Some of the earliest writing on abjection comes from Georges Bataille, who described a sociopolitical form of abjection in his essay РІР‚СљAbjection and Miserable Forms,РІР‚Сњ first drafted in 1934 and published posthumously in 1970 (Bataille 1999 Arya and Chare 2014, 2).

Not surprisingly, discussions of abjection and the abject body in critical theory frequently happen in the context of horror films, where abject bodies and abject beings act as a device to make us question our own humanity and subjectivity. It is blood, feces, urine, vomit, and other bodily effluvia that are very much a part of us but also that which we instinctively recoil from. Within the context of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory, however, abjection refers to a very specific kind of grotesqueness-the abject is that which we instinctively push away.

We speak of abject poverty as complete and total poverty or abject terror to mean that we are completely consumed by terror. In everyday speech, abjection is usually taken to mean degradation, the lowest of the low, the most extreme version of a (negative) condition.

Julia kristeva powers of horror sick