Powers of Horror
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| Author | Julia Kristeva |
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| Original title | Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection |
| Translator | Leon S. Roudiez |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Series | European perspectives |
| Subject | Abjection |
| Published |
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| Media type | |
| Pages | 219 pp. |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 8430152 |
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (French: Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection) is a 1980 book by Julia Kristeva. The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.
According to Kristeva, the abject marks a "primal order" that escapes signification in the symbolic order; the term is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other.
Kristeva's understanding of the "abject" provides a helpful term to contrast to Lacan's objet petit a (or the "object of desire"). Whereas the objet petit a allows a subject to coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of meaning and intersubjective community to persist, the abject "is radically excluded and," as Kristeva explains, "draws me toward the place where meaning collapses" (Powers 2). It is neither object nor subject; the abject is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic order. (On the symbolic order, see, in particular, the Lacan module on psychosexual development.) As Kristeva puts it, "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" (Powers 10). The abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious.
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