Kristeva explains abjection as an excess of uncaptured emotion. She uses the word ‘chora’ which comes from greek, something about empty vessels. Energy that is loose. Uncaptured emotion can levitate internal signs, giving to feelings of euphoria, or of mystical revelation.
Uncaptured emotion too, can lead to excessive disgust, the threat of degradation, of disrupting what we hold to be true. Trying to step people out of their box, when they don’t ask for it, often leads to an unconscious warding of this disgust. Question too hard and you will destroy their precious containers, ruin their beloved files. As such, they will try and explain away the threads you create for them, that lead them out of their box. Patch up the holes, and say, hey, this makes no sense.
When it does make sense, its just that they don’t want to go there.
Careful or you’ll break society for them.
Of course, you won’t break society for them. They’ll realign it, just at a different level, and incorporate your new information as a ‘negative’ in their schema.
For Kristeva at least, it’s all a matter of semiotics, of texts, of signs and their captured emotion. Captured emotion is determinate, discrete and safe. Poetry, for example, looses these bonds by butting signs against one another in new ways. Little sparks of emotion are let loose and that feels exciting. For some, poetry is abject. They don’t want that loose emotion rolling around. What are you supposed to do with it? For others, it’s pleasurable because they can roll with it.
Kristeva says poetry will change society by introducing new meanings. Nowadays, poetry is the least of our concerns. There’s plenty more on youtube that introduce new significations… for example… in an “in your face” kind of way.
One thing in common with euphoria and abjection is that the excess of emotion always trails off into the void of the unsignified. This may be a cosmic expression of the Sacred Other or it could be a horrific abyss where we lose touch with everything. This is actually both, depending deployment.
Still though, to say this is real and expect that all emotion be encapsulated, that the mystery itself be contained, is perhaps asking too much of intellect. Knowing how it happens, or knowing tragedy is such depending on one’s point of view does not eliminate the void, and its powerful statement it makes on us, the void in each of us.
What I am indirectly talking about appears to be jnana — one of the indian paths to enlightenment, not by love, (as with hari krishna for example, devotion to krishna) but through knowledge… but really I am speaking of how the void lives in all of us and we are the void. To be in it and one with it, approaches the vector of calmness. Sort of a reverse game of ‘who has it’ which is how we view Supermen, like Natman, or has the understanding/key to everything… except in this one we see that the one ‘who has it’ actually does not, and while he appears to, presents to everyone else that they really do not have it.
at this point you might as well read this article by roger ebert: being there
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