallels, just like abjection as an adult is not going to be quite the same thing as the formative processes of abjection that you're having as a small child.

I think there's a comparable relationship between language and abjection as an adult versus the pre linguistic semilinguistic status that we have and the type of abjection we experience then.

20:53 Kelly: Well, maybe you could say something like it's like the pattern recognition of humans that kind of causes us all to come to the forefront. Like, she probably wouldn't argue that foxes experience abjection because like you said, there isn't a capacity for language, meaning the pattern recognition that is necessary for language to be used. So it's something in the wiring of a brain that produces language that is going to produce abjection, which I guess

21:25 Mark: maybe points at the difference between abjection and simple disgust. Certainly there are things that, you know, if I give my dog a certain thing, like he might not like it at all.

21:35 Wes: Yeah, you've never seen your dog be disgusted. They're not disgusted by feces.

21:40 Seth: You've also never seen your dog being bored, right?

21:43 Wes: Maybe a cat. It always interests me. You frequently see people assume that, well, disgust is just this evolutionary thing where we're protected from dirty feces, for instance, but it's not there in any other animal. There's a strong argument to say that it's intimately tied to being a subject, to being a self conscious being. And it's not there in infants either, by the way.

22:06 Kelly: Kind of going back to my story about vomiting when my mom told me there was skin in my milk, or I thought she did, yeah. That response, for many reasons, couldn't exist in an animal. Not only because of the like verbal input of skin and the recognition, but also because of. I would have to be aware somehow in abstract of what skin is and what skin is on other beings. And like have a conception of cannibalism being bad and then producing a psychological response which is probably far too many steps for most other creatures to go through.

22:44 Wes: You would also have to feel the threat to one's own subjectivity, because the true phobic object, right, is either merger or castration. I think she wants to say the horror is over the idea that one may lose oneself as a subject. There's an individuating principle, like what if I were to embrace the abject? What if I were to embrace the objects of disgust? To take that example symbolically, that would be to embrace my own lack of identity, a lack of distinction between self and other. For instance. It's because those fluids are reminiscent of this exchange, right, that happens between some other being that I'm dependent on for my being and me, that they can be disgusting. There has to be the threat of de. Subjectification, of loss of self, loss of subject, object distinction. Being disgusted at it helps maintain that distinction.

23:42 Kelly: Right?

23:42 Mark: Interestingly, missing in this particular picture, I'm sure she talks about in other things, is if we're talking about our relationship to oneness pre subjectivity, where you were just a part of the organism, of the mother, you existed only in the desires of your parents, you know, you did not consider yourself an individual thing. And so we make that break, we become individuals. And these things that we object are kind of sucking us back. They're reminding us of our fundamental oneness with biology, with the mother, with nature itself. And so the name of the father part, the linguistic part, the part that carves us out from other things, rejects that says no, no forcefully I must exert my selfhood against these overwhelming forces that are threatening to eat me up, basically.

But on the other hand, we've got the erotic which we want oneness, and we're okay with wanting oneness. And often brought up in this context of wanting to be back in the stage of being in the womb is the sex drive of actually wanting to be in the womb Again, if you're heterosexual male Is the connection here just like Freud distinguishes the. The erotic urge, which is the urge for the objects of desire, from the death drive. Right. Originally, he, I guess, was trying to explain everything through Eros. And there's just, you know, some things that people do that could not be explained by that.

So he introduced the death drive. Is the abject, Kristeva's version of the death drive to explain? Yeah, we have this ambivalent relationship toward oneness that, on the one hand, there's Eros, which he's not talking about in this book at all. And on the other hand, there's this loathing of your own attraction to the oneness. And that's what abjection is.

25:22 Wes: I hate to say that I don't think so, but I don't want to give a long discourse about death drive.

25:29 Mark: Okay, Objection. Is not straightforwardly a longing toward death?

25:33 Wes: I don't think so. I think it's, in fact a longing towards life in the sense of individuation. Like I said in the beginning, there's a confusing overlap between. Right. Is this an early pre Oedipal developmental stage? I think the answer is yes. But is it something possibly pathological in adults? Is it something that suggests that something didn't go right in that early development? And in the next essay she's going to talk about, she calls borderline states, which are we'd also call narcissistic pathologies, where something definitely has gone wrong and then that's something having to do with abjection? I think.

26:09 Mark: So there's healthy abjection and fixated abjection. I thought there was healthy abjection because, you know, you sweep the things of death away from you to make room for life as another way of exerting your existence as a self. You're pushing this foulness beyond the reach of articulation.

26:28 Kelly: Don't you think, though, in some amount it's the denial of the materials of life, that in some way it is. It is life denying because you're pushing away things that have come to carry the stench of death with them, but yet these things are still part of the process of life. So the reason it's so difficult to come to a neutral point is because you are denying reality like you're refusing to engage in the reality of your own biology.

27:02 Mark: What do you think, Seth? Is abjection good? That was hard to tell on this for me.

27:06 Seth: Yes, I think it is. We had the same discussion argument several years ago when we read Phenomenology of Spirit. And we were trying to determine whether what Hegel was Talking about was something developmental. And I came down firmly on the developmental side. And in this case I come down firmly on the developmental side. My understanding of Kristeva's position is that the mechanism that Freud describes for the creation of subjectivity requires some sort of rejection of the mother. And what she's saying is that Freud's description of that mechanism is somehow impoverished.

It misses something because she thinks that there's a stage before whatever it is that Freud describes that is driven by drives and abjection which takes place prior to the formation of subjectivity, prior to the identification with gender, prior to an actual turn towards the paternal or the law of the father. To me, what she was saying was it's almost like first year of the subjectivity development. So you don't go from no distinction, no relation to object identification and negation and turn towards the father. What you do is you go from complete lack of differentiation to a drive.

There's this drive and the drive is abjection. And it somehow just this motivation of like there is something I am eliminating. There is something that is not me, that's part of me, but is not me. There's something that I'm rejecting, that I'm abjecting, that I'm rejection implies an object, let's just say abjection. And that is the thing that kind of is like, okay, it gets everything in motion and then eventually there becomes this recognition of the maternal body and this identification or with the maternal body and then this rejection of the maternal body.

But there's something prior to that. And this is where I think Wes, you strongly recommended the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on this. But this comparison between Irigaray and Kristeva, where Kristeva is not trying to posit or recover some kind of originary female movement that's distinguished from the male movement of this distinction from the mother, but that she thinks that abjection and this rejection in order to turn towards something else is necessary. But in her movement of abjection she's positing a movement which is pre gendered. It's essentially something that she's saying is required.

This rejection of the mother starts an abjection. And that abject movement is the same for both males, females or whatever gender identity that the pre subjects have.

30:30 Kelly: Do you think that there is anything that can be done by the mother to avoid the abjection of her in her child? You know, you talk about these developmental stages being the places where abjection is learned or codified or starts to occur, but is there anything you think that actions by the mother that can prevent, you know, like a painful and explosive abjection or something more severe maybe than average? Or is it something that's universal and immutable in human experience?

31:11 Seth: No, I think there are things that the mother can do. But I think that Kristeva sees abjection as a normal and important part of the child's transition into subjectivity. And so if the mother were to try and prevent that from happening, to try to avoid abjection and to. It would only prevent and slow the child's development as a subject. It's painful, but it's not desirable.

31:43 Kelly: Would something like that look like the five year old who's still breastfeeding kind of thing like that unnatural connection to the mother?

31:52 Seth: Yeah, absolutely.

31:54 Wes: As far as I can tell, abjection seems to be for her a normal developmental stage, but it's also implicated in pathology. Right. And it's implicated in, you know, she'll talk about borderline conditions, I think is what she calls them, which are produced by severe disruptions in the. We talked about some of this with Fonagy on the mother infant relationship pre oedipally, where there's a severe disturbance of a sense of self and then the use of narcissistic sorts of defenses. So for instance, if you look at. Basically we're talking about everything from personality disorders all the way to schizophrenia and psychosis.

But those sorts of conditions can result in really serious problems around individuation, around developing a distinction between oneself and one's mother, one's object. And that can be because of someone who is. I don't know if breastfeeding later on necessarily does that, but someone who, you know, there are mothers who want to hold on to their children, they actively thwart individuation. And there are mothers who respond to, for instance, expressions of affect. If you think back to the Fonagy notion of the mirroring function, that sort of attenuates that.

So for instance, if the affect is distress, both accurately mirrors that distress. So it's validated in some sense so that the infant can begin to mentalize it, begin to symbolize it, begin to ultimately down the line, put words to it, but also is attenuated in the sense that there's sort of what Fonagy calls a complex affect, giving the infant the sense that everything is going to be all right. If that sort of thing doesn't happen, and if the mother responds, for instance, with severe extreme anxiety or anger, even rage to those sorts of reactions from the infant, then you're going to have all sorts of problems with individuation because ultimately you're required to thwart your expressions of those sorts of emotions and essentially not fully form a self because the formation of the self is threatening the mother.

34:13 Unknown speaker: Would that be an argument that in some ways misogyny is built in to the development of children? We're talking about this rejection. Does it always have to be a violent rejection or a disgusted rejection that even, you know, in the most well developed children there's still some trace of their rejection of their mother and therefore

34:37 Kelly: a wider reaching misogyny?

34:40 Wes: I think there are strong natural developmental motivators towards misogyny. So even if you just think about the Oedipus complex, the regulation of women's desire, for instance, why does that happen? Why are we scared of female sexual desire, for instance? Well, if the Oedipus complex is their thing, if it's real, and the mother's desire for another is essentially a very frightening thing, it's developmentally necessary, apparently. But it's terrifying in the sense that in the beginning we are entirely dependent creatures, almost not separate. And the mother should be experience, no lack, so she should have everything and give us everything, which means she can experience lack.

And desire is a form of lack. So female desire as evidence of maternal lack and the failure of the mother and the necessity of individuation from the mother. Loss of the mother is a terrifying thing. And I think it's at the core of misogyny.

35:33 Unknown speaker: Right.

35:33 Mark: So Seth was saying, who's weighing in on whether this is a developmental or a thing that is present as adult? I think if it were purely developmental, the book would be over after this chapter, our second chapter, we were talking about it as something that turns up in phobia. So as Wes mentioned, even if you say abjection is a normal part of development, you know, just like all the other parts of development, you could be stuck in the anal stage or stuck in the oral stage or whatever. You can come up with some of kind, kind of analytic situation where you find somebody is having a problem related to this stage of development.

But I think abjection is supposed to be much more pervasive in our experience. And maybe this is because there's all sorts of different neuroses relating to it that are in our experience. But you know, you've got big sections of this book about religion and how abjection shows up, say in the Bible and Leviticus and rejecting its prohibitions of unclean. Unclean. You could say that's Pathological. But I wanted to make sure we talked about before we got out of here how abjection turns up art. And I was a little unclear in the sections. This is in the second half of the first essay.

Whether she was just talking about certain kinds of art, like an art of the abject, or the. Whether she was saying all art relates to the abjects in some way. What did people think offhand about this? Like, this seemed an obvious illustration. She goes on and on about of how abjection shows up in our adult life.

36:54 Kelly: Her talking about art as well as religion as having two modes of purifying the abject, of being a catharsis for this interaction with the abject. She certainly seems to favor art over religion, but seems to also think that they function in similar capacities. I do think that she sees art as more noble in the same pursuit. Here on 17. As objections to the sacred. She talks about abjection in religion being exclusions and taboos. But that further down here, she says, seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token, purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity. So talking about art can have, you know, the same religious sort of experience. But she definitely seems to favor art as a method of purifying the abject.

37:59 Mark: I definitely saw that in religion. Right. She says abjection is kind of like the profane which sets up the sacred. Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo in monotheistic religions, et cetera, but drifts towards secondary forms, such as transgression of the law. It finally encounters with Christian sin, a dialectic elaboration. As it becomes integrated in the Christian world as a threatening otherness. But always nameable, always totalizable. The border of our experience are threatening to be swallowed up by chaos, by our oneness with the world and the essential imagination.

We were saying that language is necessary to have abjection. But I would think it's even more imagination, which I know sort of goes hand in hand with language, right? Imagining that your milk is made of skin like that is something that a dog can't imagine. Picturing maggots on your part; abjection is kind of our imagination running away with us. And the fact that our imagination, like it's because it's the extreme otherness of it puts it beyond words. So in fact, only images can capture it. Did other folks also see that art is also doing the same thing, like religion that way that it seems like art is actually sort of freeing Our minds and a certain way, and at least certain kinds of art, the abjective kinds of art, are playing with this borderline kind of indulging it in a certain way.

Whereas religion is no, no Name of the Father. Purity. We push that other stuff aside. Sort of a means of fighting the abject. What's confusing about that linguistically, of course, is abjection is rejection of the abject. So if you say, is this sort of pro abjection or anti abjection, you know, is it the process of getting rid, of pushing aside the abject?

39:33 Wes: Or.

39:34 Mark: Or is it the object of the abject? In other words, is it indulging your fascination with death, or is it firmly pushing that aside? I don't know. What do other folks think about the whole literature section about this? How the artistic experience is rooted in the abject?

39:50 Kelly: I remember in one section where she was talking about voyeurism. I think she used the words, when you stop writing, that's when it becomes a perversion. That's when the voyeur becomes a pervert, when you can no longer identify with, like, an abstract subject. I might be getting this wrong. I don't have. The quote in front of me was

40:10 Mark: in the context of hallucinations, a cathexis of looking in parallel with the symbolic domination. Taking the place of narcissism often leads to voyeuristic side effects of phobia. Voyeurism is a structural necessity in the constitution of object relation, showing up every time the objects shift towards the abject. It becomes true perversion only if there is a failure to symbolize the subject. Object instability. Voyeurism accompanies the writing of abjection. When that writing stops, voyeurism becomes a perversion.

40:45 Kelly: There is something in literature's symbolization of when the object moves towards the abject. I think is what she said. There is something in that process of writing and creating symbols which does seem to, in her mind, provide some kind of barrier against the perversion of it.

41:05 Mark: I have on page 16. Writing, then, implies an ability to imagine the abject. That is, to see oneself in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of the displacements of verbal play. Which just sounds like what abjection is. Right? We were just saying that abjection is to thrust something aside at the same time, to identify part of yourself with that thing that you're thrusting aside. And we said that this has to do with the superego, has to do with the name of the father, has to do with language. So whenever you speak at all, you're naming something and you're thereby thrusting aside all the things you're not talking about.

Right? This was that whole language versus the real. And I'm not sure how it implies the ability to imagine the abject. I know writing was more so than verbal language had to do with death. Because, you know, once you write something down, it's there. In fact, it sort of has an immortality that you don't. So you're sort of fooling yourself as soon as you write something down into kind of like, oh, look, I'm immortal there. In that sense. As you said, it's kind of pushing aside the abject. The abject represents our mortality. And so by writing it all, you're expressing abjection.

42:21 Kelly: And I think with the examples that she brings up, I always have been a fan of Russian literature. So I, of course, enjoyed reading about her. Tegan, Dostoevsky. One of the things about art that I get the sense of from her is that it expands out the understanding of the abject that we've been talking about. So we've been referencing a lot of vomit, urine, fecal matter, corpses, cannibalism, kinds of things. But in Dostoevsky's the Possessed or I think, demons, as it's otherwise translated, it's social. And that's a lot of the stuff that I found really interesting about the connect.

Some of the connections she made was having to do with law. The abject, socially is, I think she said, you know, the thief who grins, the person who takes great pleasure in the crimes that they commit. The ones who remind us of the fragility of our society and of the borders between us and chaos and lawlessness. And I think that her examples of the literature are always to express other manifestations of how the abject kind of informs our meta considerations or our political considerations. For example, I've been saying borderlessness a lot because that's been something that I kind of latched onto in reading this.

And I think of, if we follow her metaphor of expulsion being one of those things that we are so full of dread and so trying to rectify to reality. I think of, like, immigration, politically like the. The movement between borders and people's gripping fear about the collapse of these borders because they, to so many people, represent the self. They identify with the whole expanse of the country as if it was one person. And I saw some of her description of how Dostoevsky portrays the characters of the social revolution. I think that one of the things she's saying is that in art you find new expressions of the same, like bodily objections.

44:46 Mark: Yeah, it was difficult. She goes through all these different examples in art. But I don't know. Had anybody read any of the particular things she was talking about? I certainly had not. I had to kind of fill in the details myself.

44:56 Kelly: I think of everything. The only thing I had read was The Possessed.

45:00 Mark: But I like this idea, this connection to something we saw in Augustine. Say so at the beginning of that section, perverse or artistic. This is where she starts to talk about art. It's page 15 or so. The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule or a law, but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts, uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them. So you just think of somebody, what is the attitude toward the law, toward the name of the Father? We're saying religion is a way, at least a very law focused religion is to just assume the law and take it up and you just repress basically any temptation you have to defy that law.

Or you could just repress the law itself. You could just put yourself and deny that there is such a law. You know, identify something else as the name of the Father or you know, as your superego. But to actually acknowledge that there is a rule there. But I am going to willfully pervert it. That's what Augustine is talking about, that it's not the case that everybody just pursues the good. It's that the abject is a sort of a conscious corruption. It is not repression because it's not just denying that that is in fact is the good. It's, you're admitting that it's the good, but saying screw it, I'm going to play with this, the forbidden objects regardless.

So, and I think maybe that, you know, art is something that lets you do that vicariously, especially the examples that he's talking about. If you think about the Dostoevsky we did read The Idiot, where there's this constant threat is if you give up Christianity, if you give up a very structured law based outlook, then you fall into madness. You could just go ahead and kill dozens of people. You know, everything is permissible. So I think that at least abject literature is the kind of literature that Dostoevsky writes that lets you play with this, that invites you to identify with an amoral character, for instance, and to transgress into in this way.

That's at least the best I can make sense of this. So Seth and Wes, did you have any thoughts on the art section at all.

47:06 Seth: Here she cites three authors that are exemplars of articulating the Dostoevsky, Proust and Joyce. It's exceptionally dense, those few pages where she works through each one of them. But I think what she's trying to say. To say here is that each one of these authors approaches and articulates and discusses characters that manifest this notion of abjection. She's making the connection between a literary movement that articulates abjection through an adult articulation, but intending to connect to this presubjectivity movement of the abject drive, which predates or occurs prior to the rejection of the mother in this notion of subjectivity and objectivity.

48:01 Mark: Let's give this example from Joyce, Finnegans Wake. He says the abject comes out in the way that somebody speaks. And so he gives this monologue by Molly's monologue where there's no punctuation, it's just this. The woman hides it so as not to give all the trouble. They do, yes, they. Yes. Somewhere. I'm sure by his appetite. Anyway, love it's not. Or he'd be off his feed thinking of her. So either it was one of those night women. If it was down there, he was really at the hotel story. He made up a pack of lies to hide it. Planning anyway. It just kind of.

I'm probably not reading it right, but when there's no punctuation, it's very hard to tell. He says the abject lies for Joyce, generally in the way one speaks. It is verbal communication. It is the word that discloses the abject. But at the same time the word alone purifies from the abject. And that is what Joyce seems to say when he gives back the master lead rhetoric that his work in progress constitutes full powers against abjection, a single catharsis. The rhetoric of the pure signifier of music in letters, when you get to the point where something just becomes a run on, it becomes more music.

I certainly wasn't reading it very musically. It's like a dashing melody rather than a string of logical symbols. So in that case it purifies from the abject by divorcing itself from meaning. Something like that or.

49:17 Seth: I'm not sure he's showing the pre symbolic right.

49:21 Wes: We should revisit what we're talking about when we're talking about signifiers. So Lacan is borrowing from Saussure. So we talk about things with signs, but the sign itself is made up of a signifier and a signified and the Signified is actually the concept of the representation. And the signifier is just the sound. The sound image, I think, is what Saussure calls it. So the purification of the signifier involves the extent to which it becomes disconnected from the signified, which is to say from the representations. And operates more according to what Freud would call primary process or free association, in this sense, where in the symbolic realm, it's just.

The signifiers are linked in a chain. And they can do their own thing. They have their own structure, independent of the representations that they're connected to. So, for instance, that's why it's so easy for a horse to become father. And for the fear of father to become fear of horses, for instance. The affect could just shift along the signifying chain. And the associations between the signifiers, they don't have to be anything of any importance. They can be trivial. And yet that's the way the unconscious works. So I think she's talking about reaching this point where you avoid the abject.

By lifting oneself out of the imaginary, which is the realm of the signified. By operating purely at the level of signifier.

50:51 Mark: So how does that either disclose abjection or offer a catharsis to abjection?

50:56 Wes: It basically helps you to disconnect from drive representations, you know, within the realm of the imaginary, the representations of. Of the signified. That includes drive representation. So, for instance, later on page 49, she's talking about borderline patients. She's talking about their particular retreat into the pure signifier. She says it puts a check on free association and pulverizes fantasy before it can take shape. It is, in short, a reduction of discourse to the state of pure signifier. Which ensures disconnection between verbal signs on the one hand.

And drive representations on the other. And it is precisely at that such a boundary of language splitting. That the affect makes an imprint. I think what she means, that if you can't talk about your feelings in words. Then they will do things like come out of symptoms or something like that. The way she's talking about it in art. Obviously there's some sort of comparison to be made here. But here she's talking about pathology. And in the case of writing and art, she wants to talk about some sort of positive version of that. And that goes back to her talking about the voyeurism of writing not being perverse.

Apparently, whatever we can do with writing. To the extent that we move towards the pure signifier. It's not something pathological like what we see in borderline states. For instance, this disconnection between our thoughts and our feelings. Essentially between the signifier and the signifieds.

52:24 Kelly: In the beginning, she talks about that abjection is the point at which meaning collapses. I think she moves towards meaninglessness. And I wonder if it's something like practicing meaninglessness removes some aspect of the anxiety that revolves around abjection. If you know through a string of words that don't seem to have coherent meaning. That can somehow train you to understand that language can never fully express. If you become more used to language being further removed from meaning. You may not try to use language as much to impose meaning that is made more rigid by language.

You know, somehow making yourself aware of just sounds and the input of words in your ear. Without possibly being able to parse real information or plot or story. Can maybe get you to some sort of understanding of the limitations of the language that you're trying to use to describe your own existence. Or something like that.

53:41 Mark: I mean, in that case, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be a more direct measure. Rather than we're going to use poetic language that gets at the edge of what language can express. To have just pure music, say, as a way of dealing with the inexpressible. And showing you that there are things that are inexpressible. And that somehow it's diffusing the objective conflict.

54:02 Kelly: But I don't think that we use music to impose rigidity on our own lives. We do structure our lives around ideas that can only be expressed between human beings in language and in language that has explicit meaning. I think that it's the diffusion of those guardrails, the breaking down of those barriers, that I don't think that music that is already abstract and is already meaninglessness. Would have the same kind of catharsis as the removal of one of those barriers.

54:42 Mark: It's not a rebellion within language. Let me just read one more quote here. This is bottom of page 23 in the art section. Talking about a narrative of infamy. The untiring repetition of a drive which, propelled by an initial loss, does not cease wandering, unsated, deceived, warped, until it finds its only stable object, death. Handling that repetition, staging it, cultivating it. Until it releases, beyond its eternal return, its sublime destiny of being. A struggle with death. Is it not that which characterizes writing? And yet dealing with death in this manner, making sport of it.

Is that not infamy itself? The literary narrative that utters the workings of repetition. Must necessarily become, beyond fantastic tales, detective stories and murder mysteries, a narrative of the infamous so it seems like there's something in writing itself. You're presenting a picture of the human condition, which is basically, as Schopenhauer would describe it, the untiring repetition of the drive propelled by initial loss that can never be sated until it finds its only stable object, death. So I think it was in one of the things you sent us, Wes, about Lacan, just describing what castration means for Lacan, that it just means this fundamental hole that we all have in ourselves, and that comes from the lack of unity, the separation that happened from the mother.

And so it's not, you know, walking around. It's not a fear of castration necessarily, which is the way that Freud put it, but it's that everybody, male or female, is castrated. It's just retaining the word from Freud. But really it's referring to this fundamental existential hole that we all have that, you know, every religion comes along and says, we can fill this hole for you, or else it'll be filled with drugs and with other idols and things. But, yeah, art is one of the ways that we sublimate. It's one of the ways that we deal with this fundamental lack.

We handle this repetition. We stage it, we cultivate it. And that's a way of dealing with death, dealing with this fundamental abjection. But yet it's in a playful way. It's perverting in a way that should be kind of offensive, should be infamous, our relationship with this most serious matter. So in that sense, I feel like abjection is just part of the existential situation of dealing with this fundamental hole in our life. And it can come out in very problematic ways. We could have a lot of issues of being too disgusted by something and. But that we shouldn't necessarily see that as just like, oh, you're repressing, you know, some hidden forbidden desires or something.

No, it's something more existentially fundamental. Our relationship toward death, toward our fundamental oneness with the universe. That us being a live individual is a way of temporarily breaking away from that situation. And writing is a way of sublimating that fundamental conflict. And by putting words out into the world, you're objectifying your own words. You're creating something that seems like it's eternal. You're creating an image there, and that seems like a good thing. So in that sense, abjection is playing a role in the healthy adult's life.

If you did not have art, if you did not have humor, I thought you could easily inject humor into this picture as well. And you are the no must be ruled by law at all times. If you were not playful with these things, there would be just something very wrong with you. And abjection is one of the pulls, you know, that divides the self. So that we are actually enables us, in fact, kind of requires us, if we're going to be healthy, to play in this way. I'm not sure how much of this interpretation I've made up out of whole cloth.

58:10 Wes: No, this is good. I mean, going back to the fundamental existential thing. I mean, yeah, there are direct parallels to, say, Simone de Beauvoir and her concept of lack. Because the idea is that being a subject inherently involves lack. And for existentialists, being a responsible existen as opposed to essence. Being someone who's capable of freedom means staying with the lack. And the lack just is right. Maintaining that distinction between subject and object, not trying to enter into this fantasy that one can be completed and therefore desubjectified.

That one can merge with the object, so to speak. And when people drink, Mark, you brought that up, that is what they are doing. They are trying to retrieve a maternal feeling, essentially. They're trying to get into that kind of diffuse, selfless. The sense of a loss of self and diffuse and letting the drives have greater play, lack of inhibition. They're trying to get back to the feeling of dissolution between subject and object. That's not just psychoanalysis, but research into addiction. There's clear connections between. You can think of the substance to which one is addicted as a substitute for the object.

I'm not clear on the writing stuff yet, and I didn't. When I went back for the second reading. That's the only part I skipped over was the literature stuff because I didn't understand it very well. And there are other parts I wanted to reread and take notes on, but. Yeah, so I wish I could say more than that, but Mark, I think your forays into that. I think you put it very well. I mean, there's a lot to be said there. She talks, for instance, about the cathecting, the symbolic itself, right? And then the way in which there's an oral element, for instance, to speaking.

And she talks about a little girl, right, who's away from her mother for a little while. And she developed a phobia towards dogs, which was a projection of her own devouring, greedy. But she also came back very verbal and was talking a lot, very precociously. The idea that we can fill ourselves up with words, with signifiers, in some sense, there's a weird Sense in which we, by the production of writing or production of words, we're doing something like what we do when we try to undermine that subject object distinction, or to fill ourselves back up, or to reconnect to the maternal or to the object, we're doing it in a way.

For Kristeva, that again, somehow works. And I'm not sure exactly why she thinks it works. That's what I wish I had spent more time trying to figure out.

1:00:46 Mark: Filling your mouth with words instead of filling your mouth with your mother.

1:00:49 Wes: Yeah. Are you having a realization or you think that's silly?

1:00:54 Mark: I don't know. I decided just to put aside my skepticism about the fundamental infant sexuality Oedipal. I just was going to take. Take all the Freudian stuff as more or less given, because I had to do that to make any progress understanding this at all, rather than just not being able to get past that, which is one of the issues I had when we read Lacan.

1:01:12 Kelly: I have a quote that I'd like to share about where I got the sense of a really strong connection between religion and literature and seeing art as the more successful of these two approaches in purifying the abject. It's on page 26, from Approaching Abjection. Let me just say at this point, as an introduction, that contemporary literature in its multiple variants and when it is written as the language possible at last of that impossible constituted either by a subjectivity or by non objectivity, propounds as a matter of fact a sublimation of objection.

Thus it becomes a substitute for the role formerly played by the sacred at the limits of social and subjective identity. But we are dealing here with the sublimation without consecration. Fortified. The biggest piece that got me was the sublimation without consecration. That you can sublimate the abject, you can address it without necessarily consecrating what it seems to be opposed to or like. You can sublimate the abject without creating like another object to be abjected.

1:02:41 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. That's very well put.

1:02:43 Kelly: That's where, I guess, I think her understanding of art. It allows you to have a confrontation with the abject without making what you wish to be sacred. Sacred. You can't make a divinity of yourself when literature is forcing you to confront the horrors that you, as a human being and human beings in general, are capable of. Because religion allows you to hide behind a veil of morality and expectation and divinity. And because of that wall, it never really allows you to fully experience the abject. And it's always that trace that's left that kind of becomes the space in which your perversions can fester.

1:03:40 Mark: Yeah, I think that's related to this idea of page 47. I had a note. How do we keep the fortress of individuality from becoming a prison? So rejecting the abject is a matter of maintaining your individuality. And if you do that with a law based religion, then you're sort of doing it in a permanent way. You're kind of erecting these barriers against the scary stuff that's on the edges of experience and just saying permanently, no, no, no to that. And that seems like it could lead to a disconnection with the world basically to narcissism or to some other way of being messed up.

Whereas. And I think it's again, it's not against religion per se, but it's against how you are doing religion. That there are certain ways of doing religion that are like art in keeping the current flowing between you and the outside world, between you and the. The things at the edge of experience against the abject that let you deal with it, but yet diffuses it so that it's not so scary. It's the sublimation is again, what we're going for is taking this not just the abject is related to drives sublimation. You don't really think I've got this drive, it's flailing around and I must channel it into some positive social thing.

Well, this is just an example of this. Right. That abjection is indirectly a result of drives this difficult situation. We are with regard to the abjection. We're trying to make it interesting and healthy and positive rather than just something to wall off forever. Seth, do you have any last words?

1:05:11 Seth: This was very difficult reading. I struggled. It's kind of a badge of honor when I have to look up words. And what's actually one of the virtues of the electronic media that we read on now is that I can highlight a word and look it up. And there were many, many of those in our text that I had to look up. And I appreciate that.

1:05:33 Mark: And are you going to use cathexis in your life in the next week?

1:05:37 Seth: One of them. There were. There were any number, some of which the dictionaries could not actually find.

1:05:44 Mark: Introjection.

1:05:44 Seth: That was a good one. Yes, there were. Well, I'm not even going to try to find the ones that I thought of. Okay. So the challenge here with Kristeva is that what I anticipated from this conversation was there was going to be a tremendous amount of Freudian context against which she was reacting that we would have to really understand the Oedipal complex and a certain amount of Freudian theory in order to be able to make sense of what she was saying. And what I found was being the father of a baby that's just turned eight months old yesterday, is that I kept relating her description of the experience of coming to subjectivity through this non objectival drive.

And I kept thinking about seeing my daughter vocalize without words. So in other words, make noises. What is it? The pre symbolic order that is only starting to become now formulated in terms of the symbolic being able to say dada, mama and articulate and point to specific objects. But this notion that the symbolic is language is violence, but it's a necessary violence that separates you from the mother in order to. For you to claim your own subjectivity. It's fascinating to me to not in a perverse and overt way to apply that to my own experience and my child's raising, but to see what is taking place in her development and try to apply this as an interpretive framework against it and then to see if it makes sense.

And so it was kind of fun and exciting in that sense. And, you know, maybe if three years ago when we'd done Lacan, I had had a child of the same age, I might have had the same experience reading him, but I didn't.

1:08:03 Mark: Nope, I don't think so.

1:08:06 Seth: And there's a whole narrative that I could go off on relating to our shared graduate school experiences and my interaction with somebody who was very interested in Kristeva at the time, but we'll save that for another podcast.

1:08:24 Mark: Well, thank you again, Kelly. Do you have any last thoughts about how fascinating this reading was? We got a little bit at the feminism stuff, but not really. Can you give us the cheat sheet? The upshot of what? Eventually in this book, she gets to talking about feminism.

1:08:41 Kelly: Lots more about mother hate. There's no end to the conversation about how everybody is so disgusted by their mothers.

1:08:48 Wes: As my psychoanalyst puts it, everyone with a mother is a misogynist.

1:08:55 Kelly: It's funny, I had a much different experience reading this text this time than I did the first time when I was in college. Mainly because when I was in college, I was reading for my own pleasure and casual conversation with my professor, and I skipped very large chunks, which I. I did my best to slog through again this time. One of the difficulties, obviously, is I have a very sporadic reading of philosophy and psychology in general. They aren't really my fields, so some of the terminology, keeping track of subject, object, other, and censoring myself, speaking casually to explain what I meant.

A lot of that was challenging. I've always found Freud interesting, but I have a pretty introductory level of understanding about Freud. A lot of my interpretations, I think, were a lot different and evolved in having this conversation, which is, of course, excellent. And I found this time that I was actually much more interested in the things that she had to say about the literature and in purifying the abject and in religion, because those have been a little bit more focuses of my reading attention recently.

1:10:10 Mark: What did we interrupt your reading as far as like, what are you doing in grad school right now, if that's not too off topic?

1:10:15 Kelly: Well, in grad school, so I am finishing up my first graduate degree in education that next semester I'm starting my next one going into applied linguistics and will hopefully next year be off to Japan to teach esl. That's the awesome. So language always being a big motivator of mine.

1:10:39 Wes: So you're gonna learn Japanese while you're over there?

1:10:42 Kelly: That's the plan. I actually already spent a little over a year in China. I got myself up to, you know, decent conversational level in Chinese, so it's made it a little bit easier because the kanji in Japanese are just stolen Chinese characters, and that constitutes a pretty big part of the language. And then the rest of it is an Alphabet, which is like an unbelievable fantasy to me to be learning a language that is not just 35,000 individual pictograms.

1:11:17 Mark: The Chinese name of the father is really long, 35,000. Well, next time we're going to be turning to the east, although not that far east. We're going to be reading the Bhagavad Gita. So our first foray into Indian philosophy, at least outside of the Buddhist tradition. So very exciting. But before the Bhagavad Gita discussion, and I'm inserting this announcement at a later date, you will Hear as episode 203, a second discussion on this book where Seth and Dylan and I try to pick up the thread that was more or less dropped at the end of the first half of this conversation in a further attempt to become clear about Kristeva's story of the growth of the self.

And the second half of that conversation is devoted to horror more generally and specifically as it shows up in HP Lovecraft's story the Call of Cthulhu. So if this episode was not as Halloween inflected as you would have liked, given the title, you will have another chance. Now before that happens, within a day or two of the citizen version and part one of this episode going up, I will make available as bonus content my close reading of the beginning of this essay, pages one through four. Because you really haven't experienced this text until you try to actually read it, and because most of you are not going to do that and might have too much trouble with it anyway, I invite you to join me as I painstakingly try to make sense of each individual sentence so that close reading will be available to Partially Examined Life citizens or through Patreon.

I'm actually going to make it available to even $1 members. Folks should chime in on this Tell us how we vastly misunderstood the reading by commenting on the blog entry corresponding to this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com or on Facebook, or respond to us on Twitter, or email us directly@peltiallyexaminedlife.com we'd love to hear from you for our closing song, you may be surprised that Nakedly Examined Music featured a guest who put out an album on psychoanalysis and feminism. The artist's name is Jill Freeman. She did an album of songs about fairy tales from a psychoanalytic perspective, and we analyzed this song, Eyes of Fire, which is about the Baba Yaga story in Nakedly Examined Music Episode 28.

So check that out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com I want to thank everybody that answered our survey about our ten year show. So far, New York City is in the lead for a location for that show, so we're leaning toward that. But it's not too late. If you want to weigh in, go to partiallyexaminedlife.compel- Apart from the location, there are some questions about your desired topic, your desired format, so we'd love to hear from you about that. Thanks everybody.

1:13:56 Seth: Thank you.

1:13:57 Wes: Good night, Good night, Good night.

1:14:05 Unknown speaker: You make me toil impossible, you break me like a stone, you spread your night across my fallen day. I sleep alone, I moan and fret the frightful tasks I pray into my hands that strength and sight together might accomplish your demands. There is no place where I can run, There is no sweet way home, no cake or milk or morning sun. That warm old nest is gone now only forest, only dark and you so wild and cold, A lowly, screeching dancing bark, My destiny you hold witch wild and terrible, stitched of many parts, Cruel kind banshee, hard of hearts, crazy wisdom, ancestor pit of my desire, Grant me all blessings, give me eyes of fire, eyes of fire Eyes of fire. Shake and tremble through the night I huddle with my doll Wake and stumble past your sight Speak no word at all the doll, she whispers in my ear when moon and stars are high show her right respect in fear for

1:15:47 Mark: death lives in her mind.

1:15:53 Unknown speaker: I need a fire that cuts the black and guides me through the trees I need a fire to guard my back and tell me what it sees A flame that feeds the deepest needs and warms my will to know I'll burn my fire Pass to find a path only you can show Witch wild and terrible Stitched of many parts Cruel, kind banshee Heart of hearts Crazy wisdom Ancestor Pit of my desire Grant me all blessings given me Eyes of fire Eyes of fire Eyes of fire I. Witch wild and terrible Stitched of many parts Cruel, kind banshee Heart of hearts Crazy wisdom Ancestor Pit of my desire Grant me your blessings Keep me I am Eyes of fire Eyes of fire Eyes of fire Eyes of fire.

1:17:53 Kelly: Sam.