As a post-modernist thinker, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva believes that the only way one can relate to or understand the world is through the medium of language, and anything that is completely non-linguistic is literally unintelligible.

In either case the notion of the self coalesces around (and to some degree is conditioned by) representations originating from without, rather than emanating from within like how it feels.On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Differentiation, another psychological mechanism, is the lifelong process of changing from a cell in your mother’s body to becoming an independent and distinct human being. Once these items are outside of the body, they are abject due to the threat they pose to the “full” or “complete” subject. Few original ideas, but plenty of interesting references to diverse sources (Freudian psychoanalysis, the Bible, anthropology, semiology, modern literature) to which Kristeva's essay is too heavily indebted to be regarded as a truly groundbreaking work.

After reading some of the reviews here I was a little worried that I was not going to like this "essay".

Oh but here's the deal: the gross juicy parts that should reside on the inside this-side boundary of the Me/Other demarcation are realized as like totally icky Other (who is not grossed out by their own guts, snot, pus, etc? Semiotics has a pretty cut-and-dried conceptualization of the sign: (Object--mental image of object--Sound Image--standing for object [heard word]--Visual Version of Sound Image [print/writing]--motor skill representation, spoken and written).

The problems abjection causes are really the problems that are created whenever we only have two categories in which to sort things. For Kristeva, abjection is that which can be experienced as disgust (le dégoût), the body's reaction, phobic or revolting, against the polarization of fusion and separation. I’m a little nonplussed here, after reading two pages I thought this was going to be a good read, a slow read, but a good one. Therefore, abjection is an operation of the human psyche by which the subject creates and maintains identity by repelling or rejecting anything that threatens its boundaries. Or: diners becoming ill when they learn their soup had a cross dipped in it, or local disgust prompting a hotel owner to burn a bed after learning Ghandi had used it.Psychoanalytic thinkers would likely locate the problem somewhere in that zone where the sexual overlaps with the parental, aka "the ick field. Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror , which theorizes the notion of the 'abject' in a series of blisteringly insightful analyses, is as relevant, as necessary, and as courageous today as it seemed in 1984. One aspect of the abject that Kristeva highlights is the fact that its main characteristic is not about sickness or disease, but rather about meaninglessness.