Ep. 203: Kristeva vs. Lovecraft on Horror and Abjection (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our episode 203 continues our last discussion in thinking about what is horror and exploring Julia Kristeva's answer, which involves a story about how the self is constituted and thus how horror is a feeling of the integrity of the self being threatened. So we're going to talk more about her 1980 book Powers of Horror, but we're adding to this discussion as A case study H.P. lovecraft's 1928 story the Call of Cthulhu. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer broadcasting from Placid island of Ignorance in the midst of Black Seas of Infinity in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in touch with his cephalopod self in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Seth: Seth Paskin's Self Very nice.

0:59 Mark: I wanted to have this follow up discussion a continuation partly because Dylan wasn't able to make our previous discussion and I thought that major story of the formation of the self, we kind of abandoned that. So we were working hard on this difficult text for the beginning and in fact I've now been very systematic about the first four pages and posted for Partially Examined Life Citizens, a close reading that I just did by myself did my best on of those first four pages, talking for over an hour, about four pages. But of course we were in our last discussion trying not to just do the close textual stuff but to give the high level themes about what it's about.

So it was a lot of ping ponging around and we at the end of the first half really just jumped to chapter two and started talking about phobias and little Hans. And then I brought it back to chapter one about literature for the end. But but we really never took the thread back up of how exactly is the self formed? How is this different from Lacan's story? And I thought maybe doing a group close reading of at least some of pages 5 through 15 might be nice. But I also just so that the listeners do not feel pain for us spending yet another hour or so on just this reading.

I thought one of the other things that was weird about our discussion is we couldn't really even agree on what this was about, like what phenomena of our adult life this was focused on. So I thought hey, I've I've always wanted to do a HP Lovecraft episode. So this is giving all of us only about two days to prepare for this. So we only read the one short story, but, like, you know, let's use that as a case study. And then we can bring in our various experiences of the experience of being scared of watching horror movies, of reading other books in this genre, and can kind of, you know, we had fun with that with sci fi in the wake of our David Brin episode many years ago.

So I thought maybe we could do something comparable here. Seth and Dylan, what do you want to get out of today, or do you want to give some other kind of opening statement of what you think was left over from our last discussion?

3:04 Seth: I was particularly struck Wes had recommended that we read the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on psychoanalytic feminism. The fact that there is one is impressive in itself. It does a really, really good job of laying out the Freud to Lacan arc against which Kristeva is writing. And also positions Luce Irigaray, who's another person that we had talked about reading and kind of how they differ and sort of articulates like, three phases of psychoanalytic feminism that positions Kristeva within one of those phases. So what I was interested in getting out of this is just knowing that I don't have the full comprehension of the Oedipus complex and how it supposedly works to create, to allow people to develop subjectivity or become subjects.

I wanted to understand what Kristeva's modification or insight or why is she a feminist? Right. Why is she considered a feminist and what differentiates her from other feminists who responded to that tradition? That was kind of what was interesting to me. Not that we have to focus on the issue of feminism because she's just a philosopher in her own right, and we could just talk about her insights into the process. But because the whole, from what I can tell, psychoanalytic theory is just sort of so overly laden with gender and sexuality and all this, it doesn't seem like it's possible to just talk about her as a pure theorist without pointing out how she's talking about female subjectivity versus male subjectivity and so forth in that psychoanalytic structure.

That's what I had hoped, the Lovecraft stuff. Unlike you, Mark, I have. I mean, I read a bunch of Lovecraft, like, when I was, you know, I don't know, in high school or something. And that's about where I fit that literature. It's kind of like in my high school, early college. That's about the level in which I think it. It operates. But I'm happy to talk about the call of CTHULHU that we did discuss, since you and I have already been kind of going back and forth about it.

5:12 Mark: Alright, so Dylan, your first words on Kristeva.

5:17 Dylan: I was mainly looking to get a chance to talk about her in the wake of having missed the episode. I don't know if I'm keyed in on exactly what she adds or not, but the two biggest things for me were the idea of rejection as part of making oneself and as opposed to objectification, that is pulling things in and defining them and how those things seem to be similar and are importantly distinct and then related to rejection. The way in which that ourselves are defined by boundaries that involve distincting ourselves away from something undefined, something that is.

I'll use the word unnamable, even though it's sort of a loaded term in this context. But you can only really speak of it as not being us. So that was what I was most interested in. I found that that was rich in her essays, but I also found myself confused about it because I found myself constantly, frankly, going back to whether or not this notion of rejection was really entailed deeply with objectification. I know there was this back and forth about what object was on the previous session and maybe we'll unfortunately recapitulate some of that, but that's where I was.

And then on the Call of Cthulhu, I had never read H.P. lovecraft at all. So that was my first experience with Mr. Lovecraft.

6:42 Mark: So yeah, Lovecraft, even if you haven't read him, I think underlies a lot of. A lot of Stephen King. You know, it, the movie just came out and is very Lovecraftian in that, you know, this is supposed to be the kind of, when you, if you see the creature, you go mad. It is something that. It really poses a problem for a movie maker, say of how to picture something that is described. Like it works much better in literature where you can just say, have the narrator unable to describe the thing or describe it as shifting in ways that defy logic. Like, yeah, you could use some crazy ass movie effects to approximate some of that.

You can do kind of surrealist things with the film process itself, but the power of the imagination is going to be the most effective generator of horror over something visual. Even if folks have not read Lovecraft and you know, it is very old fashioned kind of literature. I never had to read it in high school or something. It's not like in the canon in that way, as far as I know. Like it's considered a classic in that way though I'm sure, folks can correct me. And yeah, no, we had to do that in some of my classes. But he's, you know, not considered to be Jack London or something.

In fact, there are things to object to about his writing style. And of course, he was notoriously super racist. But still, you know, stranger things. The thing, the list could go on and on. You know, a good, I would say at least 30%, if not greater, of modern horror films and books and things are very directly descended from Lovecraft.

8:10 Seth: If you've ever watched some of those Vincent Price horror movies from probably the 70s, they're psychological horror, right? As opposed to Halloween or whatever. To me, they just don't work right. If you watch them, there's nothing horrifying about them. And you're right, it's because trying to represent in a visual media a narrative like that just doesn't seem to work. For my money, Poe does a better job of this than Lovecraft. All right, what do you want to jump off on, Mark? You want to jump into the text?

8:46 Mark: Well, yeah, let's cover some of this even broad brush before we even get to the close reading part. Kristeva, as a feminist, you pointed out the Stanford article. I just actually looked at that again this morning. We talked about last time, how this whole picture of rejecting the mother as being a primary part of healthy development then can lead to seeing the feminine as basically something to be avoided, as otherness, a marginalization. So you could definitely see right there, as Wes was saying last time, everybody with a mother is a misogynist, how a feminist would want to be aware of this fact and do things to directly counter that.

However, in terms of thinking about the specific problems that women as patients can have, you would think if a woman is herself has within her sort of a. What Du Bois called a double consciousness, right? That in our Du Bois episode on racism, it was that black people were infected with this negative view of blackness so that they suffer this double consciousness. On the one hand, they are the blackness, and on the other hand they are incorporating the white master that rejects the blackness. So this is exactly the same structure as abjection.

And so you could see similarly, you know, that Du Bois was using that as a way to diagnose. In fact, we might read before too long, Franz Fanon, who's an actual North African, French speaking black psychoanalyst writing about this very exact thing. But, yeah, you could see that Kristeva could have a similar analysis of female problems with being dissociated from their own identity by this structure.

10:38 Dylan: I have A question about the rejection of the mother business, which is, how is that abjection? And the reason I ask this is because abjection seems to be in. Kristeva seems deeply involved with the notion of rejection, but of rejection of unformed things. And the rejection of the mother seems to be the rejection of an object. Abjection would be a kind of naysaying regarding something much less defined. And that lack of definition, that ambiguity was fundamental to the notion of abjection as generating the self.

11:19 Seth: So I think you're right, Dylan. Rejection is not the word I would have. It's not the way that I think it should be characterized necessarily. But abjection is definitely different than whatever the mechanism is that Freud and Lacan are posing. And I thought that was part of her criticism of criticism.

11:36 Dylan: Exactly. In some sense, if you thought of Freud as being one step, Lacan being the next step, abjection is central to her refinement of Lacan.

11:47 Seth: Yep. So let me take a stab at this, just because it's. This is kind of the thing that I've been thinking most about and focused on. So there's the mechanism. You're born, you're literally a part of the mother, and then when you come out, you're now physically distinct from the mother, but you don't have any sense of individuation. I think we talked about this, Mark, that we kept saying individuation. We tried to use that term to kind of get at this. But as part of your development, eventually you're going to have to split from the mother. You're going to have to individuate yourself, which we think of as, at least in our philosophical tradition, as subjectivity.

It's how you come to be as a subject where you identify yourself as an I, and then you identify things outside of you as objects, and then suddenly you're now then a traditional philosophical subject. Right. That can grasp and comprehend and do whatever. The big question is, how do you get from the unity with your mother as an experience to the individuated eye? And the Freud and Lacanian story is, if I'm thinking about this correctly, it's what they call the Oedipal complex, which is basically, there's a way in which you have to recognize that there's something that your mother cannot offer you.

Right. And the way they phrase it is if your mother satisfies all your needs, and if you think that you're satisfying all her needs, then there's no motivation for you to individuate. There's no reason to individuate. But as part of the normal process, according to Freud and Lacan, you recognize a lack, that you don't satisfy your mother's needs and that she can't satisfy all your needs, and then you have to turn somewhere else. And part of the individuation process, then, is built on the recognition of a lack. That's where it starts.

13:54 Dylan: So it makes sense that in both directions, it turns on desire. There's the lack that the child perceives in themselves, which I would understand as an unfulfilled desire that they have. And then there's also the perception of a lack on the part of the child that the mother has. So a recognition in a lack, a recognition of distinct desires, unfulfilled desires in the mother. And maybe that is simply that the child isn't fulfilling them. That there is the experience of the mother being unfulfilled, incomplete, that is having other desires.

14:38 Seth: Yeah, maybe that's a better way to say it, Dylan, is that the mechanism by which this process takes place is that there are desires that can't be filled. As long as your desires are being satisfied, there's no motivation and no reason,

14:54 Dylan: but there's no lack. It seems to me that those are absolute corollaries. Right. When I say lack, then I immediately think that a little bit like, there's just a piece missing. But part of this is remembering that whatever that lack is is driven by a source of desiring.

15:12 Seth: Right.

15:13 Dylan: So there is this notion, it's called unterminated desire, that for Freud and I think Lacan, is sort of our libidinal activity of just wanting stuff, and that that is its own source. And in some ways, that desire, you can characterize it as also implying a lack because it's unsatisfied desire. But it's not as if there was a completeness and then you remove something so that now you have an incompleteness. It's that there's a source of desire that's searching for completeness.

15:51 Seth: Yep. A drive. Right.

15:53 Dylan: And I think that Kristeva is adding to that abjection is central to her refinement of the notion of desire.

16:01 Seth: Mm. I think you're right. And like I said, if there's this mechanism that the pre. Ego, the undifferentiated self, has these drives, and as long as there's no lack, there's no motivation to do anything, to individuate. But at some point, there's a recognition of lack, and that drives the subject to go or drives the. The thing Whatever it is at that point, to go start the process of individuation and let me try to work through this. I think what Kristeva is saying is even the notion of a lack, the recognition of a lack from a drive that is something that needs to be satisfied, is already in some sense, an object you're already objectifying.

And if that were the case, then you would already have subjectivity. So she's essentially saying that the mechanism that they claim makes this happen can't actually do the work that's necessary because it already presumes the structure that has to come into play after subjectivity takes place.

17:13 Dylan: Yes, because subjectivity is founded on language and things like that.

17:18 Seth: Exactly.

17:19 Dylan: Yeah. So there's this page five, which is where Mark said he wanted us to start.

17:25 Mark: Well, actually, before that. Let me. Let me. Okay, let me just read a quote from the beginning of.

17:30 Dylan: There's a great quote right here, but go ahead.

17:32 Mark: Okay, let me just read a quote. Just. Since you brought up the Oedipal triangle, I just want to. Before we jump, before we start our close reading in earnest on page five, just look at the first page of chapter two. So that is page 32, the object, just to fill in one of the other gaps that we left, the object as trimming of anguish is the subsection of what I'm about to read. When psychoanalysts speak of an object, they speak of the object of desire, as is elaborated within the Oedipal triangle. According to that trope, the father is the mainstay of the law and the mother the prototype of the object.

Toward the mother, there is convergence not only of survival needs, but of the first mimetic yearnings. In other words, mimetic is kind of imitation. She is the other subject, an object that guarantees my being is subject. The mother is my first object, both desiring and signifiable. So she's gonna object to this, but she's setting this up as this is what she has inherited from Freud. So what was just missing in when Seth started describing the Oedipal relation is just the fact that, yes, we recognize that the mother has desires that you cannot fulfill, but those desires are toward the father.

18:45 Seth: Right.

18:45 Mark: So the father is, on the one hand, the missing piece. So, you know, if we were going to fully identify with the mother, then we would have to desire the father as well. Right. Instead, we break away. We are jealous of the father. We want to kill the father. And then I think Lacan's advance on this, which a lot of it might be In Freud, I'm unclear on that. But is the father as representing not just the law, not just civilization, but language in particular the nameable. So that's kind of the situation that we find ourselves in is that on the one hand, to say that the mother is the first object is to say that it's the first locus of desire.

And in the fact that her desires are different than our desires, you know, that there's some divergence there, that that's what creates the subject. So I wanted to clarify this distinction between if you're just Husserl or a straight ahead philosopher, a British empiricist, say, and you want to talk about the self being created based on interaction with objects, or you want to talk about the subject object distinction, you might as well be talking about this book in front of me. Like, hey, hey, I point to this book and this book is not me, and therefore there's a me or something like that's not the way psychologically that this actually happens.

You could not do that with a mere piece of the world. Instead, I kind of think of this instead of it being William James's field of blooming, buzzing confusion, that then we cut into a this and a that, and that's the way objects are created metaphysically. And in turn, you know, the subject would be created as something opposed to those objects. It's more like Schopenhauer's view of. Of a writhing mass of will. Like that the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world before it is cut up into objects is not just a neutral, you know, a graph. I'm thinking of, you know, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where he's kind of like the universe is of facts and there's just all these inert things out there and there are different meshes we can lay over those using concepts, and that cuts it into different things.

Well, this is a much more lively view, such that becoming a subject actually requires that you've got desires that are different than the desires of the mother. And so like they're pointing in different directions. That's the actual motivation, as Seth was just saying, for becoming an individual as opposed to just there being an opposition and having the father there as part of that triangle is part of what actually, according to this initial Freudian model, what sets this in motion.

21:24 Seth: That was a lot of name dropping there, Mark.

21:27 Mark: Well, I'm trying to connect to things we've talked about in the past. The next paragraph out of that which is about to get to. We jump very suddenly at the beginning of Our second half last time to little Hans and Phobia. But the couple of paragraphs before that are that one. And then what's her objection? She says no sooner sketched out such a thesis. The thesis of the Oedipal triangle is exploded by its contradictions and flimsiness. We read part of this last time. Do we not find sooner, chronologically and logically speaking, if not objects, at least pre objects, poles of attraction, of a demand for food, air, 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? Semi objects that are called purely transitional by Winnicott. Okay, and then west told us what transitional objects were. Finally, do we not find a whole gradation within modalities of separation, A real deprivation of the breast, an imaginary frustration of the gift as maternal relation? And to conclude, a symbolic castration inscribed in the Oedipus complex, a gradation constituting, in Lacan's brilliant formulation, the object relations.

Insofar as it is always a means of masking, of parrying the fundamental fund of anguish, the matter of the object sets in motion or implicates the entire Freudian structure. So reading that much, is it clear to you guys what she finds wrong with the Freudian Oedipal triangle?

22:54 Seth: I believe her criticism of the mechanism is that the notion of desire and lack, which drives the child away from the mother and towards the father, already presupposes the structure towards which it's moving. That the desire and drive for lack is itself already assumes objectivity and some form of subjectivity. And so we're basically presupposing the end state. And I believe she thinks that abjection, which is a rejection of a non object that comes from within us as opposed to something outside of us, is a way in which you could explain it where it would actually work. It would explain the transition from non individuated, non subjectivity, and then give you a mechanism to start the process of rejection without using objects. But then you could come to understand, or essentially it would form the basis of your ability to then reject an external object and become a subject.

24:11 Dylan: Yeah, see, the nice thing about this, I'm not going to say exactly the way you said it, Seth, but the abjection comes from within the self or the proto self or whatever, but is directed outside. And so there's this nice link in abjection, right? Because it is for the, I'll say, the individual who is experiencing or doing the abjectification is they are distinguishing things outside the world as not themselves. And in that way, sort of rejecting. And so there's a little bit of this cutting up of the world that Mark was referring to, the this and the that.

But rather than when you describe it, the this and the that, it's saying, well, I'm cutting up the world into a whole bunch of different objects. And I think Kristeva is pointing out, even in that sort of metaphysical account, that it's really. There's a this and a not this. And in fact, prior to any this, there's a not this. There's a whole mass of things that you are not incorporating. But the source of that activity of not incorporating is yourself. And so in that way, it's actively defining yourself. It's actively defining the individual.

25:31 Mark: So I was trying, in my close reading of the beginning of the text, to take Wes's admonishment that we talk about the object as the psychoanalytic object seriously. And the way that I was interpreting that is the psychoanalytic object is kind of a homunculus. It's an internalized view of the mother. Or I was positing, I'm not sure if this is right, that maybe the superego is itself kind of a homunculus like that. That it's an internalized view of the father. It's kind of like the angel sitting on your shoulder, which then in turn, if we're taking this Oedipal story and trying to incorporate abjection into it, then maybe the mother ends up being.

In trying to separate from the mother. And this is why I was characterizing. Dylan. Abjection as rejection of the mother is because it's not just rejecting bodily fluids or rejecting some unnamable thing. Like. Like it's something that becomes unnamable because we reject it. Like, that's what repression is about, is that you've pushed something down, and so it becomes unspeakable, and so it just bubbles up. So the feeling of objection is really the feeling that you've taken this, you know, locus of desire, this homunculus of the mother. In other words, the mother as object.

So you've got this, like, little version of the mother in your head, but then you have separated yourself because you recognize that your desires are different from the mother's. And so you've got. The ego is one homunculus, one part of you. The mother part is another homunculus. And abjection is. We don't want to. That unity with the mother that we had before separating is kind of like death to us. Is kind of me no longer existing as a human being anymore. As a separate entity. Like, when I start, I'm just kind of like my mom's. I was gonna say my mom's arm, but it's actually more like my mom's stomach.

Like, my mom is part of that group entity that is feeding me. But once I separate from that, then, like, I want to keep separated from that. Like, there's a part of me that just to assert my own individuality, I need to press that down. So that whole homunculus gets pushed into the world of the abject. And we see this then very clearly in the maternal metaphors that keep coming back in horror of, you know, deep cavities and wells and something that will consume me. That the psychoanalytic analysis of this is that it's really a fear of the mother.

A fear of a distorted image of the mother. A fear of the mother as already rejected.

28:09 Dylan: That's interesting. The way you're describing it makes repression itself an abjectification. Where you've taken the object, the psychoanalytic object, and made it into a unarticulated, unnameable source. That is that affects the individual as being the object.

28:39 Mark: But I don't want to discount the interpretation that I think you and Seth were just giving, which is that it's these pre objects. It's not the fact that the first object, as Freud says, is the mother, but that it's these loci of desire which, you know, the pre objects are like the bad breast. At least what Freud calls it. That. That kind of thing in itself. Before there's even a whole mother homunculus that could itself be the non object that abjection is reacting to.

29:09 Dylan: Yeah, I think that she could mean both. Right. I think that would lend power to her interpretation because it would a make the interpretation of repression stronger. By making repression an activity of pushing what was articulated object within one's psyche into the unarticulated primordial soup of the psychic world. And it gives it power the way that first birthing of the. Of the soul and the self has against everything unknown. Right. So it affects you, and it would be affecting you in the same way. With that same sort of indistinctness.

29:56 Mark: So, Dylan, did you want to start us on page five? Because I think we have some hypotheses now. But on this section, page 5 to 15, she actually talks about repression. Probably get clear on this if we can look closely at the wording Obviously, we can't read the entirety of the 10 pages. That would take three hours by itself if we read and commented on every sentence. But let's try to hit the high points here.

30:20 Dylan: Yeah. So this is the subsection of chapter one called the Abjection of Self. If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand, understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength. When that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within. When it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed.

That all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is, in fact, recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language or desire is founded. One always passes too quickly over this word want. And today psychoanalysts are finally taking into account only its moral or less fetishized product, the object of want. But if one imagines and imagine one must. For it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here.

The experience of want itself as logically preliminary to the being of the object, then one understands that abjection, and even more so, abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility. Before God witnessed Elizabeth of Hungary, who, though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing herself. I get a little bit lost at the end there.

32:07 Mark: Yeah. So let's get clear on this. The experience of want as logically primary to being an object. I think Seth described that pretty well. To the being of the object. Then one understands that objection even more. So the objection is it's only signified. So why would we think that want is a signifier? If you want to say that want, the abjection, is the signified of want. That makes it sound like want is a signifier. But then she says its signifier, then is none but literature.

32:41 Seth: No?

32:42 Dylan: Well, the objection of self is its only signifier. The its is the want. Right. So the experience of want is only signified by the objection of self. Right.

32:52 Mark: But why do we want to say that want signifies anything? Is it the idea that one way of saying what a desire is is pointing to what Its object is. So you could say that that desire signifies, you know, that I need food or, you know, signifies the food. But if we want to say that there's just want as this primal energy.

33:17 Dylan: Exactly.

33:18 Mark: That no. Does not yet have an object. And we still have our emotional experiences that are not aimed at any particular object. So it's. They're aimed at the object instead.

33:28 Dylan: Yes. And it's a funny thing to call it aimed at the object, which is why it's probably better to use this term signified. Right. It's signified by objection. Because it's. She's wanting to have it be undirected.

33:43 Mark: Yeah. And then you were saying at the end that mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God. So abjection of self, you know, the way we were describing abjection is pushing the mother homunculus below the surface into the land of death, say, so its name can no longer be spoken. And thereby a self in opposition to that, a subject would emerge that. That is actually identifying with the superego, with the name of the Father is law like. But because the part that is submerged is still you, abjection ultimately is.

And you recognize it on some level, maybe it's an unconscious level, but you recognize it as objection of yourself. So by abjecting, it's not, as I was just describing, at least as a pure experience. It's not the expression of pride by pushing the unnamable down. It is, at the same time, as she has said, abjecting yourself. And so it's really a debasement of yourself. Right. It splits the self. And so you've got the part that is coherent and civilized, and you've got the part that you're pushing out that is rejected. I guess I still don't see how this lines up to a partial identification with that which is abjected and thus wanting to humiliate yourself.

Does that equation seem to capture what's going on here with that last sentence?

35:13 Seth: Say that one more time, Mark.

35:16 Mark: So I'm trying to figure out. It seems like abjection is a positive thing. I'm pushing this unwanted part away so that I can then be healthy and civilized. And an ego that doesn't sound like that would result in humility. So I'm changing my interpretation of what's going on here to say, well, yes, you've got this civilized ego, but you also have the part that you're pushing away, which is still you and which you still on some level recognize as you. So the fact that you're pushing it away, that amounts to pushing away yourself, humiliating yourself.

That. That could translate into bowing down before God, that sort of pushing the source of ultimate value out of the symbolic realm. Only the religious can be something that has true value in it. In other words, I've tried to reject the mother. Reject the mother homunculus, to condemn it as evil, but in fact, a very similar move would be to elevate it. You know, to put it outside the symbolic order could be to elevate it as God and thereby feel like I have to prostrate myself before it.

36:22 Dylan: But in that way, isn't it making the connection that though that act of abasing and that act of deep humility could also be interpreted as a dramatically forceful assertion of self. And so in that way, it's not humble in that respect. It's in fact, that most dramatic prostration is in fact tied to it, a deeply vigorous definition of self.

36:58 Mark: That's a very nice Nietzschean. You know, you're being a despiser of life, but at least you're exerting your will to power. Through doing that, you're not just wanting to snuff yourself out, you're actually, in a sneaky way, asserting yourself. And I like that interpretation better than somehow I am identifying with the self that is being abjected. No, in fact, I am identifying myself in opposition to that. It's just with this weird inversion of values where unlike Nietzsche's inversion of values, I'm actually positing myself as humble and ostensibly bad in relation to that which I'm raising as God. Have we lost you, Seth, here, or do you have any thoughts on this?

37:41 Seth: No, you haven't lost me. Although I am the connection to God. I mean, I don't need that right now to complicate things any further.

37:51 Mark: Yeah, she's the one who threw in that sentence here. It doesn't need to be here.

37:55 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

37:57 Seth: So I think the abject. There's got to be a play on words here, right? That you have object. object, objet. And then you have, you know, abject. But she's positing a counter movement, a pushing away, a rejection. Right. It's a drive, but it's not a drive of desire. At least it's desire to rid yourself of something. The desire works negatively, I guess you could say, is that you have this sense of horror or terror or fear. She uses the word fear at one point. Right. It's fear of the unknown or fear of nothingness. Or not even nothingness. It's. It's fear of something that you can't conceive of, which gets manifested through the rejection of some part of yourself.

And she talks about like actual physical, you know, urine, feces, semen, snot, whatever. So if you think about it, the positive abjection, which is this need to get clean and to remove these things that would potentially be humiliating or somehow simultaneously indicates a desire for purity. And maybe this is the connection that you're talking about, Mark, but it represents a desire to have some kind of integrity of yourself against this, a notion of cleanliness or something like that, or purity or what have you. And so it does a really interesting bit of work.

Like Dylan was just saying that it can be a movement, a positive movement towards the constitution of the self against something that's not an external object, but rather against a self generated criteria that manifests out of your own body, so to speak.

39:52 Mark: Do you like the idea, you know, combining that with the idea that really the object was an object, it's just now it's a repressed object and so we don't name it anymore?

40:03 Seth: Well, I thought that that was something that happens later on. So the fact that, that you're born in abjection leaves a trace. And so even as an adult there are these elements of that. And presumably remember she is or was a practicing psychotherapist. So you know, she's thinking about how does this manifest in disorders that can be treated. And I think she says there's always this trace of abjection. And that's where you get people who have anxiety. This explains very well, like generalized anxiety disorder, for example, and phobias.

40:40 Dylan: I mean, one of the things I liked that made those things more understandable to me is the way in which, let's just take phobias, for instance, are undirected, right? The fact that it's a phobia against something that doesn't have a concrete object is in fact the source of its power. That the fact that anxiety becomes so powerful because no matter how much you were to specify it, to try to neutralize its power, its source is everything else is a great unnamed specificity out of which there's an infinite amount of objects that you can pull out of it and neutralize and you'll still have that infinite wellspring of abjectness out there. And that's why it's so powerful. That's why it becomes almost unneutralizable.

41:32 Mark: Should we keep going in the text still on page five. The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time, that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what is termed knowledge of castration, turning away from perverse dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non objects. They are no longer seen in their own right, but forfeited abject. The termination of analysis can lead us there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights of masochism. What do you guys make of that? Presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non objects.

So again, this might hinge on the psychoanalytic versus philosophical object, because clearly, if you've just named them, right, the body is an object. So if I'm going to consider it a non object. Well, an object in psychoanalytic terms would have to be an image that you have of a locus of desire, right? The internalized, the homunculus of the mother, the homunculus of the father, or other things. I guess that doesn't help me make sense of this sentence either. Why would I consider my own body? I mean my own body, would I personify that? Would I make that a homunculus?

It seems like, no, obviously that's not an object in the sense that of an internalized mother.

42:49 Dylan: In that way it's a non object, right? So I mean, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non objects, right?

42:58 Seth: The body is the most precious non object.

43:00 Mark: They are no longer seen in their own right, but forfeited abject. So we are. If you're self debasing, then you're saying my body, in fact my own desires, my own ego are not important. They are not to be considered legitimate loci of desire. I should not be paying attention to their urges. I should become ascetic. What's important is God. What's important is something in the beyond. I am just a pile of crap. I'm no longer seeing my own body and ego in their own right. I'm forfeiting them. I'm rejecting them as really part of the impurity of the world. Like if I were, if I had ultimate purity on this, then I would be a pure spirit floating around one with God. And so maybe that is, that doesn't sound like masochism, what I've just described, but.

43:51 Dylan: Well, no, it's. It's the pangs and delights of masochism. It sounds to me exactly like, okay,

43:56 Mark: so yeah, if you're whipping your own back with a lash, then you're dissing yourself in the Same way that the person bowing down. You're putting the focus of value as something outside of you that you pale in comparison to continuing essentially different from uncanniness, more violent too. Abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin. Nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. Right. So we've just said that you should be recognize your own body, you should recognize your own ego as yours. But we're somehow externalizing those.

All these familiar things we're pushing out and denying that they're familiar. I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on this account all by himself, and to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him. All gifts, all objects. He could have a sense of the abject. Even before things for him are hence before they are signifiable, he drives them out. Dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory edged by the abject, a sacred configuration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, the thrown up, driven out, forfeited.

What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father. That is what he tries to cleanse himself of tirelessly. So I guess this is just more of the same. Any comments on that?

45:15 Dylan: Well, I think the key sentence is a couple beforehand. Even before things for him are hence before they are signifiable, he drives them out, dominated by drives as he is, and constitutes his own territory edged by the abject. This is to me, it feels very. A kind of metaphysical account, which I give us a little bit of slack for this kind of back and forth between metaphysical objects and psychoanalytic objects. That sentence of even before things for him are. He drives them out. She's trying to talk about this abjection of rejecting unspecified things in the world as a process of defining oneself.

46:00 Seth: Yeah, right. So you're the same thing. Signifiable means language. Right. So even before you have language, which is the ability to constitute things, there is this drive where you. You abject yourself. And it makes sense that that would be the body. Because if you think about the way we come to some kind of realization of the self, it starts with the kind of exploring recognition of our own body. And that's why anytime we talking about the father, we're talking here about language. And she talks about being able to make noises prior to language, the phonemes.

Right. That phonemes without signification, are verbal expressions of drive. And that's another transitional step that gets mentioned at that part where it says what he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word, for the words of the father. That is what he tries to cleanse himself of tirelessly so, without signification, without the words of the father. Right. The response is not to this lack of love or this maternal love. It's the abject, which is this emptiness. Now he says the word hatred.

I don't know how. Maternal hatred, I don't know quite how that functions. But as we move a little further in the text, I see a distinction now here that I didn't get the first time we read through it, talking about without a father, the holy brat would probably have no sense of the sacred, a blank subject. He would remain discomfited at the dump for non objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. Okay, that doesn't help, for he is not mad. He through whom the abject exists out of the days that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother.

A daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations. Out of such a daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject, but that word fear. A fluid haze, an elusive clamminess. No sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words and language with non existence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. So somehow you're driving something out of your own body. That's abjection. And that process of abjection brings up this, I'm saying, emotional component, but I'm sure these are technical terms that don't.

But there's essentially this loathing, this drive to push this stuff out, and somehow it then makes you aware that you are distinct from the mother. Somehow this recognition implicates the mother and the attendant emotion upon that recognition is fear. I'm trying to make a connection here, if that makes sense, between that if you come to abject yourself, to try to drive something out without having a specific object, and that then somehow that's going to bring you to some level of awareness of the maternal, which is going to inspire fear. But that feels to me like that's already the object, the objectification.

Because the fear has to be the fear of the abject, right? It's fear of nothing or fear. It's. It's fear without an Object. And she says that any nameless fear, any phobia. So, oh, I'm afraid of clowns, right? Or I'm afraid of dogs, or I'm afraid of dying in my sleep. All of that, ultimately, is rooted in just pure, blind fear that has no object. That's what those phobias are. And that's the trace in the adult. It's the manifestation of this experience in the adult.

50:02 Dylan: And, of course, there's this kind of funny way of saying it. The phobic has no other object than the abject. So I think you're right, Seth, to say that there isn't, properly speaking, an object. And I think it's probably true for either interpretation of an object. As, I mean, that sentence. I think it's object. Not in a psychoanalytical sense. Maybe I'm wrong. It seems to me it works both ways.

50:31 Mark: I'm just trying to get at exactly what the relationship between fear and abjection that we talk about. Abjection is a fear that is directed at nothing. In other words, they are the same thing.

50:45 Dylan: No, I wouldn't say that. Abjection is fear.

50:49 Mark: So say again what you think exactly. The relationship between them. The phobic has no other object than the abject. So what does that mean for the relationship between fear and. Objection. And the process of. Objection.

51:01 Seth: Let me read this sentence again. Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations. Out of such a daze, he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop. Fear.

51:23 Mark: So it sounds like abjection has already happened.

51:25 Seth: Yes.

51:26 Mark: What makes the mother's body untouchable, impossible, absent, at least developmentally. That is the process of abjection. Right. That is the process of separation from the mother. And that causes a fear. So it's like abjection is not fear, but it causes fear.

51:43 Seth: Yep, that's the way I'm reading it. So that somehow the mechanism is you're abject, you're rejecting, you're loathing these parts of you that you're trying to get rid of, these fluids and whatever. But the loathing that you feel for these pieces of yourself simultaneously brings about the awareness that you thought you were the body of the mother, but in fact, you're not. And it's something that you always already lost. And that. That causes fear. So it's not fear of the maternal body, or it's. I guess that's kind of where lack comes in this whole process is the recognition that you have your own body and that it's not the mother's body.

And that causes loathing in you and fear because you're disconnected from what you thought you were. I guess it causes panic, like abject terror. Like, oh my God, you know, it's kind of like. Like death, right? Like, ah, the whole basis for my existence has been pulled out from under me. And that is with nothing to replace it that you're aware of. Yet until you signify, you're in this no man's land where you thought you were the mother, now you're not the mother, but you have no language. And so it's just pure abject terror. So, wow.