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Abjection

Psychology
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A state of revulsion toward what feels impure, cast off, or threatening to identity.

Detailed Definition
Abjection describes the disturbed response produced when boundaries between self and what is rejected become unstable. In poetry, it may appear through images of bodily decay, waste, contamination, or exile, where disgust is mingled with fascination. A speaker confronting abjection may recoil from a place, memory, or aspect of the self, yet remain unable to look away. The term helps describe poems that make estrangement physically and emotionally visceral.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Sylvia Plath’s “Cut,” the speaker’s fascination with her bleeding thumb turns blood and injury into abject material, making the body seem both intimate and strangely alien; In Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker presents her repeatedly damaged and revived body in a way that confronts readers with mortality, decay, and the unsettling nearness of death; In Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” images of bodies, illness, and social exclusion use abjection to challenge a culture that rejects people deemed dirty, mad, or unacceptable; A poet might describe a child recoiling from a dead bird, using the corpse to show how abjection blurs the boundary between living self and dead matter; A poem about cleaning a hospital room could use vomit, blood, and disinfectant to explore abjection, revealing how disgust may coexist with care and compassion
Additional Notes
In poetry, abjection describes the uneasy revulsion produced by things that seem cast out of the self or social order, such as blood, decay, waste, corpses, or broken bodily boundaries. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory, it is more than ordinary disgust: the abject both repels and fascinates because it threatens identity, purity, and the distinction between self and other. Poets may use abject imagery to explore trauma, mortality, shame, illness, motherhood, exclusion, or taboo. Consider how sensory detail, speaker response, and cultural ideas of contamination create this effect. Related concepts include the uncanny, grotesque, liminality, and disgust.
Also Known As
The Abject Kristevan Abjection
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