Architecture in Abjection by Kovar Zuzana;

Author:Kovar, Zuzana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

The body needs to escape precisely because it has been forcefully organised and confined into a subjective system. Pendergrast is correct that there is a distinction between Deleuze and Kristeva. For Deleuze, it is about a boiling over and a search for a productive subjectivity; for Kristeva, it is primarily about a cleansing, but also a staining if the system fails.14 What this essentially leads us back to, however, is that if there is an ‘I’ in the equation even for Deleuze, how does one avoid falling into a dualistic model where abject(ion) is inherently negative?

Although Deleuze and Guattari critique the subject – and certainly the phenomenological, stable, centred subject – they repeatedly point out that we cannot be entirely without a subject position, which would bring on death and madness. If only for this reason, then, there is always a ‘subject’ present to a degree. Where Kristeva sets the abject in opposition to the subject, however, retaining it as a stable and organised entity, Deleuze attempts to reconfigure the subject, to set its various organs in motion; in this way, there are no clear distinctions between singularities – all relations are constantly variable. It is because all is in motion for Deleuze that bodies, spaces and abjects are no longer discrete entities, but indeterminate organs of a given assemblage. And it is for this reason that it becomes impossible to classify abject(ion) as negative.

Further, it is perhaps possible to discuss abject(ion) productively, even in the presence of the subject, as it is first and foremost a physiological process even before it is maternal, as Kristeva insists. It is a necessary physiological process that exists in order for the body to be, and it has at this primitive stage nothing to do with subjectivity. It is purely about the body expelling that from which it has exhausted all possible nutrients, in order that it may rejoin the field of material structure. Because it is an uncontrollable expulsion, abjection temporarily overrides the subject. The body does not actively perform an action within a space: something uncontrollable is expelled from the body, informing the location within space and precise movements that the body performs. The body is reorganised through an unconscious spasm.

I propose that both philosophical models are useful in looking at abject(ion), and that we may employ the philosophies in different ways – that is, we may utilise Kristeva in order to approach abject(ion) from the perspective of the subject/‘I’ and thus come to understand the meaning it has acquired, and on the other hand, we may utilise Deleuze (and further his collaborations with Guattari) in discussing abject(ion) as a multiplicity of bodies, but also learn how to reconfigure the subject. The two consistently overlap, and in order to approach abject(ion) in its entirety, both must be considered:

Essentially, what the Deleuzean model provides that the Kristevan one cannot is a way of looking at all bodies as parts of the same construct, to be linked or decoupled in strategic or momentary ways.

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