Abjection names the unstable border where a body, a subject, or a culture expels what it cannot fully separate from itself. It is not simple rejection; it is a disturbed intimacy with what must be cast out in order for identity to hold. In Kristeva, abjection belongs to horror, disgust, maternal ambiguity, and the fragile construction of the self. The abject is what the subject must expel continuously in order to maintain the fiction of coherence and boundedness. When read as a field concept, abjection describes how archives, institutions, and disciplines protect their coherence by pushing certain materials to the edge—not outside, but to the edge. What appears impure, excessive, or disturbing may reveal the hidden labor by which a system keeps itself legible and respectable. An archive that claims to preserve important knowledge necessarily abjects other knowledge, other voices, other ways of knowing. These abjected materials do not disappear; they remain present at the boundary, constantly threatening to collapse the distinction between inside and outside. The reparative work is not to eliminate abjection—impossible, since any coherent system must produce abjection—but to recognize it. To ask what have we abjected, why did these materials seem impure, what would it mean to reintegrate them without trying to absorb them completely into our system. An archive becomes reparative when it begins to record and honor what it has been forced to expel, not to achieve purity or wholeness, but to acknowledge the necessary exclusions upon which all systems depend.
Kristeva, J. (1980) Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection. Paris: Editions du Seuil. LEXICUM 100 · Socioplastics Book 39 https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/05/lexicum-100-concepts-100-authors.html INDEX https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
