Abjection, Your Honor

Let's talk about that epigraph at the top of the page: three lines of verse by écrivain célèbre Victor Hugo, from his collection of poems La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages), published in three series in 1859, 1877 and 1883. This tercet appears in the first series, in a poem titled "Le Crapaud" ("The Toad"). In the original French:

Pas de bête qui n’ait un reflet d’infini ; 
Pas de prunelle abjecte et vile que ne touche
L’éclair d’en-haut, parfois tendre et parfois farouche

The translation I quote in my header, with its capital Beast and Promethean meter, is the one that I personally prefer; a gentler English rendering of the complete poem can be found here. La Légende is hailed by contemporary critics as a masterpiece of French modern literature, but unlike his massively popular novel Les Misérables, Hugo's poetic saga seems to have a minimal readership outside of his native France and besides scholars of French literature. The context in which readers today are likely to be acquainted with the lines quoted above is not the original text, but rather, their citing in an obscure and yet seminal work of French psychoanalytic literary criticism, Julia Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection).

As I write this, a housefly is buzzing around in my space. It zips and zags around the vicinity of my head, and thus follow shades of the undesirable and offensive with which we link the insect: carrion, rotting, decay; illness, transmission of disease; intrusion, an unwanted visitor. Abjection, this psychic landscape of revulsion, the domain of rejected phenomenal experience - and from a nondual perspective, the rejected self - constantly asserts itself in our milieus, usually right beneath the surface of our awareness, in ways that we are only just capable of ignoring. Kristeva describes reacting viscerally to accidentally touching her lips to the "skin" that forms on the surface of milk, "harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring," and the total sensory revolt that ensues: 

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. 

The theory of ego identity that underpins Kristeva's analysis of her response is post-Freudian, and supposes that the subjective "I" forms itself on the basis of distinguishing itself from that which is object, or "Not I". The power of experiences of abjection - however one comes to them - is that they confront the subject with the arbitrariness of its separation from the object, and in doing so, seem to threaten the subject itself with annihilation. What is immediately remiss when we experience disgust - whether socially, upon hearing of or witnessing a violation of a taboo, or kinesthetically, as when handling dog shit or spoiled food - is that the object's disgustingness is not an intrinsic property of that object, and yet in practice we experience it as such.

Beholding a sunset, smelling a rose, the subject is ennobled, reflective - willingly participating in a phenomenon that transcends it, and perhaps even cognizant of it as such. "This starry night is so much greater than I," remarks the awestruck "I" in contemplation; "how humbled am I to stand before it - how fortunate, even, to exist in transcendent continuity with it." This is characteristic of the mystical experience.

Cleaning up vomit, or disposing of the bloated corpse of a rat, the subject naturally has a categorically different reaction. Voiceless, desperate, reflexive: This is no part of me. Get it away. One feels compromised by the association, a sense of shame at "being in the middle of treachery," as Kristeva puts it, as if coming into contact with filth or the taboo, even by accident, were to confer guilt by association, or to constitute one's endorsement of such. Hence the trope of morticians and exterminators being probable serial killers, or the social abandonment of the wives and mothers of men who commit heinous crimes.

Astute readers will note that abjection, in my paraphrasing of Kristeva's theory of it, implies liminality - a "no man's land" between so-called subject and object, the phenomenal abyss alluded to by the Sephirotic theory of mind.

As a magician, I don't consider experiences of abjection to be a goal of my practice. But they do come with the territory, and I would argue that they are endemic to the path.