Mud, the Abject

Jiangnan is fundamentally all mud; neither water nor earth, it is the substance that cannot be named. Julia Kristeva frames that which cannot be object (identifiable) as abject. She investigates our simultaneous repulsion and attraction to things like mud, and how the abject is contained culturally. The following abstracts are from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection (1982). That all of Suzhou's cultural motifs are somehow in response to mud seem absurd; yet themes like forgetfulness, exile and jouissance that Powers of Horror articulates register deeply as reoccurring themes that characterize Suzhou's 2,500 years of history.

NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable...

 The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire..

Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meanglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.

[page 1]

THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protects 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. 

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite...He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law - rebellious, liberating, suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you...

[page 2]

AN EXILE WHO ASKS, "WHERE?"

Instead of sounding himself as to his "being," he does so concerning his place: "where am I" instead of "who am I?" For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe who fluid confines -  for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject - constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more is is saved.

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TIME: FORGETFULNESS AND THUNDER

For it is out of such straying on excluded ground hat he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.

[page 8]

JOUISSANCE AND AFFECT

...abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not readically cut off the subject from what treatens it -  on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also because abjection itslef is a composite of judgement and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be - maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out.

[page 9]

AS ABJECTION - SO THE SACRED

Abjection accompanies all religious structuring and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse.

[page 17]

Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982