Powers of Horror; An Essay on Abjection

SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF 39
eling and, in the final analysis, determining role <strong>of</strong> symbolic
language relation. From the deprivation felt by the child because
<strong>of</strong> the mother's absence to the paternal prohibitions that institute
symbolism, that relation accompanies, forms, and elaborates
the aggressivity <strong>of</strong> drives, which, consequently, never presents
itself in a "pure" state. Let me say then that want and aggressivity
are chronologically separable but logically coextensive. Ag-
gressivity appears to us as a rejoinder to the original deprivation
felt from the time <strong>of</strong> the mirage known as "primary narcissism";
it merely takes revenge on initial frustrations. But what can be
known <strong>of</strong> their connection is that want and aggressivity are
adapted to one another. To speak <strong>of</strong> want alone is to repudiate
aggressivity in obsessional fashion; to speak <strong>of</strong> aggressivity
alone, forgetting want, amounts to making transference
paranoidal.
"I am afraid <strong>of</strong> horses, I am afraid <strong>of</strong> being bitten." Fear and
the aggressivity intended to protect me from some not yet
localizable cause are projected and come back to me from the
outside: "I am threatened." The fantasy <strong>of</strong> incorporation by
means <strong>of</strong> which I attempt to escape fear (I incorporate a portion
<strong>of</strong> my mother's body, her breast, and thus I hold on to her)
threatens me none the less, for a symbolic, paternal prohibition
already dwells in me on account <strong>of</strong> my learning to speak at the
same time. In the face <strong>of</strong> this second threat, a completely sym-
bolic one, I attempt another procedure: I am not the one that
devours, I am being devoured by him; a third person therefore
(he, a third person) is devouring me.
PASSIVATION
Syntactical passivation, which heralds the subject's ability to
put himself in the place <strong>of</strong> the object, is a radical stage in the
constitution <strong>of</strong> subjectivity. What a fuss was made over "A
Child Is Being Beaten," what efforts exerted to write passive
sentences in those languages that have such a mood. I should
point out here that the logic <strong>of</strong> the constitution <strong>of</strong> the phobic
object also requires such a procedure <strong>of</strong> passivation. In parallel
fashion to the setting up <strong>of</strong> the signifying function, phobia,