“What is ...
is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses...
And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master...
On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
” –Julia Kristeva, . * We each carry within us a degree of self-loathing. A true self that is, knowingly or otherwise, hidden from the world in shame.
In fear, also, that it might elicit judgement, or disrupt the norms around us that we are socialized into and come to abide by. Within every Self, there is an Other that is trampled on, marginalized, and suppressed in the anxious belief that its acknowledgement might destabilize the Self and bring it to ruin. That is to say, we are all, on some intimate level, familiar with abjection, with the wretchedness we feel at confronting the Other within or around us.
The abject being, of course, all that is disgusting, repulsive, ugly, unfit to be in proper society, exceptional, subhuman. Gaza is the abject of our time. It is a miserable stretch of land, overpopulated and dirty, drowning in its own shit and decrepit infrastructure, beaten and abused, on the brink of death refusing the dignity of passing, of letting go.
In the Israeli collective psyche (but not just), Gaza is a dark place, full of terrorists, of angry hordes, a place where—in the words of a minister of justic.
