Why your deepest revulsion is actually a defense of your identity
In short: Why do corpses, waste, and bodily fluids trigger such visceral horror? It isn't just about hygiene. In critical theory, these things represent the 'abject'—the terrifying boundary where our sense of self dissolves into something else. To feel disgust is to defend the borders of your own existence.
The concept of abjection was famously formalized by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 work, Powers of Horror. She argues that the abject is not merely 'dirty' or 'unhealthy'; rather, it is that which disturbs identity, systems, and order. It exists in a liminal space between the subject (the self) and the object (the independent other). When we encounter something like a corpse—which was once a living subject but has been violently cast out of the cultural world—it creates a cognitive dissonance because it reminds us of our own corporeal reality.
Kristeva links this to psychoanalytic theories by Freud and Lacan, specifically focusing on how we must 'abject' the maternal to construct an individual identity. On a societal level, abjection is used to maintain communal consensus by casting off what is perceived as 'filth' or 'monstrous.' This mechanism explains why certain groups—such as the poor, disabled, or marginalized—are often stigmatized; they are positioned as 'the deject,' those who inhabit a 'zone of inhabitability' because they fall outside established social norms.
This dynamic plays out in modern institutions and media. In organizational theory, companies use 'collective instruction' to hide the 'dark side' of their operations, spinning narratives to eject inconvenient truths from collective memory. Similarly, horror films like Alien (1979) explore these boundaries by using monstrous representations of the female to evoke the primal scene of the mother. Ultimately, abjection is a tool of both exclusion and renewal: we use rituals of defilement to draw lines between nature and society, constantly negotiating what it means to be human.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Abjection
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