Abject State Research Articles

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Satire of Patience Advice in Sir Isumbras

The Middle English romance entitled Sir Isumbras has been neglected, and a series of pronouncements by the hero regarding patience has been all but ignored. However, a closer examination of them allows one to treat these patience episodes as crucial junctures in Isumbras’s development as a character. If a reader recognizes them as examples of satire of the prevailing rhetoric concerning patience in the literature of medieval England and compares the patience episodes with later descriptions of Isumbras’s actions, then the hero’s development is much easier to follow than previous critics have found it to be. Isumbras starts the poem as materialistic and naive. A messenger from God causes him to repent, but a newly acquired tendency to self-righteousness leads him to admonish his wife, children, and other members of his household to be patient in the face of extreme adversity. His advice seems more and more inappropriate as his manifold sufferings alienate him from his family and reduce him to an abject state. Isumbras’s struggle provides insight into the remarkably exacting moral standards of the poem: the process of trying to give up worldly attachments is fiendishly difficult, and pride is nearly impossible to eradicate.

Resonance of Existentialism on Pandemic literature: An Introspection of Pandemic Literature of the Past

Literature has always been impacted by the abject state of thought of humans existing in a particular time and era. A sense of meaning, or forging an explanation evinced within literature during the cataclysmic contemporary crisis of the pandemic, definitely resonates within the existentialistic paradigms. Not addressing the effects this humanitarian crisis has had on humans in literature is akin to being in a bubble of time and being immune to the devastation all around. The pandemic which is arguably one of the most horrific disasters of modern times has nearly irreversibly affected the outlook, imagination and thinking of humans. It will definitely have an irrefutable impact on the literary discourse of modern times. The interactions during a crisis of such proportions, the various texts, practices, the socio-economic and political repercussions have an indelible impact on the way the literature of that time is doled out as literature effectively represents the society and its sentiments in general. The essence of the present times is survival, with death gaping at all within close quarters and this is the root of an existential way of living which reflects in literature as well. This can be ascertained by introspecting pandemic literature of the past and the purpose of this paper is to analyze the resonance of existentialism in pandemic literature.

Characteristics of Abjection in First Love, Last Rites

First Love, Last Rites was one of the greatest works of English writer Ian McEwan, which leaded him to fame. The book was based on eight short-stories from eight teenagers’ or youth’s point of views. Among those stories, the men suffered from different dilemmas of sexual states, in which horror, violence, death, cruelty, absurdity, mildness and sadness were mixed and interwoven. Applying Julia Kristeva’ s theory of abjection, the eight heroes in the book acted different unusual sexual behaviors because of abjection towards somebody or something in life. In the meantime,the readers could also introspect their status and identities through the stories. Thus, extreme as the plots in this novel, it is true that the mental state of abjection and disorientation still tortures people nowadays. Through this work, the readers may reflect on the life they are experiencing and build up their own self -identity.

Editor’s Note: New Baggage for Old Masters

Editor’s Note: New Baggage for Old Masters

“Pointless, Ridiculous Monster”: Monstrous Abjection and Event in “The House of Asterion” and Grendel

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine reimaginings of myth and legend that subversively address the confrontation between hero and monster by recreating the villainous monster as protagonist. These adaptations disrupt the Self/Other binary, which consequently positions us in a state of empathetic abjection with the monster. Jorge Luis Borges's “The House of Asterion” and John Gardner's Grendel take notions of the monstrous abject in the popular imagination and recreate the myth of the Minotaur and the epic of Beowulf, respectively, from the point of view of the monstrous Other. Borges and Gardner rely on mythic and folkloric profanation to (re)write abject monsters. They intertextually invoke their parent texts and explore the monster's own maternal parentage, which leads to their eventual (and Evental) demise.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Blind Submission

Abstract Muslims in the West are under pressure to perform nationalism and hegemonic gender ideology to neutralize themselves as threats. This has triggered a series of “blindfolded hug” viral videos that show individual Muslim males standing blindfolded in a busy street asking for hugs from passersby who “agree” that they are not a danger to society. In this article, I examine 51 such videos and argue that the visual of a minority male made abject reifies state might while building an aesthetic of peacefulness that Western Muslims are compelled to demonstrate. Such an aesthetic relies on the rhetorics of disability, the affective circulation of hate, and the stripping off of oppositional gazing to be read legibly by White audiences.

Meaning and Captivity in Classical Arabic Philology

Abstract This article takes a close look at the word maʿnā as analyzed by Abbasid-era authorities on the Arabic language, chiefly Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004). The word’s context-sensitivity and polysemy are well known; less well appreciated are the lexical and morphological preconditions for maʿnā’s diversity of meanings across the disciplines. Even less well studied (though widely quoted in lexicographical literature) is the anonymous basīṭ-meter couplet that Ibn Fāris cites in al-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-lugha as a locus probans for the word. The speaker in these verses boasts of ransoming a bound captive (ʿānī), using maʿnā to refer to the captive’s abject state. There is evidence to suggest that the verses once featured in a lost work of the philologist Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/855) called Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī. This was an anthology of verses framed like riddles whose interpretation hinged on double meanings and rare metaphors, and its form and content may be judged by numerous outtakes preserved in later anthologies and lexica. The affiliation of Ibn Fāris’s verses to Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī would confirm that the derivation of maʿnā truly is a puzzle with multiple answers. To contemplate its parameters is to uncover a paradigm for meaning in which noetic intention and phenomenological exposure are figurative correlates of bodily captivity and duress.

De-composing the Gothic Body in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent

This article argues that the corpse seizure in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent epitomizes the fragmentation of Irish cultural identity, employing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to reveal the gothic body as a site of indeterminacy. Narrative inconsistencies, or dislocutions, “de-compose” the text, registering both a distinctively gothic horror of loss and an obsessive need to record the abject state of the colonized. The dislocution of traumatic events signals a dissolving cultural distinctiveness that destabilizes time and meaning itself.

Liminal Criminal: Abject, Absence and Environment in Junky and The Outsider

Liminality represents a transient and in-between space in which the subject, midritual, is rendered absent and abject. This space is generated and inhabited by both the victims and perpetrators of social transgressions; a space in which each party is caught in a state of abjection until the fulfilment of punishment. Located within this sphere the reader finds the worlds of William Burroughs’ Junky (2002 [1953]) and Albert Camus’ The Outsider (2013 [1967]). Junky outlines the daily journeys of its narrator, Bill, through the lens of his opiate addiction as he travels from the chill of New York to the sub-tropics of New Orleans and the heat of Mexico; constantly haunted by the ‘junk vibe’ until the lure of new highs takes him to the tropics of Columbia and beyond the reader’s reach. The Outsider follows the narrator, Meursault, as he travels under the burden of the Algerian sun from the day of his mother’s death through to his conviction of murder for shooting a man after a confrontation on a beach. The titles of both texts denote the protagonists as abject and liminal. The liminal is present within Junky and The Outsider in three distinct ways: the criminal element, the oppressive environment, and language.

Violence, dandyism and the literary self-portraiture of Quentin Crisp

This essay argues that, although he is often characterized as aristocratic and defiant, the literary dandy fundamentally is the object of the types of violence identified by Galtung: direct, structural, and cultural. These three kinds can be traced throughout dandyism’s history, from the historical rise of “Beau” Brummell to more contemporary literary theorizing, as matters of acknowledging direct violence’s common proximity to the dandy, noting the dandy’s strong structural connection to his modern celebrity analogue, and understanding how the dandy transforms the economic and cultural relations of the commodity. Each of these aspects serve to reduce the literary dandy to a state of abjection. As a result of this antagonism, author and literary dandy Crisp adopts a form of life-writing in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant that can be identified as the literary self-portrait, a confessional and contrarian sub-genre theorized by Beaujour. The authorship of the self-portrait, then, serves as a defensive tactic that rewrites and reinterprets the violence of the dandy’s opponents.

Taking Apart the Body

When thinking about abjection in relation to the body it is illuminating to think about the significance of the boundary between two different states. In abjection this boundary becomes problematized through transgression. This article examines the various processes of transgression employed by performance artists that involved piercing, cutting, ingesting and expelling as a way of rupturing personal and social homogeneity and distorting the normal parameters of bodily expression and sensation. These processes often left the artist in a state of stupor or ecstasy at which point they were able to escape beyond their culturally determined body to a state of abjection and anarchy. By subjecting their bodies to a range of often extreme experiences, artists pushed the boundaries of representation and expressed corporeal and psychological states that transgressed social propriety. Abjection became a tool of social critique where marginalized groups could articulate their concerns as a way of empowering their minority status. Viewers in turn experienced sights and participated in actions that challenged their assumptions about art and conveyed a whole new arena of experience.

Domestic abuse as a transgressive practice: understanding nurses' responses through the lens of abjection

AbstractDomestic abuse is a worldwide public health issue with long‐term health and social consequences. Nurses play a key role in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse. Yet there is considerable evidence that their responses are often inappropriate and unhelpful, such as trivializing or ignoring the abuse. Empirical studies have identified several reasons why nurses' responses are sometimes wanting. These include organizational constraints, e.g. lack of time and privacy; and interpersonal factors such as fear of offending women and lack of confidence. We propose, however, that these factors present only a partial explanation. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, we suggest that alternative understandings may be derived through applying the concept of abjection. Abjection is a psychological defence against any threat (the abject) to the clean and proper self that results in rejection of the abject. Using examples from our own domestic abuse research, we contend that exposure of nurses to the horror of domestic abuse evokes a state of abjection. Domestic abuse (the abject) transgresses established social boundaries of clean and proper. Thus when exposed to patients' and clients' experiences of it, some nurses subconsciously reject domestic abuse as a possibility (abjection). They do this to protect themselves from the horror of the act, but in so doing, render themselves unable to formulate appropriate responses. Rather than understanding the practice of some nurses as wilfully neglectful or ignorant, we argue that through a state of abjection, they are powerless to act. This does not refute existing evidence about nurses' responses to domestic abuse. Rather, as a relatively unknown concept in nursing, abjection provides an additional explanatory layer that accounts for why some nurses respond the way they do. Crucially, it elucidates the need for nurses to be supported emotionally when faced with the transgressive practice of abuse.

Heathcliff’s Abject State in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Applying Julia Kristeva’s theories of abjection reveals both the development of the character of Heathcliff and his actions within Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff exhibits common attributes of abused children, which is exacerbated when the Earnshaw family treats him as a liminal ‘Other’. As a result of his abjection, Heathcliff exhibits borderline personality traits. He abuses human beings and animals, and constantly rejects social laws. Longing for fulfilment and connection, Heathcliff becomes enmeshed with Catherine Earnshaw. Unable to separate himself from Catherine, despite her death, Heathcliff increasingly spends his time searching for signs of her absent presence in the natural world. Although he seems to realize his abject state and reject his carefully planned revenge at the end of his life, Heathcliff cannot move away from abjection. Instead, Emily Brontë creates a character who fails to construct a boundary between himself and the Other and exemplifies Kristeva’s definition of abjection.

Surviving on the Margins of the Formal Employment, an Analysis of the Life Experiences of Pensioners in Masvingo Zimbabwe

Without purporting to be a meta-representation of the life experiences of pensioners in Zimbabwe, this ethnographic study reflects on the challenges bedeviling pensioners, using Masvingo urban as the case study. The study therefore examines the challenges faced by the pensioners in Masvingo, simultaneously analyzing the survival strategies adopted by these pensioners to improve their strained livelihoods. The central argument is that the current macro-economic challenges in Zimbabwe have led to a huge strain on the livelihoods of the pensioners as well as economic marginalization, leaving them in a state of abjection, where they are struggling to meet life’s basics such as heath, food clothing and transport requirements. Notwithstanding the constraining effects of the said economic challenges, the treatise opines that these social actors have an avalanche of livelihood assets which they exude as calculative, strategic, rational and reflexive actors to deal with their constraining social environment. The study was grounded in qualitative methodology and unstructured interviews and focus group discussion were used as the main data soliciting techniques. Giddens’ Stracturation thesis and the Sustainable Livelihood Framework were used as the analytical lens for the findings made herein.

Exorcism, or the Road Not Taken

<i>Exorcism</i>, or the Road Not Taken

The repugnant appeal of the abject: cityscape and cinematic corporality in District 9

This article explores the different aspects of abjection in Neill Blomkamp's film District 9 (2009), namely abjection and the urban space, the aliens and the process of abjection, and the human body and the state of abjection. Julia Kristeva's model of abjection offers a useful lens through which to view District 9, as it is a theoretical exposition of the psychological origins and workings of loathing and disgust. Besides the tension and action of science fiction cinema, the viewer is constantly confronted with the dynamic of the abject which manifests in the dystopic cityscape of Johannesburg (and specifically the ghetto of Chiawelo) and the repulsive bodies and the repugnant social habits of the aliens. It is ironic and significant that the film's central character, Wikus van de Merwe, becomes the extreme manifestation of the state of abjection as a result of his metamorphosis into the repulsive appearance of the Other. This rupture of the boundary between the inside and the outside of the clean and orderly body evokes critical questions about real and symbolic identity, which implies a new comprehension of humanness/humanity. Ultimately the viewer's confrontation with the abject in District 9 is a confrontation with fear, as Hook (2006) argues.

Globalization and Varieties of Capitalism: New Labour Economic Policy and the Abject State – By Dan Coffey and Carole Thornley

Globalization and Varieties of Capitalism: New Labour Economic Policy and the Abject State – By Dan Coffey and Carole Thornley