Viewing Abjection: Film and Social Justice

I propose to mobilize the notion of abjection as a theoretical device that can contribute productively to feminist analyses of film, in particular, Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992). Let me say from the outset that I am not proposing abjection as an explanatory category that is all-embracing. Indeed, one of my concerns will be to suggest that for very specific reasons some films lend themselves more readily than others to an analysis in which abjection comes to the fore. To the extent that film critics have availed themselves of the use of the analytic power of abjection they have tended to focus on horror film. I shall argue that narrative films which do not fall under such a rubric offer more propitious ground for such an analysis. One reason for this is the double temporality of abjection, and its ambiguous relationship to the symbolic, which I shall argue are important, but neglected, dimensions of abjection. The particular films I focus upon reflect, in part, my interest in exploring the political implications of abjection, and in part my reaction to the tendency of feminist film theory to repudiate what is presented as the diegetic conventions governing narrative film, in favor of a celebration of the extra-diegetic disruption of narrative conventions, as exemplified by some avant-garde films.

It is my conviction that abjection offers a tool of analysis able to negotiate a series of dichotomies which have come to structure and divide feminist film theory into different camps, dichotomies that can be variously articulated as the split between those who adhere either to pleasure or politics (Smelik, 1998, 7) history or theory (Doane, 1991, 79) realism or idealism (Jacobowitz and Spring, 1990, 353). Underlying these fissures are at least three intersecting debates, the contours of which can only be briefly signaled here. First, there is the question of whether or not cinema merely continues a long tradition of western aesthetic, stemming from Plato onward, whether the invention of the moving picture represents a decisive break, or whether it is part of a more general shift in the formation of knowledge. Secondly, there is the question of how feminist or progressive cinema should situate itself in relation to dominant traditions, and to what extent feminist film criticism must distance itself from theorists who are seen to assume the privilege of dominant traditions. For example, how far can feminist film theorists afford to rely on psychoanalytic theory? Is the appeal of Lacan’s mirror as an analogy for the fascinated and pleasurable absorption of the cinema spectator outweighed by ideological impasses into which it is liable to lead? On the one hand there are those who want to retain at least some of the insights culled from psychoanalytically informed spectator theory, and who associate themselves with the tradition of Metz (1975), Mulvey (1990), Silverman (1990) and Doane (1991). On the other hand there are those who are wary of the phallogocentric implications of Lacanian inspired film theory, and are more interested in giving voice to the diversity of multiple positions in women’s cinema (see Gaines, 1990 and De Lauretis, 1990). Here I re-examine the grounds on which psychoanalytic theory has proved useful to feminist film critics, and I offer an alternative way of analyzing narrative film that situates sexual difference in relation to, rather than in abstraction from, race, class, and sexual preference. I am interested in retaining some of the insights of psychoanalytic theory without sacrificing what I take to be the crucial project of taking seriously diversity. Rather than depending on an exclusively Lacanian framework, I draw on Julia Kristeva’s development and critique of it, focusing on the notion of abjection, which I think can negotiate not only questions of sexual difference, but also race, class, and sexual preference.

Thirdly and finally, there is the issue of what role narrative cinema might play in relation to the dominant ideologies that many feminist filmmakers and critics are working to disrupt. There has been a tendency to move away from the conventions of narrative cinema, and toward genres that take exception to what might be called its constraints, as in the celebration of the avant-garde. The trend has been to see positive representations of women as extra-diegetic, interrupting the diegetic flow of narrative film, and, as a natural progression of this, films by women directors that challenge the conventions of narrative film by breaking up the narrative flow have been heralded as radical. The problem with such approaches is that they leave intact, and perhaps even reinforce, the dominant classical standards, precisely by positioning themselves as marginal exceptions to it. By mobilizing the notion of abjection as a resource to analyze narrative film, I aim to shed light on the dynamic by which subjects are marginalized and coded in terms of race, gender, class, and sexual preference.

Feminist film theorists, influenced by psychoanalytic theory, have put forward various concepts in an effort to provide an interpretive framework with which to analyze the representation of women. Voyeurism, fetishism (Mulvey, 1990) masquerade (Doane, 1991) and the rule of synchronization (Silverman, 1990) have all been offered as hermeneutical devices for interrogating the place of women in film. Feminist readings of Lacan's mirror-stage have played a prominent role in these analyses. Here I suggest that Kristeva can provide an alternative model for feminist film theory (even though she herself focuses on literature--and art--not film). I show how, with the discourse of abjection, Kristeva rewrites the object-relation in a non-specular way, and then I go on to suggest that the abject can provide a model for thinking not only sexual difference, but also racial, class, and ethnic difference. I reconstruct Kristeva’s position with reference to how she rewrites the object-relation so that it is not completely beholden to the Lacanian mirror-stage. A reconstruction is called for since her remarks about how she deviates from Lacan tend to be cryptic, rather than thematic. I then ask how Kristeva’s remapping of the object-relation makes available a re-interrogation of the maternal, and how this might be appropriated within a feminist sensibility.

Kristeva’s own relationship to feminism is a maverick one, but herein lies part of her interest.

She exhibits a certain disdain for feminism, but, even if she herself is not willing to pursue this direction, her work lends itself to feminist interrogation. Although Kristeva’s dismissive remarks about feminism are probably intended as a rebuttal of feminism en masse, it might even be the case that, while she mistakenly takess one brand of feminism for all of it, she manages to identify and show wanting some of its more naive versions. Despite her own proclivities, Kristeva’s work can be valuable for feminists who are keen to develop a version of feminism that is neither prepared to jettison the insights psychoanalytic theory can provide, nor prepared to allow the blindspots of psychoanalysis to dictate a complacent attitude towards its historical privileging of white, male, western, bourgeois ideals. Through a reorientation of psychoanalysis, I want to suggest that a bridge can be built from the traditional exclusions of psychoanalytic discourse, to feminist film theory, which, often influenced by ethnographic, sociological or empirical sources, is concerned to allow the diversity of women to come to the fore.

Why should the notion of abjection serve as an interpretive tool for feminist film theory, and what advantages does it have over extant theories? A number of reasons for its potential usefulness and benefits suggest themselves. First, I believe that the notion of abjection can serve to straddle the divide that has sprung up between feminists influenced by psychoanalysis, and those who remain suspicious that such theoretical commitments merely serve to sanction not only the very patriarchal structures they ostensibly reject, but also the heterosexist, racist, elitist, western baggage that ideologically structures the idealized Oedipal subject. One of the reasons that I think the notion of abjection can serve as a powerful tool of analysis is that it can illuminate difference and discrimination not simply along the axis of sexual difference, but also in the context of race, class, sexual preference, and sexual identity. In her elaboration of abjection, Kristeva provides an interpretation that at once concerns the social-symbolic realm, and the genesis of subjectivity, in which she draws on anthropological as well as psychoanalytic sources. Her analysis therefore has affinities with feminists who, drawing on ethnographic sources among others, are quite rightly concerned to emphasize the importance of relating film analysis to the political and material realities of women’s lives. At the same time, the notion of abjection represents a challenge to the privileged role castration anxiety enjoys both in the analyses of Freud and Lacan, and in Mulvey’s analysis, which has acquired an almost canonical status for feminist film theorists, who feel obliged to cite it even if only to mark their disagreements with it.

By shifting the focus from castration to abjection, Kristeva rewrites the Lacanian paradigm, in a way that directs the emphasis away from the mirror image, and toward the pre-oedipal history that leads up to the mirror-stage. Consequently, there is a renewed interest in the significance of the maternal, and the need to separate from the mother. For Lacan, "the specular image is the `prototype’ for the `world of objects’" (Kristeva, 1984, 46), whereas Kristeva is more concerned with analyzing the early development of the infant in a "nonspecular way." In effect, Kristeva rewrites the mirror-stage, or rather inserts a proto-mirror stage that is prior to the Oedipal complex and the onset of castration anxiety, and thus prior to sexual differentiation. Instead of a fragmented body projected prematurely onto an idealized, perfected, but illusory body-image, we are confronted with a pre-oedipal, precocious relation to language (see PH 43). Instead of the "fragmented body" (PH 49) of the infant who has not yet achieved motor co-ordination but who anticipates its future unity, coherence and integrity by means of a stable mirror-image, the symptom of abjection involves a prematurely creative capacity with regard to the command of language (see PH 45), "a stupendous verbal skill" (PH 34), an "extensive vocabulary" (PH 40), an "extreme nimbleness" (PH 41). Like the méconnaisance of the infant, who in the mirror stage sees an enabling but illusory image of itself, in abjection the "vertiginous skill" of verbalizing (PH 41) is in fact fractured, and disjointed. It is a language that is, "dislocated" and "disassociated" (PH 49), since this "intense verbal activity" is a "devouring" that covers over an "abyss" (PH 41). "Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it" (PH 41). This "manipulation of words is not an intellectual play" but a "desperate" and "frantic attempt made by a subject threatened with sinking into the void" (PH 50-1). What can be heard occasionally in the "breaks," "gaps" (PH 30) and "blanks" in discourse (PH 49) is the "sudden irruption of affect" (PH 53). Here is where abjection makes its appearance. At stake is the emergence of the semiotic aspect of language, always bound up in some way with the symbolic, but cleaving to it in a way that reveals the "heterogeneity of signifiance" (PH 51). From beneath the unbroken surface of skillful verbalization the "outburst of abjection" (PH 47) demands to be analyzed, calls for interpretation. It produces fissures that need to be concatenated (see PH 30), linked up with one another, rendered in narrative, made into a story that joins together a subject’s abrupt and sudden encounters with the intolerable that is figured as abject. Thus, language takes the place of the mirror which is "shattered" (PH 9), adopting the mantle of a "fetishist screen" (PH 37). Although there is a sense in which not so much the acoustic, but at least the verbal, seems to take priority over the visual through this substitution of the fetishistic screen of language for the salutary "more or less beautiful" (PH 13) image reflected in the mirror, the significance of Kristeva’s elaboration of abjection by no means lies in a simple privileging of language over vision. We shall see that the peculiar relationship to language that abjection establishes opens on to the heterogeneous field of coenesthesia (PH 53, check).

Kristeva’s analysis opens up a number of possibilities that are closed off by Lacan’s rereading of Freud. Since she recasts the mirror-stage that was so formative for Laura Mulvey’s influential but controversial article, she also presents an opportunity to rework some of the problems that readers have pointed out in Mulvey’s position. Abjection describes a state in which neither the sexual object, nor the question of sexual difference, has been decided (see PH 48, 45). This has profound implications for a feminism that wants to take seriously lesbian and bisexual desire, rather than merely subordinating diversity amongst women to an always already assumed normative heterosexual matrix. While Kristeva might seem to endorse this matrix (see PH 48) , a careful reading reveals that at key points in her text she in fact disrupts it. The task of the analyst can be, she acknowledges, to steer the subject towards "another sex" (PH 50). Even if Kristeva herself is not always concerned to explore these avenues, in my view abjection offers a rich terrain on which to map out various forms of discrimination that are constitutive of one another.

Not only can Kristeva’s analysis of abjection provide resources for correcting the tendency of (at least the earlier) theorists who pursue what has come to be called "apparatus" or "gaze" theory to neglect the pressing question of how to account for diversity, it also answers to another problem that many of Mulvey’s critics pointed out, namely her failure to take seriously the question of women’s pleasure. Abjection is situated in a pervious relation to pleasure and pain, fascination and disgust, attraction and repulsion. When Kristeva writes "so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims--if not its submissive and willing ones" (PH 9), one could almost imagine that she is describing the much lamented fascination that female cinema spectators are supposed to experience in the face of masochistic identification with women in films who are objectified and represented as passive, helpless victims. The ambiguity of abjection neither situates the subject as entirely in thrall to the image, as if cinema spectators passively and uncritically consume the idealized and ideologically loaded visions that confront them, unwittingly colluding in their victimization, as upholders of the status quo. Nor does it entirely negate the powerful fascination of the image, its capacity to seduce, its ability to fascinate. Kristeva describes "a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant" (PH 9). Pleasure and danger are inseparable here.

Mulvey has further been criticized for leaving no constructive space for the female viewer. If she is not masochistically identifying with a passive, objectified subject-to-be-looked at (see Modleski, 1988) she is busy destroying the patriarchal pleasure she nonetheless enjoys as she indulges in the overvalued cult of the glamorous film star (see Kaplan, 33, 1983). For Kristeva, there is an intimate, if problematic, relation between the feminine and abjection. According to Kristeva, abjection reveals to the subject that "all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being"(PH 5), and the loss of the most archaic object is coded as maternal (see PH 64). In short, one of Kristeva’s primary concerns in Powers of Horror is a "confrontation with the feminine" PH (58). As "trustee of th[e] mapping of the self’s clean and proper body" it is "maternal authority" that comes to be suppressed (PH 72). Whether one reads this as an analysis of women’s situation, or an endorsement of it (and it is often hard to tell precisely where Kristeva comes down on this question), there is no doubt that Kristeva’s association of abjection with the mother, whose authority must be quelled most urgently because of her reproductive power (see PH 77), serves to highlight the mothering role. This is so despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that Kristeva seeks to disrupt the usual psychoanalytic narrative, in which the mother is the "first object," the "prototype of the object," whereas the father represents the law (PH 32). The procedure Kristeva engages is in fact one that stresses partial or semi-objects, transitional objects that precede the mother, which in itself would seem to detract from the centrality of the maternal (PH 31). By putting the abject on the map so decisively, Kristeva has also revived the question of what role women play in the psychoanalytic staging of the process of the subject’s becoming, but there is no easy way of determining precisely what that role is. Kaplan thinks that "Kristeva’s theories about Motherhood suggest first, possible reasons for the repression of mothering in patriarchy, and second, ways in which the mother-daughter bond may be subversive" (1983, 6). Butler is closer to Kristeva when she considers abjection "not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility" (1993, 3). What is clear is that if the maternal embodies redemptive qualities, it also holds menace for the subject who must, after all, find a way to separate from the devouring mother. Kristeva says, "The fantasy of incorporation by means of which I attempt to escape fear (I incorporate a portion of my mother’s body, her breast, and thus I hold on to her) threatens me none the less, for a symbolic, paternal prohibition already dwells in me on account of my learning to speak at the same time" (PH 39). The attraction of the maternal is inseparable from the threat it poses: "devotees of the abject, she as well as he, do not cease looking, within what flows from the other’s `innermost being,’ for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body" (PH 54).

It is clear that the maternal, and more precisely the "maternal bowels," the "body’s inside," "urine, blood, sperm, excrement" provide some kind of refuge from abjection. These body fluids "reassure a subject that is lacking its own and clean self,’" they "compensate[s] for the collapse of the border between inside and outside" (PH 53). Yet, it is equally clear that without separation from the mother, the subject will not survive, at a psychic level. The plight of the one who suffers abjection, then, is its failure to realize the basic requirements that one needs to recognize oneself as a subject, that is to experience oneself as a desiring subject. Instead, the one who suffers abjection, who cannot realize desire, throws up all kinds of barriers, "false selves," none of which represents true desire, and all of which serve only to barricade, imprison, lock up the self in a trap of its own making, designed to close off desire for what is after all far too threatening, because it portends the engulfing of a self that has not managed to erect boundaries between itself and any other, or object. On the one hand, then, there is "an enompassment that is stifling (the container compressing the ego)" and on the other hand there is a "draining (the want of an other, qua object, produces nullity in the place of the subject)" (PH 49). There is an emptiness, a hole, where the subject should be, and this emptiness is due to the lack of a proper relation to an other.

Why does the subject fail to separate from the mother and therefore fail to establish objects, relations with others, and therefore have recourse to the abject? Kristeva explains this failure by pointing to the lack of rigor in the paternal law. The function of the father is to outlaw incestuous desire, to be powerful or strong enough to impose his authority as father and rival. If this authority is too weak, if it breaks down, if, in other words, there is a failure of homogeneity, which is at the same time a failure to impose a single, ideal, unitary meaning, then there is a danger of a splitting apart of language into more than one significance. Here is where what Kristeva calls the "heterogeneity of signfiance" (PH 51) comes to the fore, here is where affect can emerge unsubordinated to the normative order imposed by the Oedipus complex and castration, here is where abjection can burst through the surface of an orderly, structured, language, presided over by the uncontested sovereign authority of the father. Here, in fact, in the outburst of abjection, can the authentic (see PH 48) desire of the subject be heard, albeit fleeting, temporary, and owned by its formal and intensely verbal discourse. Here the subject can "say" (without saying, without saying "I" or "this") "[I] want [this]," or "[This] is [me]." Here the subject, perhaps for the first time, can be, can articulate a desire of his own. And the task of the analyst, as Kristeva sees it, and as she claims the analysand sees it, is to reconstruct a language based on sightings of that barely visible, momentary desire that shines through the opaque veils that are designed to smother it. The subject is asking to be reconstructed through the only access he can gain to his desire, is asking to be reborn, rearticulated, re-imagined (see PH 50) through his abject outbursts. What should the analyst do? The question is undecidable according to Kristeva (PH 48).

In following the etiology of the subject from within the perspective set up by the Oedipal paradigm, how far does Kristeva acquiesce to its representation of the mother as abject (see PH 13), thereby condoning the need that patriarchal society sees to repress the maternal? In exposing the mechanisms by which the maternal/feminine is repressed, and thereby reconceptualizing the historical process by which the founding socio-symbolic contract is established, how far can her analysis contribute to the feminist demand to question the patriarchal underpinnings of society?

In order to sort out more precisely what Kristeva’s attitude to the feminine is, and what function it serves in abjection, we need to reconstruct the story she tells, and how it departs from Freud and Lacan. Kristeva’s analysis of abjection promises to reopen the question of the role of the feminine, indeed she isolates as her specific contribution to the elaboration of abjection its connection with the mother (see PH 64), yet the implications for feminism remain unclear, in part because her own attitude to feminism remains uneasy, to the say the least. The only version of feminism she acknowledges in Powers of Horror is one that is "jealous of conserving its power--the last of the power-seeking ideologies" (PH 208). While there are moments in Kristeva’s texts that indicate a hopefulness, even such moments are fraught with ambiguity, as when she advocates that we "recognize ourselves as always already altered by the symbolic," that we "hear in language--and not in the other, nor in the other sex . . . the basic incompleteness that conditions the indefinite quest of signifying concatenations" (PH 88-9). This can be read as Kristeva’s robust attempt to follow up what she identifies as Freud’s "master stroke," namely that in the same gesture as he establishes the normative force of the Oedipus complex, he "destroys it as fundamental determinism" (PH 38). The authority of the Oedipus complex is radically unsettled because the "symbolic language relation" (PH 39) is the ultimate arbiter of meaning. Given the formative power that the paternal law retains for both Freud and Lacan, the fact that language finally carries the burden of significance might not seem to amount to much. On the other hand, Kristeva’s relentless emphasis of the instability of the paternal metaphor (see PH 14, 44) serves to draw attention to its failure to impose its ideal in a homogeneous or decisive way. Yet the implications of this instability and failure remain obscure. I would venture to suggest that such obscurity does not in itself carry negative connotations for feminism, but that it might well reflect both the complexity of the situation in which feminism finds itself, and the inherent ambiguity that is essential to abjection (see PH 9).

It would be too easy, particularly if we were to read in isolation certain statements that Kristeva makes about the feminine and the maternal, to dismiss Kristeva as endorsing the association she uncovers between the abject and the maternal. We read, for instance, that the abject is the "demonical potential of the feminine" PH (65), "that other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil" (PH 70), and that "if someone personifies abjection without assurance of purification, it is a woman, `any woman,’ the `woman as a whole’" (PH 85). It comes as no surprise, then, when we are told that if "a woman ventures" into abjection (and she does so rarely) "it is usually to gratify, in very maternal fashion, the desire for the abject that insures the life (that is, the sexual life) of the man whose symbolic authority she accepts" (PH 54). We are entitled to be skeptical about at least some of these remarks. Do we find here anything other than a transcription of the Freudian/Lacanian paradigm, in which one assumes that the Oedipal subject is a male subject, and where the only consideration given to women is at best fleeting, and at worst insulting, and in all cases definitely an afterthought, tacked on either in a rather pathetic attempt to satisfy "the feminists" (Freud) or (at least so it would sometimes seem) appended to intensely amuse, deliberately provoke, or enrage, "the feminists" (Lacan)? To assume that Kristeva is simply repeating unthinkingly the patriarchal assumptions of her masters is to ignore the fact that she does elaborate maternal authority as "the trustee of [the] mapping of the self’s clean and proper body" (PH 72) and this authority bears the mark of the material (see PH 74), corporeal, visceral aspects of the signifying function that are lost or sublated in the idealism that consists in "stressing the inherence of language in the human state" (PH 62). However, if it is a mistake to write off Kristeva as unremittingly patriarchal, it would be equally precipitous to endow Kristeva’s emphasis of the repression of maternal authority (PH 72) with an uncomplicated liberatory potential. Perhaps it would be more in keeping with the spirit of Kristeva’s analysis, and to the ambiguity of abjection itself, to resist either tendency. It is clear that the very fact that Kristeva devotes thematic attention to the maternal revives the question as to its significance. It is also clear that in the last analysis, if this thematic is to have any revolutionary potential, it must be specified in relation to the normative demands of the Oedipal scenario. Kristeva adheres to the outlines of the basic story she inherits from Freud and Lacan, although by effecting the return to Freud on principles that deviate from Lacan’s own return to Freud, she subtlely challenges the authorized version. According to the standard story, in order to become a desiring subject, one needs to separate from the mother. The paternal function provides the impetus for such a separation, for it is under the sway of the name of the father that symbolization begins, objects emerge, and a subject can recognize itself as such, that is, can become an I who can posit objects, a subject who can have a desiring relationship to another. Clearly, without accomplishing separation from the mother, there can be no I, and therefore no other, no desire. Kristeva does not quarrel with the general drift of this narrative, but we find an implicit critique of Lacan, already touched upon from the point of view of asserting the heterogeneity of the signifying process. Lacan neglects, Kristeva implies, to differentiate between "two moods, active and passive, according to which the subject is constituted in the signifier," and at the same time he fails to pay enough attention to the "economy of narcissism" (PH 63). The implication is that because of the overriding importance of the Oedipus complex in his account, and due to the uncontested privilege he assigns to the fact that we are inherently linguistic, Lacan only acknowledges the "active use of the signifier" (PH 62). While refusing to "overestimat[e] the subject’s having been the slave of language since before his birth" (PH 62-3), Kristeva immediately warns against going too far in the opposite direction, however, suggesting that it would be a mistake to celebrate "the archaic relation to the mother," which might in retrospect, appear "edenic" but which also necessitates uncertain borders. The lack or failure of the paternal function can lead to "perversion or psychosis" (PH 63).

If it would be dangerously romantic to believe that one can simply celebrate the idyllic, dyadic relation with the mother, as if it could provide a haven from the rigors of the paternal law--after all the subject must separate from the mother in order to achieve independence--it would also be too simple to merely endorse paternal authority, and too hasty to overlook the difficult passage the subject must effect in order to overcome the maternal attachment.

"The time of abjection," says Kristeva, "is double" (PH 9). To understand this double temporality is to call to mind that there is never a time at which we are not already subject to the rigors and strictures of the symbolic, and yet, through the irruption of affect in the moment of abjection, the subject can hark back to a time that is earlier in the sense that it predates the consolidation of meaning into a system of signs underwritten by the paternal law. Kristeva says "the speaking subject enjoys the possibility of condensation because it is inscribed in the Oedipal triangle. By means of that inscription, not only beginning with the so-called Oedipal stage but from the time of its advent into the world, which is always already a world of discourse, it finds itself subjected to paternal function" (PH 52-3). Central to her elaboration of abjection is Kristeva’s insistence that the heterogeneity of the signifying system has been occluded by an idealist bent that Lacanian psychoanalysis inherits from transcendental philosophy, and which resolves the meaning of the sign by privileging the condensation of sound image with visual image (see PH 51). To witness the disruption of "the sound image/sight image solidarity" (PH 53) is to glimpse a more complex and diverse, less abstract and more corporeal, heterogeneous signifying system, which is not only symbolic but also semiotic, and which is essentially incomplete. Because the subject is irremediably immersed in a world in which the spoken word prevails, a world of symbols and discourse, the only access that is to be gained to this previous time, a time before the rigidity of the Oedipal structure has taken hold, is one that works "backwards" (PH 38). This time, not regulated by the uniform homogeneity of ideal meaning, is a time that breaks through the sedimented history of a subject already caught up in the Oedipal triangle, and its normative demands. It is the "moment" in which there is an "outburst of abjection" (PH 47), a "flash of lightening" and "thunder," "the moment when revelation bursts forth" (PH 8-9) "into a symbolicity that is normally calm and neutral" (PH 46). In this moment of abjection, not only are the visual and auditory aspects present, but also the tactile, motor aspects of corporeal meaning (see PH 46 and 53). It would seem that the moment of abjection, albeit "elusive, fleeting" (PH 46), or perhaps precisely because it is impossible to sustain, and cannot last beyond the instant, is the authentic time of abjection. It is the "time of oblivion," a "forgotten time," a time of "veiled infinity" (PH 8-9), a time of affect, which interrupts the linear development of a subject bound to the triangular structure of the Oedipal scenario, a time of the lost object, a time that cannot get over the loss of the mother. A time, then, that does not sit well with normative societal expectations, that goes against the grain, and comes up against the decency woven into the fabric of society. A time that calls for "a rebirth with and against abjection" (PH 31).

Kristeva writes that if the sudden "flash of lightening" in which abjection makes its appearance "were to be thought out," this "would involve bringing together the two opposite terms" (PH 9). But these terms, the terms of the object relation which must eventually predominate in order for there to be a subject who can desire another, are not yet fully in place, not yet stable (see PH 48). For "the triangular relationship . . . alone, . . . the paternal agency alone, to the extent that it introduces the symbolic dimension between "subject" (child) and "object" (mother), can generate such a strict object relation" (PH 44). Here, on the contrary, in abjection, "one always discovers a collapse of the Oedipal triangulation" (PH 53). Here, "[d]iscourse" is "substituted for maternal care" (PH 45). This is a "language of want" (PH 38), not yet the exchange of information, communication, that language will become, but it is nonetheless a language, which means that it is already under the auspices of the paternal function. And yet it is a language that is being made to speak that which cannot be named, what resists naming, the "unnamable," pre-objectal, pre-Oedipal, inchoate realm where I am not yet the subject that I must become.

The unassimilable is what Fergus comes face to face with in The Crying Game, in an encounter that renders unstable the heterosexual matrix that structures his self-understanding. I am interested in revisiting The Crying Game, and its critical reception, both of which implicate, and are implicated in, various forms of social discrimination which I think can be usefully read in the light of abjection. Critics such as Sarah Edge and bel hooks have argued that The Crying Game is not as radical as many film critics hailed it, Edge (1995) by suggesting that Jude (Miranda Richardson) is demonized, a monster, abject, and hooks (1994) by suggesting that stereotypical notions of race prevail -- in the end, the interracial relationship cannot work. While informative and interesting on a number of levels, these readings also seem problematic to me, since they recuperate some of the most radical aspects of the film in attempting to draw it back into a conservative narrative about gender and race, one that supports, rather than disrupting, the status quo. Both readings undercut the radicality of the challenge that the film’s exploration of transvestitism offers, recuperating this theme within a rather traditional insistence that there are no good real women in the film, and refusing to acknowledge that the sexist way in which Jude is portrayed only serves to underscore the shock that Fergus (Stephen Rea) feels at the realization that the person he has fallen in love with is anatomically a man. Coming from a society in which sexist, racist, heterosexist old-fashioned prejudices prevail, he is hardly prepared for this turn of events. While hooks is right to point out that Dil’s function could be read as conforming to the stereotypical, exotic other as a tragic-mulatto, she allows this objection to neutralize another pervasive disruption that Dil (Jaye Davidson) effects, that of Fergus’s heterosexual gender identification on his discovery that Dil is not anatomically the woman he has assumed she is. Both Edge and hooks fail to take account of the class politics surrounding Jody (Forest Whitaker), whose working class identity is implied when he responds to Fergus’s question "why did you sign up [for the army]?" with disarming simplicity: "It was a job." We get an insight into his ethnic background when he explains that cricket might be a game "for toffs" in Tottenham, but not in Antigua, where he comes from. Contrary to racist stereotypes, Jody is represented as humane, articulate, sensitive and open. In contrast, Fergus is heavily enmeshed in a heterosexual matrix of desire that prevents him from picking up the cues that Dil assumes are too obvious for him to miss. The fact that Jody hails from Antigua, a former British colony of the West Indies, complicates Fergus’s relationship to him, since Jody is himself subject to Britain’s colonial imperialism. As a hostage of the IRA, Jody is therefore far from being a representative of the British army’s imperial relationship to Northern Ireland in any straightforward way. To Jordan’s credit, he resists oversimplifying race and ethnicity, or treating it as one-dimensional, not backing off, for example, from confronting the racist attitudes of his own country, an example of which we see when Jude responds to the prisoner she has helped to capture by calling him a "fucking animal." If Jody is content to stereotype Fergus as "a Paddy," he is not so happy that he has been "sent to the one place in the world where they say nigger to your face." The friendly exchange between Fergus and Jody about the relative merits of cricket and the Irish game hurley serves to solidify the connection of each to their own ethnic backgrounds, but it also serves as a ritual of male bonding--the universal language of sport.

After Jody is taken prisoner, he asks Fergus to hold his penis while he pisses, because his own hands are tied behind his back. If the symbolism of having his hands tied is obvious--having signed up for the army he got himself into this situation--the scene also prefigures the homosexual bond that Fergus will have so much trouble assuming with Dil. He will never be comfortable enough with Dil’s sexuality to touch Dil in this way, a touch that would usually signify intimacy, but which here becomes a complex signifier of intimacy, mixed with the violence of the IRA having taken Jody hostage. Fergus’s discomfort with the task presented him is palpable. Displaying prophetic qualities about the difficulty Fergus will encounter when he discovers Dil’s biological sex, Jody says "It’s amazing how these small details take on such importance," and then, when Fergus is reluctant to touch his penis, "It’s only a piece of meat." Back in the safety of distance, in the outhouse where Jody is being held hostage, their laughter dissipates the tension, and signals to Peter (Adrian Dunbar), who appears on the scene to reprimand Fergus, the inappropriate bond that has sprung up between Fergus and Jody.

When Fergus leaves for London, and finds work on a construction site, it is fitting that it stands opposite a cricket pitch. He finds the hairdressing salon Dil works at, and has her give him a trim. She assumes from his accent that he is Scottish and he allows her assumption to stand, since he is hiding from the IRA. The film thus continues its pursuit of the question of identities, and the need to hide the truth about who you are. Adopting the name of Jimmy, Fergus conceals his true identity from Dil, and his nationality, and fails to recognize her true sex. Much of their relationship is performed --she is, after all a night club singer, a performer, and we are treated to her rendition of "The Crying Game." The performance happens in front of, and is mediated by a third party, Col (check), the bartender, who dispenses advice to Fergus about how to treat Dil. On one occasion, the third party is Fergus/Jimmy’s boss and co-workers, when Dil comes to see him at work one day. Their first kiss is orchestrated, ostensibly to get Dave’s goat, as is there first date. At dinner she tells him that "now is the time you are meant to do something - make a pass or something," choreographing his movements as if she is writing a script. In another such exchange, they communicate to each other that he doesn’t want anything, and that he is old fashioned. Thus, in a variety on ways, a social context of conventional expectations is woven. Col speaks for Dil’s expectations, while the onlookers in the restaurant, Dave, and the construction workers, provide the heterosexual substance of Fergus’s expectations.

Unlike Edge, I do not think that Jude is the abject figure, rather, the scene in which Dil reveals her sexual identity is the scene of abjection. One could argue that the moment that Jody is hit and killed by a British army Saracen (the irony of which, particularly in the light of Jody’s own relationship to British colonialism, cannot be overlooked) also figures the abject. Jody is reduced to a corpse by the British army, of whom he is taken by the IRA to be a representative, and he thus prefigures the reduction of Dil to her body by Fergus, who takes her to be a representative of the heterosexual norm. The shock of discovering her penis causes Fergus, who hadn’t realized Dil was a transvestite, to vomit. One could say that Fergus vomits the mother (see PH 47). Derailed from the heterosexual path that his identification as a man, and his attempt to separate from the mother, has set him on, he is confronted, in his love for Dil, with the unacceptable other. The boundaries he has created for himself collapse, as he reverts to the fear and aggression that Kristeva suggests are inseparable from one another. He hits out at Dil for not being the woman he took her to be. Just as his failure to murder Jody represents a collapse of the political and normative principles to which he has adhered as an IRA member, so his violent, threatened, and sickened outburst at Dil represents the collapse of the uncomplicated heterosexual norms he had assumed were his own until this moment.

The next night, in the club where Dil works, The Metro, Dil engages the third party in the figure of Colin again: "He’s back Col. Tell him to go fuck himself. Tell him to stop messing Dil around." Fergus, unable to break the bond he feels with her, leaves a note at Dil’s apartment, standing outside, just as Dil’s former romantic attachment, Dave, had done. Dil shows up at Fergus’s workplace, calling him "darling, honey, sweet," and he responds, "Don’t call me that." Dil’s words, "Even when you were throwing up I could tell you cared," are heavily ironic, but they also speak the truth. Fergus does not stop loving Dil, despite her disruption of the conventional matrix of desire. When Fergus vomits, what he finds intolerable is his unwitting transgression of the gender boundaries he was assuming were fixed in place according to the societal boundaries to which he adheres. The moment of abjection is a moment when all his prior assumptions come tumbling down, and he is faced with an abyss. He must re-negotiate his identity, come to terms with who he is, what he has done, who he loves, and what he will become. The film does not resolve the issue of how successfully he does so. In a gesture that compensates for the moral guilt Fergus carries for Jody’s death, Fergus takes the fall for Dil’s murder of Jude. In the maximum security prison cell where Fergus serves his sentence he is separated him Dil by a glass panel. Both of them seem comfortable with the distance of the glass between them. Fergus still objects to her calling him honey, but at least the difficulty of how to negotiate sexual contact between them without him throwing up is resolved. Dil seems free to express a conventional femininity that Fergus denied her on the outside. Subject to the law, which punishes him for what she has done, he enjoys a respite from the crisis his love for Dil has thrown him into. The law reasserts itself, and plays the role of the loving father, rescuing Fergus from having to definitively alter his symbolic universe.

Acts, states, and beings coded as abject can take up transgressive or revolutionary positions, and these very positions can take on opposite effects. When hooks and Edge refuse the radical implications of Fergus’ confrontation with Dil’s transvestite identity, there is a sense in which they could be said to use race to abject transvestism. The point is not that any disruption of system in inherently radical. Power does not operate as a one way vector, from top to bottom. It can occupy multiple sites, and it can operate in more than one direction. Resistance is not merely a matter of asserting the authority or integrity of one’s voice based on one’s marginality, or on the experience of being oppressed, whether this is specified in terms of being woman, black, lesbian, Latina, or some other label. It is a matter of articulating one’s marginalized experience with a view to making visible its operative role in structuring the governing norms of the symbolic, and rearticulating one’s position by challenging the self-evident prerogative of those norms. By engaging abjection as a mode of analysis I want to resist polarizing society into representative agents of good and bad, oppressor and oppressed, holy and evil. By emphasizing the sense in which abjection throws up a screen of words, a screen in which words do not bear the uncomplicated weight of the paternal law, but rather exhibit its weakness, we see how the verbalization of abjection refers back to the maternal, and to the subject’s inadequate attempts to separate fully from the mother. The emergence of an abject language of want, a language of signs that break down and carry the force of affect, a language heavy with fear, symbolizes the state of crisis undergone by the subject, a narcissistic crisis that is a regression to the oral stage, but a regression undertaken through the medium of language.

I have interrogated abjection as a crisis that assumes a subject already structured by language, but one who reverts to its incomplete separation from the mother, by understanding the moment of abjection as an irruption of affect into the ordered, stable, and discriminating world of symbolic discourse, by understanding, that is, the double time of abjection. Fergus’s encounter with Jody leads him to a crisis of confidence in the symbolic world of the IRA that he has taken on, a world whose authority is underwritten in the film by Peter, the father figure. Temporarily shedding his political identity as an IRA man in London, the moral crisis he undergoes with Jody draws him into an encounter with Dil, which leads to a shattering of his sexual identity. Unable to face its implications, he returns to his former political identity as a refuge. He would rather serve time for something he did not do, than do something that his idea of himself cannot serve. He enters into prison, under the watchful eyes of the law, as a haven, which preserves his love for Dil, and hers for his, in an idealized, but unrealizable form.

Tina Chanter

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