A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

positive version), the call is for humanity to literally and metaphorically lay down its arms.
Duplication is not the “goal” so much as simultaneous transcendence and embrace of difference.
CONCLUSION
Whereas the utopian currents of the nineteenth century invoked a set of material transformations
as the response to human suffering, those of the later twentieth respond to what has been
understood as the pre-eminent disease of the latter century—alienation. Herein lies one of the
fundamental ironies of the displaced utopian imaginary in the late twentieth century—it is
through sundering one’s understood relation to self and embracing the alien that alienation is
escaped. Each of the moments discussed in this document have involved an effort to bring the
abject back into circulation. The abject is that “exorbitant outside or inside ejected beyond the
scope of the possible, tolerable, thinkable... It lies there quite close, but it cannot be
assimilated.” 318
The abject is a “constitutive outside—the unspeakable, the unviable, the nonnarrativizable”
319
The world of spirit, the power of the feminine, surrender and dissolution as
modes of practice—all banished to the margins as potentially disruptive of a dominant
worldview that values masculine virtues above all. Positivism and its cognate forms valorized
visibility, clarity, vigor and mastery and thus depended upon the abjection of the very content
and modes of practice that Spiritualism and its offspring introduced back into public discourse.
This set of practices and content is the constitutive outside of rational order.
Abduction also re-introduced the abject—both at the level of the abduction narrative and
at the level of experience. Abduction marked a departure from those earlier moments, all of
which stopped short of the disintegration promised by the contemplation of the abject and the
318 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 1.
319 Judith Butler, “Arguing with the Real” in Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 188.
221