ENG 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Jacques Lacan, The Symbolic, Abjection
22 Aug 2016
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How the genre of the gothic organizes itself around boundaries (boarders between the self and the other; how we know ourselves to be human in the world; how we know ourselves through language) and the anxiety over boundaries. Symbolic order = social world: the world we experience together, communications, of inter-subjective relations, of ideological conventions, of knowledge. A child only enters the symbolic order when the child is able to interact with others as an individual: the child starts to distinguish between itself and other things. Powers of horror: an essay on abjection (julia kristeva, 1982) The abject is the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite any phenomenon that disturbs identity, system, order and that does not respect positions, rules (42) (the collapse of meaning; the in-between; the self) The abject haunts the self by continuously bringing it into crises generally in the form of some cast off part or product of the body (corpse, flesh, etc.
