Last revised: 1 October 2002

THE ABJECT

I have found 35 useful sources for the informe, the abject, and religious purity, which tend to be related in current discourse. These terms are often seen as variations on a theme but should be considered as quite separate according to Rosalind Krauss (see October Winter 1993 and Krauss, 1997).

Three theorists appear in this discourse: Georges Bataile, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler.

Bataille is associated with informe, roughly formlessness, which he equates with spittle but also with man as animal, horizontal rather than vertical, from mouth to anus rather than the mind and it's psychic distance from the ground. Taking off from Kristeva's notion of the abject, Judith Butler can be added to the list of those who explore the abject since she claims that "abject beings ...form a constitutive outside the domain of the subject" (Butler, Introduction, 3). Kristeva in The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, (1982) sees the abject as prior to the mirror stage between the subject and object but also as the means by "which the subject is first impelled towards the possibility of constituting itself as such-- in an act of revulsion, of expulsion of that which can no longer be contained. Significantly, the first object of abjection is the pre-Oedipal mother - prefiguring that positioning of the women in society ...as perpetually at the boundary, the borderline...etc." (15 Burgin, 1990).

The abject is seen as transgressive because it destroys borders, is always ambiguous, and points towards the disintegration of identity in death. The abject is also related to religious purity and impurity.

The informe is seen as transgressive because, as an operation, it refuses hierarchy.

The artists that have been associated with the informe, the abject, and the grotesque include Fontana, Joel-Peter Witkin, Robert Gober, John Miller, David Hammons, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly and David Lynch.

Bataille, Georges. (1985) "Rotten Sun," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings.
            1927-1939, Allan Stoekl, ed. and Trans. Minneapolis: University of
            Minnesota Press, 1985. pages__________
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY: PQ 2603 .A695 A27 1985

Bataille, Georges. (1985) "The Language of flowers," in Visions of Excess: Selected
            Writings. 1927-1939. Allan Stoekl, ed. and trans. Minneapolis: University of
            Minnesota Press, 1985.

Baudrillard, Jean. (1983) "The Ecstasy of Communication," in Hal Foster, ed. The
            Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington:
            Bay Press, 1983.
            NO LONGER IN PRINT

Ben Levi, J., Houser, C., Jones, L. C., and Taylor, S. (1993) Abject Art: Revulsion
            and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
            exh. cat.
            "Introduction," 7-16.
            "A Sasomasochistic Drama in an Age of Traditional Values," Jack Ben-Levi:
            17-32.
            "Transgressive Feminity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and Seventies," Leslie
            C. Jones: 33-58.
            "A Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art," Simon Taylor: 59-84. "I,
            Abject," Craig Houser: 85-101.
            STETSON UNIVERSITY: N 6512 .A25 1992 ORDERED FOR NEW
            COLLEGE LIBRARY 21 AUGUST 2002
            Staff unable to locate a copy of this out of print material.
            [All of these chapters have been listed separately under their individual
            authors]

Ben-Levi, Jack. (1993) 'A Sadomasochistic Drama in an Age of Traditional Values,"
            17-32 in Ben Levi, J., Rouser, C., Jones, L. C., and Taylor, S. Abject Art:
            Repulsion and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of
            American Art. exh. cat.
            STETSON UNIVERSITY: N 6512 .A25 1992

Betterton, Rosemary. (1996) "Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women's
            Art," In An Intimate Distance: Women. Artists and the Body. London and
            New York: Routledge, 1996.
            USF LIBRARY/TAMPA: N 7630 .B48 1996

Bois, Yve-Alain. (1989) "Fontana's Base Materialism,' Art in America, 77 (April
            1989): 238-248, 279. RINGLING MUSEUM LIBRARY NC LIB: NSIO
            .A784

Bryson, Norman. (1993) "House of Wax,' 216-223. In Rosalind Krauss, Cindy
            Sherman 1875-1993. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.
            USF TAMPA: TR 654 .K729 1993.
            [Very useful discussion of representation, the body, the abject, the real, and
            the simulacrum. Discusses the differences in the representational regimes of the
            waxwork museum and Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills seeing the former
            as an "aesthetic of representation as the duplicate of a physically stable
            referent, a body that stands before it as its original" (217).

            [With Sherman's photographs] "the structure of representation is precisely
            reversed: the nominal referent exists only by means of representation and the
            complex cultural codes it activates(218). "Sherman convinces the viewer that
            her various images are indeed different presences, but that 'behind' those there
            stands no central core of identity (218). Bryson argues that this constructionist
            understanding of the body ends by being unable to reduce the body to mere
            representation, but instead "it becomes that which cannot be symbolized: the
            site, in fact, of the real" (220). He goes on to explore the implications of this
            problem. Bryson sees the waxworks as halfway through "a conversion of
            reality into spectacie(223). Concludes that the "movement from the ideal to the
            abject is now a single sweep, an arc: the trajectory, indeed, of Sherman's
            career to date" (223).

Buck-Morss. (1992) Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay
            Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992): 3-41.
            RINGLING MUSEUM LIBRARY PERIODICALS:// NEW COLLEGE:             NXI .0276

Burgin, Victor. (1990) "Geometry and Abjection," in John Fletcher and Andrew
            Benjamin, eds. Abjection. Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia
            Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
            CH LIBRARY: FEMINISM--KRISTEVA

            [There are a number of useful sections to this essay, Section II discusses
            Jacqueline Rose's "The Imaginary," in Sexuality and the Field of Vision of
            1986 and Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," of 1975. In
            Section III, (115-118) Burgin discusses Kristeva's account of what the
            patriarchal order abjects: "the biological woman--the procreative body--that
            this order abjects" (116). Section IV explores briefly the changed space of the
            new geometry in which 'the very notion of identity is challenged (119).]

Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies that Matter. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
            Introduction" 1-23
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY: HQ 1190 .B88 1993

            [Butler would place "the domain of the abject beings, who are not yet
            'subjects,' but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.
            The abject designates here precisely those 'unlivable' and 'uninhabitable' zones
            of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not
            enjoy the status of subject, but whose living under the sign of 'unlivable' is
            required to circumscribe the domain of the subject" (3).]

Butler, Judith. (1993) "Beyond the Logic of Repudiation," in Bodies that Matter, New
            York and London: Routledge, 1993.
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY: HQ 1190 .BSS 1993
            DID NOT MAKE A COPY OF THIS BEFORE RETURNING

Comand, N. (1994) Repulsive Attractions: Abjection in Contemporary Culture,
            unpublished dissertation.

Chasseguet-Smirgel. (1984) Foreword, and Chapter 1," Perversion and the Universal
            Law," 1-12 in Creativity and Perversion. New York and London: W.W.
            Norton, 1984.

Creed, B. (1986) "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,"
            Screen 27: 1. xeroxed: received 6/7/02
            [Creed looks at the horror film (especially Alien) in terms of the monstrous
            feminine as she reflects abjection and the negative archaic mother who
            threatens to re-absorb the life she once birthed and thus gives rise to a "terror
            of self-disintegration, of losing one's self or ego' (64).]

Creed, Barbara and MacDonald, C. (1993) The Monstrous Feminine: Film.
            Feminism. Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge.
            "Kristeva, Feminity, Abjection,' Chapter 1, 8-15
            "Horror and the Archaic Mother: Chapter 2,16-30.
[Gaze] "'Medusas Head: The Vagina Dentata and Freudian Theoiy" Chapter 8,             105-121.
[Gaze] "The Medusa's Gaze, Chapter 11, 151-166.
            "Bibliogrpahy, 167-171.
            USF LIBRARY: PN 1996.9 .H6 C74 1993

Douglas, Mary. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
            and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.
            'Introduction," 1-6.
            Chapter 1, Ritual Uncleanness, 7-28.
            Chapter 2, Secular Defilement," 29-40.
            Chapter 7, 'External Boundaries," 114-128.
            Chapter 10, "The System Shattered and Renewed," 159-179.
            "Bibliography," 180-185.
            USF LIBRARY: GN 494 D6
            [Individual chapters are given that seem most relevant]

Finkelpearl, Tom. (1991) 'On the Ideology of Dirt,' in David Hammons: Rousing the
            Rubble, Exh. cat. Long Island City, New York: P.S.1 Museum, The Institute
            of Contemporary Art, 1991. USF LIBRARY: N 6537 .H3455 A4 1991

Gross, Elizabeth. (1990) "The Body of Signification," in John Fletcher and Andrew
            Benjamin, eds. Abjection. Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia
            Kristeva. London and New York Routledge, 1990.
            CH LIBRARY:

Gubar, Susan. (1987) "Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and
            Depictions of Female Violations." Critical Inquiry (Summer 1987): 71241
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY PERIODICALS:

Hollier, Denis, ed. (1989) Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille,
            trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.
            "Introduction,' ix-xxiii. 
            "On Bataille," 23-30.
            "The Caesarean," 74-172.
            "Notes," 173-196.
            USF LIBRARY: PQ 2603 .A695 Z713 1989

________. (1988) The College of Sociology 1937-1939, trans. Betsy Wing.
            Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY: PQ 142 C5813 1988

Houser, Craig. (1993) "1, Abject," 85-101 in Ben Levi, J., Houser, C., Jones, L. C.,
            and Taylor, S. Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. New York:
            Whitney Museum of American Art. exh. cat.
            STETSON UNIVERSITY: N 6512 .A25 1992

Jones, Leslie, C. (1993) "Transgressive Femininity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and
            Seventies," 33-58 in Ben Levi, 1, Rouser, C., Jones, L. C., and Taylor, S.
            Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney
            Museum of American Art. exh. cat.
            STETSON UNIVERSITY: N 6512 .A25 1992
            [Discusses the use of the abject/transgressive in male and female artistic
            practices to show that men are celebrated for their exploration of the
            "femininity" in themselves, while women artists are seen as "stereotypically
            feminine" when they explore comparable body images.]

Kaprow, Alan. (1963) "Impurity," News 61 (January 1963): 30-33, 52-55.
            RINGLING MUSEUM LIBRARY PERIODICALS: ???
            [This was not on the abject as such. Kaprow contrasts Mondrian and Myron
            Stout with Pollock and Newman in terms of the former two artist's purity with
            the latter two artist's impurity.]

Krauss, Rosalind. (1993) Cindy Sherman 1875-1993. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.
            USF TAMPA: TR 654 .K729 1993.

Krauss, Rosalind. (1997) "The Destiny of the Informe."in Krauss, Rosalind and
            Yves-Alain Bois (1997) Formlessness: A User's Guide. New York: Zone
            Books, 1997.
            [Krauss provides an excellent outline of the abject and the informe as quite
            separate (not, of course, in current criticism) things. Most useful as an
            introduction to the problems of both. Shows that we must see the formless as
            an operation and the abject as a condition of being and most often a condition
            of being feminine. Discusses Kristeva, Sartre, Laura Mulvey, Derrida, Batyl,
            Man and the work of Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelly.]

Krauss, Rosalind, and Yves-Alain Bois. (1997) Formless: A User's Guide. New
            York: Zone Books, 1997.
            USF LIBRARY: N 6488 .FS P316 813 1997

            [Abstract from OCLC First Search: In a work that will become indispensable
            to anyone seriously interested in modern Art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind
            Krauss introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of
            avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User's Guide constitutes
            a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century
            culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook
            his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the
            idea of the "formless" been deployed in theorizing and reconfiguring of the field
            of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been
            crudely set up as a battle between form and content; 'formless' constitutes a
            third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is
            itself formal, In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and
            compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within the
            history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging
            formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In
            the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural
            cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of the thematic
            of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a
            "job." The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the
            informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this
            reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of
            Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Tombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman,
            Claes Oldenberg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta Clark,
            among others.]

Krauss, Rosalind. (1986) "Antivision," October no.36 (Spring 1986): 147-154
            RINGLING MUSEUM LIBRARY PERIODICALS:

Kristeva, Julia, (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.
            Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
            Chapter 1. "Approaching Abjection," 1-31.
            Chapter 3. "From Filth to Defilement," 56-89.
            Chapter 11. "Powers of Horror," 207-211.
            USF LIBRARY: PQ 2607 .E834 Z73413 1982

Michelson, Annette. (1965) Lee Bontecou. in Gillo Dorfies, Gerald Gassiot-Talabot,
            and Annette Michelson, exh. cat. Paris: Ilena Sonnabend Gallery, 1965.
            PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY: N6537 .B6 G3

Modeski, Tania. (1991) "Femininity as Mas(s)querade," in Feminism Without Woman:
            Culture and Criticism in a 'Postfeminist' Ane. New York and London:
            Routledge, 1991.
            USF ST. PETERSBURG: PN 1995.9 W6 M55 1991

Morris, Robert. (1968) "Anti Form," Artforum 6 (April 1968): 33-35 7?
            RINGLING MUSEUM LIBRARY PERIODICAL:

Mulvey, L. (1991) "A Phantasmorgia of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy
            Sherman," New Left Review 188: 136-50.
            [Response to Creed]
            XEROX IN FILE
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY PERIODICALS: HX 3 .N4

October 36 (Spring 1986) Special issue on Georges Bataille.
            LIST OF TABLE OF CONTENTS
            "Extinct America," 3-10.
            "Slaughterhouse," 11-14.
            "Smokestack," 15-16.
            "Human Face," 17-22.
            "Metamorphosis," 23-24.
            "Museum," 25.
            "Counterattack: Call to Action," 26.27.
            "The Threat of War," 28.
            "Additional Notes on the War," 29-31.
            "Toward Real Revolution," 32
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY PERIODICALS: NX 1 0276 ALSO           
            RINGLING MUSEUM OF ART LIBRARY

October 67 (Winter 1993) "The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the
            Informe and the Abject," 3-21. Roundtable with Hal Foster, Benjamin
            Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Denis Hollier.
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY PERIODICAL: NX 1 0276
            [Panel discussion of how the informe and the abject are different and why they
            should remain separate in contemporary discourse. Inlcudes references to
            Bataille, Kristeva and Judith Butler and their versions of these terms.]

Oliver, Kelly. (1993) Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington and
            Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993
            "Revolutionary Horror," 10 1-107.

Russo, M. (1986) "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in Teresa de Laurentis
            (ed.) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
            (213-229)
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY: HQ 1154 F4473 1986

Schleifer, Kristen Brooke. (1991) "Inside and Out: An Interview with Kiki Smith," The
            Print Collector's Newsletter, 22 (July-August 1991): 84-87.
            RINGLING MUSEUM OF ART LIBRARY:

Schowalter, E. (1993) (ed.) Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de
            Siecle, London: Virago.
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY: PS 508 W7 D38 1993

Simms, Eva-Maria. (1996) "Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud."
            New Literary History 27, no.4 (Fall 1996): 663-77.
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY PERIODICALS:
            [Simms explores Rilke's experience of "dolls" through both his poetry and a
            curious short story "Frau Blaha's Maid." She shows the doll/dead child as
            uncanny and relates them to Freud's essay on the "uncanny." Freud shows that
            the death instinct underlies both the experience of the uncanny which is Rilke is
            reflected in his experience of the doll as inert/dead and is therefore evidence of
            the artist's "regression to primary masochism" (675).]

Stone, Jennifer. (1982) "The Horrors of Power: A Critique of 'Kristeva,'" 38-48, in
            Francis Barker et al., eds. The Politics of Theory. Colchester, England:
            University of Essex, 1983.
            LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI: PN 33 .E87 1982 MSMAI
            [Sees Kristeva as hostile to feminism. Says that Kristeva "has stepped through
            the looking- glass. What she finds behind is her self, reflected in Louis
            Ferdinand Celine's abject image of womanhood..."(39) and goes on to give
            Kristeva's history before she turns to her analysis of how Kristeva's Powers of
            Horror support Freudian notions of "nothing to be seen." Helpful, as all
            critiques are helpful, in challenging Kristeva's vision of the archaic mother.]

Tamblyn, Christine. (1990) "The River of Swill: Feminist Art, Sexual Codes, and
            Censorship," Afterimage 18 (October 1990): 10.
            XEROX IN FILE

Tamblyn, Christine. (1991) "No More Nice Girls: Recent Transgressive Feminist Art,"
            Art Journal 50 (Summer 1991): 53-57 ??
            NEW COLLEGE LIBRARY PERIODICALS:

Taylor, Simon. (1993) "A Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art," 59-84. in
            Ben Levi, J., Rouser, C., Jones, L. C., and Taylor, S. Abject Art: Repulsion
            and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
            ext cat.
            STETSON UNIVERSITY: N 6512 .A25 1992