THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The
spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the
retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from
defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of
being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads
me toward and separates me from them.
Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most ar-
chaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch
that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of
cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging
sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the
belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and
bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.
Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at
that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who
proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire;
"I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel
it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only
in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself
within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish
myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that
they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside
out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in the
process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death,
During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself
amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symp-
tom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is
inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either
wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer
to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.
excerpt from
POWERS OF HORROR
An Essay on Abjection
by Julia Kristeva
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York 1982
Read the essay here.
