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At the heart of Nina Bunjevac’s 2012 comics collection Heartless is the catwoman Zorka, eponymous protagonist of the five-story sequence “Bitter Tears of Zorka Petrovic.” Reading “Bitter Tears” as tragicomic satire—poised between a comedy of errors and a tragedy of ideologically grounded ideals—this chapter looks to explore some of the “alternative tensions” that arise from Bunjevac’s humanimal enunciations, and to account for the powerful feelings of abjection that emerge from the text’s orientation in the grotesque. Zorka’s “catness” is both cage and key, drawing readers to her and inviting both counter- and transcultural readings that radiate outwards into the text.

By combining emotion and gender histories, this study analyzes the affective economy of fear ruling during the Paris Commune and its aftermath. This focus allows us to examine the creation of female collectives, such as the pétroleuses: the revolutionary women accused of having organized the fires that devastated the French capital during the bloody week. Although there was no evidence about their involvement in this episode, they became the evilest enemy in the eye of the public. Taking Louise Michel’s testimonies as starting point, this chapter analyses abjection as a practice that situated the female revolutionary body outside the borders of civilization. A comparison of past and present terrorist bodies allows us to think about the powers of fear for the creation of fictional enemies.

In this essay John Lechte develops the idea of the abject as beyond objectification. Grounding his argument in Immanuel Kant’s conception of the beautiful as that which has no concept, Lechte asks if there can really be an art of the abject given the concept’s elusive status. He answers this question through an analysis of the film Sombre(Dir. Philippe Grandrieux, France, 1998). For Lechte, the abject “represents” a radical immanence. Abject art is therefore art that takes the non-object as its object. Grandrieux’s films, through their chiaroscuro cinematography, comprise works in which the medium of film appears to be foregrounded. The sombre lighting makes objects difficult to discern. This has led some commentators to contend that Grandrieux brings the materiality of film to the screen. Lechte, however, argues that materiality is always already screened, barred from us, by the very process of signification that seeks to capture it. In this light, if there is an abject element to Sombreit can only ever be evoked rather than clearly represented for to represent it would be to abolish it.

Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, Nicholas Chare suggests that the Surrealist project possessed an underlying sadistic impulse that was prefigured in the art of Édouard Manet. Manet exploited paint’s potentially aberrant qualities through an aggressive approach to composition and handling. Artworks that exhibit a deviant painterliness often function within Surrealism to question dominant ideas about identity, particularly sexual identity. The abject qualities of Manet’s works prompt such a questioning. Chare contrasts Manet’s technique with that of Jackson Pollock to tease out the nature of the former’s brutal formalism, his Surrealism, and elaborate on its capacity to recast identity without losing sight of the self entirely.

Building on the theories of Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek, Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson explore how debates about modernism and postmodernism are played out in the work of Chilean-Australian artist Juan Davila. The abject assumes a central role in these debates as it cannot be equated either with the medium or the message of art. It falls outside polarising arguments over the privileging of surface or subject matter. The abject is not present in Davila’s paintings. It cannot become their subject given its quality as a non-object. The abject is rather that which resists becoming subject. It refuses to be made to matter as a subject because it refuses objectification. It is, however, not a simple matter. It is a kind of arrested or abeyant signification: it occupies the gap between matter and meaning. Butler and Donaldson show how Davila works within this gap exploiting the abject’s slipperiness in his recent pictures as a means to intervene in contemporary aesthetic disputes about the role of the medium in art.

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s essay, ‘Animals, Art and Abjection’, teases out the implications of Kristeva’s contention in Powers of Horrorthat the abject engenders a fragile state within which the human strays on the territory of the animal. For Kristeva, some cultures have branded animals as abject and as ‘representatives of sex and murder’. In such cultures, the animal is figured in negative terms and notions of animalism, of the human as an animal species, are suppressed. Animals therefore figure as impure and are made to form the constitutive outside to the human. Creed and Hoorn, however, argue that contemporary art practices that explore animals and animality do so as a means to challenge the notion that animals form humankind’s abject other. In this context, the artworks do not function to purify the abject but rather embrace what has hitherto been labelled as abject as a means to renegotiate its status from within an anthropocentric society.

Ernst van Alphen’s essay is a synoptic study of abjection in the context of Francis Bacon’s art: it investigates the various ways and senses in which Bacon’s art can be described as abject. On the face of it, Bacon’s paintings are abject but this appearance needs to be probed further to examine the significance of the boundary between matter and representation, for instance, and of his figures themselves which are fragmented and which demonstrate various positions of subjecthood at risk. Calling on the work of theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, van Alphen explores the identity of the Baconian figure and argues for a fresh way of thinking about the abject condition of Bacon’s figures. A further area of study in his essay draws on Hal Foster’s work and concerns how the viewer is provoked to complete the operation of the abject, which results in a reshattering of the viewer’s sense of self. Van Alphen’s study shows how abjection can be used to elicit a host of other Baconian themes about representation, viewing and identity.

Kerstin Mey considers how, although death and its concomitant connotations – disease and demise – have been removed from the public gaze in the West, this has not reduced our fascination with these subjects. Nor has it removed their exploration through various forms of mediatized culture, including graphic video games, films and the visual arts. She examines the mass appeal of the anatomist Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, which was a worldwide touring exhibition between 1995 and 2011 that focused on the display of preserved corpses and body fragments. The scientific process of Plastination was employed to preserve the body tissue and reveal inner anatomical structures which gave the specimens a hyperreal colouration, somewhat departing from the visceral ghastliness expected of bodily parts but in other ways imparting the starkness of our grim destinies, especially given the lifelike poses of the corpses. Mey’s essay details the different aspects of von Hagen’s controversial but influential work and also examines the work of other artists who are engaged in similar subject matter, such as Joel-Peter Witkin, the art group AES + F and Andres Serrano’s morgue series.

Calvin Thomas explores the differing roles of the abject as a theme in the writings of the contemporary authors Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. For Thomas, Wallace’s novella ‘The Suffering Channel’, which features an artist who claims to excrete fully-modelled figurative sculptures, demonstrates how literature provides a crucial means to convey abject suffering. Wallace’s faecal theme provides the means by which the author analyses abjected masculinity in contemporary America and also art’s claim to use stories to reveal truths.

Daniel Watt’s ‘Base Materials: Performing the Abject Object’ configures abjection within the performing arts, and in particular within theatre, thereby underscoring the significance of catharsis in abjection as grounded by Antonin Artaud’s work. Watt examines the radical theatre practices of Tadeusz Kantor, who co-founded the Cricot2 theatre in 1955, and Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre company, which began in 1959. What these share is a view of the practice of immersion in abjection. The actor in Kantor’s theatre, the bio-object (which is neither human nor object) is transformed throughout the performances from person to thing. In Grotowskian performance the body is sacrificed in total theatre. Both cases articulate how the sacrificial abjection of the performing object reveals a vision of reality, in a Bataillean sense, that conveys the potentiality of theatre as one that unveils the human, through a different type of communal event that entails the dissolution of selfhood (jouissance) and the power of horror. The task of performance becomes one of immersion in abjection.

Justine Gieni examines the language and illustrations of Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 picturebook Struwwelpeter, a seminal text in the genre that, on the surface at least, makes explicit use of horrifying methods of childhood death and dismemberment as a means of cautioning young readers to behave according to the strictures of its era. In her essay, however, Gieni zeroes in on the transgressive nature of Hoffman’s tales, concentrating specifically on the role of body horror in the text. Entering the debate about the book’s appropriateness for child audiences, Gieni focuses especially on the violence committed against the child’s body in the book, arguing that, through the “powers of horror,” Hoffman satirizes the pedagogical didacticism of nineteenth-century German culture and empowers young readers, allowing them to experience the thrill of derisive laughter in the face of brutal authoritarianism. She also illuminatingly considers the publication, relevance, and reception of Struwwelpeter today, discussing how it has been rebranded as a text for “knowing” adult audiences with an emphasis more on its horror than its humor, as well as the implications of such a shift in the text’s purported readership and thematic intentions.

Shane Meadows' films are preoccupied with bodily functions, scatological humour and themes of social abjection. Rather than dismiss these bawdy comical interludes as deviations from the director's more ostensibly serious themes, the consistently grotesque terrain of Meadows' worldview is best understood in political terms as a form of resistance to neoliberal ideology. Meadows's films consistently valorise mutuality and working-class commonality through recourse to corporeal terrain: the political is thus significantly embodied in Meadows' oeuvre. In rejecting the self-regulating fictions of neoliberal individualism, Meadows' grotesque themes function as a form of oppositional ‘dirty protest’ against the hegemonic interpellations of middle-class social normalcy. This is exemplified by the bodily excesses of Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) in Somers Town (2008), a character who typically embodies a distinctly Meadowsian form of ‘excremental heroism’ which systematically rejects the atomised individualism of neoliberal culture.

This essay inquires into the intellectual relation between Bataille and Kristeva by focusing on their conceptions of the religious experience as an experience of desire, law, and death. It lays out how their reflections on religious signification have evolved throughout the different phases of their thinking. Even though both have interpreted religion in terms of abjection, Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach to religion differs from Bataille’s anthropological reflections. The essay shows that Kristeva’s reading of Bataille changed from an appreciation of him as a thinker of poetic revolution in 1970s to a figure of revolt in 1980s, a period in which Bataille still continues to be a source of inspiration for Kristeva’s theorization of the sacred, religion, erotic, abjection, language, and revolt, though now she disavows his legacy and seeks to distance herself from his thought. In the 1990s, Kristeva comes to the point of dismissing him as a historical, even nostalgic figure of transgression.

Throughout Blanchot's post-war writings, but particularly after his return to national politics in 1958, one finds that articulation of a dual imperative: pursuing political justice while answering to an infinite (impossible) exigency that belongs to the ethical relation and to which writing must answer. This concluding statement draws together a core argument of the book by asserting that the relation between these apparently divergent imperatives must be thought as an oriented passage.

By now critics have clearly recognized the ways in which foundational Gothic texts are rife with discourses and debates on racial otherness. Critical studies have especially revealed the conjunction of racial otherness and monstrosity in British and American Gothic Literature. However, as Toni Morrison explains in her seminal collection Playing in the Dark, the appearance of such monstrous racial others in literary texts is rarely about the actuality of the racial minority, but rather about white anxiety and self-construction. Extending that observation, this essay specifically examines how Black Gothic writers have understood and critiqued Gothic theorizations of race as participants in larger discourses which produce an uncanny whiteness. This essay even shows the ways Black Gothic writers have variously sought to re-appropriate and alter - and thereby re-theorize -- the meaning and uses of monstrosity in relation to race.

A number of cultural theorists and literary critics have identified the postcolonial as freighted with the legacies of colonialism. The Gothic has been invoked by some of these theorists to emphasize the effects of the colonial past in the postcolonial present. In some postcolonial fiction, the Gothic provides a framework or lens through which to analyse and discuss the postcolonial experience presented within that fiction. With others, however, the fictional text itself is the framework which interrogates and critiques the social, political and economic structures that shape the postcolonial experience. This chapter will consider the relationship between the Gothic and the postcolonial, as they inform and shape each other, with particular reference to the novels of the Australian writer, Mudrooroo, who in his Master of the Ghost Dreaming series (1991-2000) utilizes a range of literary and critical devices in order to excavate and foreground an Aboriginal voice.

Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) has had a profound effect on the analysis of Gothic works. Building on Freud, Lacan, and others, it posits a "throwing over" of the deepest anomalies at the roots of human being - the inseparable intermingling of life and death and self and other at the moment of birth - into what seems an alien, other figure (the 'abject', such as Frankenstein's creature) so that the abjecting subject can construct a wholeness of consistent identity over against it. This process, as Slavoj Zizek has emphasized, is even a socio-cultural one, whereby populations abject underlying social conflicts into supposedly alien others. The abject figures in many Gothic works, then, are fear-inducting sites prompting terror or horror because they enact this scheme. In fact, they do so because the whole idea of abjection hearkens back to the very nature of Gothic symbol-making from Horace Walpole on.