International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

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Bettina Wahrig, Heike Klippel & Martina Mittag (Universität Braunschweig, Germany)
Applying the abject: Working with Kristeva's concept of chora and abject in the cultural history of poisoning

The authors have been working for a while on the history of poisonings in scientific and literary discourse and in films. We have found that Kristeva's concept of abject can serve as a key term to analyse the poison and poisoning narratives in science, literature and film. It is especially fruitful to understand the ambivalence which lies in all the terms linked to poisoning, like pharmakon (medicinal drug, poison, magical drug, colour) or the German words for poisoning (Gift - etymologically linked to "giving", and even " to pardonning (vergiften - vergeben). "Toxikon" as associated to arrows and hence to a sudden death. Another strand of images has to do with a subtle matter that stealthily enters the body and slowly decomposes it. The images associated with poisoning are close to "non-images", they articulate the non-imagined, the un-seen, the invisible with the visible. This is especially obvious in films like, for example, "Notorious" by Alfred Hitchcock.

We would like to discuss our findings in the light of Kristeva's concept of abjection. Abjection in Kristeva's understanding is not only the prerogative for symbol-production in the father's name. It also and simultaneously undermines this type of symbol-production. “It is not the absence of propriety or sanity which makes someone/something abject, but that which troubles an identity, a system, an order. That which does not respect the limits, the places, the rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the mixed (existence)” Hence, abjection is a process that enforces exclusion, but on the other hand, abject sign production persists, thus undermining and circumventing  the separations and exclusions inherent in the logic of social order and its concomitant forms of communication. There are very interesting connections between the abject and the sublime, which might also be transferrable to the conceptual field of poisoning. Pharmacy and chemistry have to do with pure substances, with separating things and keeping them apart. The effectiveness of a pharmaceutical substance is usually held to correlate with its purity. This is, vice versa, true for poisons. Preparing a poison was in historical texts associated with the fabrication of very pure, and dangerous, substances, but also with mixing. with adding vicious substances to nutrients, with blurring the borders between good and bad, between food and poison, between health and death. We will give an short example each from the fields of literature, science, and film to make discussion more concrete.

We would like to discuss this in the light of Kristeva's philosophy, and we would be delighted to get comments on this from the "Kristeva community".