Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1982) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. It examines the complexity of the concept and its significance as a cultural category.

Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1982) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. It examines the complexity of the concept and its significance as a cultural category.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

Execrable speech -- Fascinating facture -- Background noise -- Amidst the nightmare -- Under the skin -- Afterimages.

Julia Kristeva's blend of the literary with the psychoanalytic places her work central to current thinking, from semiotics and critical theory to feminism and psychoanalysis. Her profound understanding of the dynamics of intention and creativity mark her out as one of the leading theoreticians of desire. Each essay in this volume offers new insight into the many aspects that make up Kristeva's thought, ranging from her analyses of sexual difference, female temporality and the perceptions of the body to the mental states of abjection and melancholia, and their representation in painting and literature.

DIVExplores the ways that playwrights and performers have dealt with the presentation of the Asian American body on stage, given the historical construction of Asian Americanness as abject and unpresentable./div

Summary: Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies, this title contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.