The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Article: Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva by John Fletcher; Andrew Benjamin; Julia Kristeva

Title: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Summer, 1992,) pp. 270-271

What is most remarkable about this article is that it is freestanding, in the sense that one need not be a follower of Kristeva in order to understand and appreciate it, with greater depth, understanding and a more critical eye, even not a relative reader of Kristeva may find much compelling interest on this work of art. The focus of this is Kristeva's exegeses, views spinning off her writing to evolve critical stratagems of their own. Partly, this is because the essayists have exerted extra efforts to define unfamiliar texts such as abjection, thus to explain their variable relevance in different contexts.

Abjection, in context is merely the inability to assume which sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things, and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence. Meaning, the abject might then appear as the most fragile, the most archaic sublimation of an object. And still, inseparable from drives. The abject confronts us, it is related to perversion. The sense of abjection that a subject usually experience is immersed in the superego.

The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule or a law. But turns them aside, misleads. Corrupts, uses them, takes advantage of them, and better to just simply deny them. Corruption, its most common, most obvious appearance. This is the socialized appearance of the abject. Thus, Gross defines abject as that which falls between the cracks of corporeality and subjectivity, as a mismatch between subject and object.

The essayist then, in this brief review to cull samples of themes and ideas significant to aesthetics, instead. A symbolism of a small bouquet of blossoms, cut off above their roots, might be thought of this entire article. It is worthwhile to note that among those with tangential relevance for aesthetics. Since, profundity of the Kristevan framework is perennially invoked to art and life dichotomy. Kristevan attributes that particular dualism, not surprisingly, to a failure to engage with the semiotic dimensions of the art-making process.

Works in progress, thus presenting Kristeva's view that art is dynamic and constitutive, rather than static and fetishistic. That it is caught up but not without control in a network of signs. Rather than seek the meaning of despair, thus, it is either obvious or metaphysical. Let us acknowledge that there is a meaning only in despair. And according to Beardsworth, 'Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus', the face that is to bear him away into death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage.

On the contrary, we shall see the shadow cast on the fragile self, hardly disassociated from the other, precisely by the loss of that essential other. The shadow of despair. Nevertheless, Burgin claims a history for space, or chora as we relate to Kristevan framework. Spaces once conceived as separated now seem to overlap, and the subject-object, stand-off of Euclidean geometry.

Burgin, then describes the well-known spatial paradigm drawn from Euclidean geometry, the so-called 'cone of vision', and associates it with reductive notions of looking that involve objectification. He claims that this paradigm continues to dominate contemporary theories of representation even though it fails to accommodate the radically altered apprehensions of space that contemporary culture demands.