(the) American (Novel of)

Eating Dogs and Women
abjection. I will be concerned, then, to acknowledge what could be said
to operate as a remainder of Kristeva’s discourse. The gestures of exclusion
that she makes in the name of exploring the strange, disturbing,
but also necessary process of abjection have the effect, I will claim, of
bracketing precisely the political and ethical implications of her work
with which the abject confronts us. The residue, or remainder, is, as
Kristeva acknowledges, ambivalent. And while I agree that such ambivalence
must be maintained, rather than rendered decidable in its
meaning, I am also convinced that abjection offers us a way of analyzing
a tension that Kristeva systematically puts aside, evades, or remainders.
This evasion, this exclusion, this—I’ll say it—abjection that might
be said to operate from the very center of her discourse about abjection
is what interests me.
Kristeva evinces a certain anxiety about the relation of cause and
effect between the speaking subject and the symbolic order, insisting
that they both “follow the same logic.” 1 That logic has as its goal
“survival.” And herein lies the problem. There is, I think, a reluctance
to take on questions about the political possibilities of transgression, for
how can historical and social mores come to be judged inappropriate
without some acknowledgment of a gap, or fissure, or lack of fit between
the symbolic order and the speaking subject? Symptoms can be
read as indicative of social forces, but there is a range of questions that
are surely worth asking that exceed that reading. To interpret the subject’s
symptom as illustrative of his or her culture leaves no room for any
critical distance of the assumptions informing that culture. Such critical
distance does not have to retreat into the naïveté of assuming transformation
can be thorough, completely revolutionary, or unambiguously
liberating. Another way of putting the problem is to couch it in terms
of Kristeva’s categorical acceptance of Freud’s Oedipal myth as founding
the social and symbolic contract. To simply say, as she does, that she
takes this myth as “logically established” is to sidestep, to remainder, an
array of important questions which perhaps allow her to say what she
says, and to do what she does, with such brilliance, but which also
sideline questions about the political effects of a symbolic system that
authorizes some subjects to abject others with apparent impunity. 2 Among
these questions are how and why the Oedipal model of triangulation
might be inapplicable both to non-Western cultures that do not display
in any straightforward way the norms imposed, enforced, and authorized
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