Shame, Abjection and Disgust

There are remarks of books i read 

'It is not an object, not even a coherent object of study. Shame, which is the greater part of the experience of abjection, being precisely where words fail us and where the difference between self and not-self ceases to exist' (Kristeva 1982 referenced in Pajaczkowska and Ward 2008)

Kristeva suggests, the abjection is the place at which the origins of self are found in the act of differing from 'mother', so that anything that threatens to revoke or dissolve that difference invokes abjection.

We invoke the world of verbal language, words in syntax: thought, spoken or written. Because of its agency in the formation of the eariest, preverbal representations of the self, shame refers us to a relationship to representation based on iconic signs and visual, spatial logic that precedes the word and its syntactical language of time and grammatical subject.

 Anthropologist Mary Douglas describes this transgression of symbolic borders as our experience of 'contamination', and defines the objectification of this feeling as 'dirt'. The many anxieties that are produced by the fear of contamination by dirt give rise to complex rituals and taboos, the observance and repetition of which are believed to have magical powers of cleaning, cure, salvation or restoration of symbolic boundaries.

Julia Kristeva concluded the function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject's fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.

sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal.

On the other hand, these forces which act like dams upon sexual development-disgust, shame and morality-must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. 

We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as through spontaneously, when education and external influence give the signal.

A chapter 6 of Art and Psychoanalysis (Walsh 2013)

The Evolution of Abjection

The potential of pre-Oedipal primary processes, which includes the bodily drives and affects, is a source of creativity which can be tapped into on in other to restructure the symbolic rigidity of culture.(p68)

The pre-Odepal primary processes of the semiotic are linked to the basic pulsion of early development which are predominantly anal and aril. For kristeva, these pulsions are gathered up in a space she calls the chora, a term she appropriates from Plato's Timaeus, where 'he defines it as an enclosed womb-like space which at the same time is "an invisible and formless being" capable of receiving all things and partaking of the intelligible.(p68)

Chadwick's work explores the intersubjectivity of semiotic space in artworks that exemplify it as a space of potential for the creation of multiple self-doublings by which the woman constitutes her subjectivity anew, beyond castration. this is a spece where she can enter into a self-conscious splitting, not between belief and disbelief, as the fetishist does, but between self and self-other in which the self contains the split-off parts of itself rather than projecting them outwards.(p71)