On the Matter of Abjection

Hanjo Berressem

a small green frog … He didn’t jump; I crept closer … He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped … He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football … Soon, part of his skin … lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing … I had read about the giant water bug … It seizes a victim with [his] legs … and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite … through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs – all but the skin – and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice … The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek indecent exposures pink flamingos

John Waters’s film Pink Flamingos (1972) is probably one of the most comprehensive and at the same time one of the most entertaining introductions to the world of abjects and abjection (terms that I will use in the first case to highlight the materiality of what is normally called “the abject” and in the second case to differentiate the production of disgust from “abjection”, the cultural marking of events|objects as disgusting). In fact, Pink Flamingos provides an almost complete lexicon of abjects|abjection, stringing a number of increasingly revolting scenes that centre on gluttony, vomiting, spitting, sodomy, voyeurism, exhibitionism, masturbation, rape, incest, murder and cannibalism along a plot that follows the lethal contest between Divine and the Marbles for the title of “the filthiest people alive”. In terms of a logics of abjects|abjection, three of these scenes are of particular interest. The first one, in which Divine buys a raw steak that she keeps squeezed between her thighs for the rest of the day, introduces the close relation between abjects and the material realm of flesh|meat. In the second one, which addresses the project to make even the most intimate and private spaces uninhabitable through abjection, Divine and her son cover the interior of the Marbles’ home, from beds to banisters and from couches to cutlery, with saliva 20 THE ABJECT OF DESIRE (symptomatically, the movie’s production company is called “Saliva Films”). The movie’s epilogue, finally, pushes abjection beyond the level of the representational logic that had up until then framed and thus economized it. Coming after the apotheosis of physical abjection into a metaphysical concept that ends the movie – Divine has executed the Marbles and has declared “I am God” (something her name had suggested all along) – it refers abjection back to the level of pure physics. It is a moment of abject verité, shot without cut to ensure that, as much as one would want to, one cannot read it as either fictional or as a special e|affect, that documents Divine eating fresh dog excrement. In light of these scenes, Pink Flamingos is not only a preview of coming repulsions, but, more importantly, an introduction to a material logic of abjects|abjections. Like many other works of abject art, it links the abject directly to the corporeal realm. Not only are all of its scenes organized around the body and its apertures, most of them involve directly the flow of corporeal matter, such as semen, vomit, saliva, blood, or excrement. Before I consider this material logic in more detail, however, I will delineate the Lacanian topologics (a term I use to denote a structural logic that is inseparable from a specific topology), which are the default logics of the abject not only because Jacques Lacan introduced the term into psychoanalysis in the first place, but also because Julia Kristeva, who developed the term into a fully-fledged theoretical reference, remains faithful to these topologics. abject space

For Lacanian psychoanalysis, abjects are things|events in the face of which the subject experiences absolute dread. The excessive intensity of this experience is directly related to the topologics of abjects, which differs from that of objects, which are by definition safely distanced and thus separated from the subject. In the visual field, these separations proceed along specific lines of vision. The logic of the sublime, for instance, which is in many ways the abject’s other, is measured along such spectacular lines because the idea of sublimity can only arise in the subject when it is not too near to the material object that triggers the idea (it must be at a safe distance) but also not too far away from it (it must be near enough to be affected by it). Abjects, in contrast, are experienced, much like traumatic events – if Lacan defines trauma as a “missed encounter with the real”. [The