Quote with 21 notes
[The abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.
Quote with 21 notes
If abomination is the lining of my symbolic being, “I” am therefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such always potentially condemnable. I am from the very beginning subject to persecution as well as to revenge. The infinite meshing of expulsions and hazings, of divisions and inexorable, abominable reprisals is then thrown into gear. The system of abominations sets in motion the persecuting machine in which I assume the place of the victim in order to justify the purification that will separate me from that place as it will from any other, from all others.
Quote with 14 notes
The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.
Quote with 22 notes
Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-clippings to decay, represent — like a metaphor that would have become incarnate — the objective frailty of symbolic order?
Quote with 35 notes
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 comprimise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.
Quote with 18 notes
We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.
Quote with 479 notes
When the starry sky, a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.
Quote reblogged from word flesh with 17 notes
FLASH - instant of time or of dream without time; inordinately swollen atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a yet formless, unnameable embryo. Epiphanies. Photos of what is not yet visible and that language necessarily skims over from afar, allusively. Words that are always too distant, too abstract for this underground swarming of seconds, folding in unimaginable spaces. Writing them down is an ordeal of discourse, like love. What is loving, for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash on the unnameable, weavings of abstractions to be torn. Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, broken up visions, metaphors of the invisible.
Julia Kristeva, from Stabat Mater
(via throwherinthewater)
Quote reblogged from the fascination of the absence of time with 25 notes
Anne confirmed me in that conviction: “I speak,” she would often say, “as if at the edge of words, and I have the feeling of being at the edge of my skin, but the bottom of my sorrow remains unreachable
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun.
(via batarde)
Quote reblogged from the fascination of the absence of time with 14 notes
A new rhetoric of apocalypse (etymologically, apocalypse means de-monstration, dis-covering through sight, and contrasts with aletheia, the philosophical disclosure of truth) seemed necessary for a vision of this nevertheless monstrous nothing to emerge - a monstrosity that blinds and compels one to be silent. Such a new apocalyptic rhetoric was carried out in two seemingly opposite, extreme fashions that complement each other: a wealth of images and a holding back of words.
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun.
(via batarde)
Page 1 of 2