What is the exact relation between semiotic, symbolic, thetic, and chora? What is the difference between Kristeva's use of the term chora in Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror? How are chora, narcissism, and abjection related in Kristeva's discourse? How do Kristeva's and Derrida's interpretations of chora illuminate one another? What is the relationship between the maternity and chora, and what light does this relationship shed on feminism, on women's relation to language and representation, specifically on the problem of castration, and women's relation to castration? Is there a sense in which the Platonic chora, which is likened to the maternal, anticipates the relationship that Kristeva articulates between chora and abjection? How far does what Derrida refers to as "the art of Plato the writer!" (K: 106) condition everything that could be said here about the relation between literature and philosophy, and even the relationship between femininity and masculinity? Derrida says "When they explicitly touch on myth, the propositions of the Timaeus all seem ordered by a double motif. In its very duplicity, it would constitute the philosopheme of the mytheme . . . installed from Plato to Hegel" (K: 122). How far can the subordination of mythos to logos that Plato and Hegel both effect be understood as different symptoms of a defense against abjection? Can the negativity of chora consist of an aggressivity or transgression comparable to the negative forces of abjection, does it derive from a trauma that is unassimilable, unbreachable and unsusceptible to the sublation and strengths of the dialectical or speculative thought that definitively characterizes Hegelian idealism?
Of course I will not be able to do justice to this veritable barrage of questions here. So I set myself up for failure even before I have properly begun–a gesture I invoke, and observe myself invoking, in order to signal a movement that only just begins to touch the surface of the real issue that concerns me here, a gesture that imitates–although it can never be adequate to (and here is the rub) what it purports to expose as a fundamentally non-mimetic relationship. Of that, more later.
Part I
I want to take up the problem of instability that Kristeva names "chora." The process of naming the chora is emblematic of the problem that the chora names. To name the chora is to bring it into the realm of the symbolic, thereby transforming the semiotic into the symbolic in the very gesture that was intended to designate it as distinct from the symbolic. The semiotic is thus represented symbolically, although what it designates is pre-symbolic. The specificity of the semiotic is thus concealed by the very term that recognizes it, bringing it into being by naming it. The symbolic lends legitimacy to the semiotic, conferring upon it the status of existence. Without the capacity for symbolic representation, the meaning of the semiotic cannot be articulated, but as soon as the semiotic is afforded representation, named, or posited, it is also misnamed: it is no longer what is was. Even this formulation is misleading, since the point is that the semiotic cannot exist outside the symbolic, cannot be recognized without being named. Therefore the very process of naming the semiotic, the very gesture by which it is brought into the realm of representation–and by which it exists–is also a process that undermines it. The semiotic cannot be named without being undermined, cancelled out, or obliterated. This problematic of naming, conceptualising, or representing that which resists being named or categorised is what Kristeva has in mind when she says in Revolution in Poetic Language that the Platonic chora thus "makes explicit an insurmountable problem for discourse" (RPL: 239). The "difficult reasoning" that the chora consists in the fact that "though it is lost as soon as it is posited, it is nonexistent without this positing" (RPL: 32).
Women both owe their existence as subjects that can be represented at all to the system that excludes them, and constitute the extradited other that the system cannot represent as such. Women are thus the residue that the system cannot cope with, and at the same time they provide the conditions that faciliate the symbolic as a system –the outside that guarantees the coherence of the system, the unthought ground, the unacknowledged substrate, a place-holder. As such, women are always already incorporated into the system even as they suffer exclusion from it. I hardly need add that when I say women, this does not exclude the possibility that those who would not necessarily be categorized biologically as women can and do occupy the position of women to varying degrees. That is, in this context, they take on abjection. The fact that I retain the term women is most importantly a political and strategic decision on which I would want to insist, despite the oversimplification I commit in doing so. I choose the term women here rather than, say, black, working-class, homosexual or a host of other labels that sometimes specify the abject in this society at this time, because I am interested in exploring the connotation Kristeva gives to the maternal chora. I am interested in exploring maternity as a site that thematically informs and constitutes the position of abjection. One of the underlying problems in the background of my question about abjection is the privileged relationship psychoanalytic feminist theorists influenced by Lacan (amongst whom I include Kristeva and Irigaray, though neither of them can be labelled unproblematically either psychoanalytic theorists or feminists) accord to sexual difference. By privileging sexual difference, and by construing access to language as situated in relation to castration, Kristeva appears to make sexual difference more fundamental than racial difference. Psychoanalysis appears to endorse the idea that sexual difference plays a founding role in "constituting" (however this overworked term is to be understood) the socio-symbolic realm in a way that cannot be said for race or for socio-economic differences. I want to take seriously this suggestion, although I am not sure I agree with it. I suspect that the suggestion can only be maintained by oversimplifying the complex of related but specific problems identified by racism, nationalism, ethnicity, imperialism, and colonialism. My political decision to retain the term women as a designation of the other, this insistence on naming women the abject that facilitates but is not encompassed by the symbolic–this mis-naming–rests upon a conceptual elaboration of women's relation to castration. While feminists who lack much investment in psychoanalytic theory have tended to deny women's castration, other feminists who are more identified with psychoanalysis have responded by accepting the castration thesis and using it as a critical resource to undermine phallogocentrism. Both responses are problematic. To accept the idea of women's castration is to run the risk of putting women outside language, thereby depriving us of any effective means of intervention in the socio-political order. To deny the castration thesis is to risk obliterating the question of sexual difference by making women into token men, eliminating at the same time whatever critical purchase women might gain from our marginality.
The problem of women's place in relation to castration can be read as a problem that repeats the structure of designating the semiotic within the symbolic–a structure in which the positing of the semiotic by the symbolic is as necessary as it is debilitating. In so far as women have been the place-holder of otherness, the residue that both anchors the symbolic system and is excluded from it–we function as an enabling but excluded other.
Women's inclusion within the symbolic–or the extent to which women are considered subjects equal to men–is a process of colonization by a system that cannot sustain any radical divergence from it or challenge to it: even as we are barred proper entry from the symbolic, there is a sense in which we are always already included within it in a way that not only neutralizes and disinfects the alterity of women, but which also grants us a certain provisional subjectivity. The system thereby protects itself from any challenge from outside, from any disruptive influence the excluded other as other might create, by both retaining a place of sorts–albeit ritually circumscribed by unwritten rules of exclusion–for its others, and designating it as more properly belonging to the outside. A pre-emptive strike is thus effected: the destructive aspect of the excluded other is anticipated, accounted for, and negated, rendered innocuous and inoffensive, cancelled out by a system that first reserves a place for disruptive influences, calculating in advance any risks that might be posed and thereby innoculating itself from any radical alteration. Secondly, the system restores its own authority by creating an inner sphere of invisible privilege, a sanctified circle that operates along the lines of a pacified, opaque, but rigorous repetition of what might be called secondary exclusion. Current shorthand for this symbolic position is "white men," a system that incorporates within it token blacks and women.
Its very instability, ambiguity, and uncertainty, and Plato's hesitation as to its status –is it a thing or a mode of language? (RPL: 239) is what makes chora an appropriate term for Kristeva. It can neither be posited nor rendered axiomatic, it is neither sign nor signifier, neither model nor copy; it lacks unity and identity, has no position or thesis; it precedes figuration and specularization (see RPL: 26). The ambivalence and uncertain status of the chora is reflected in the fact–or perhaps we should say it is a result of the fact–that it is "produced recursively" (RPL: 69). The semiotic "underlies and conditions" the symbolic (RPL: 241), and yet–given its dependence on the symbolic (without which it would have no existence, could not be named or recognized)–the idea that it "precedes" the symbolic must be brought into question, since "it exists in practice only within the symbolic" (RPL: 68). The functioning of the semiotic is therefore more properly described as a transgression of the symbolic order, as an explosion or incursion into the symbolic, as a negativity (RPL: 68-9). Negativity is to be distinguished from negation, since it is not the act of a judging subject (RPL: 28). In this sense it lacks the objectivity or universality of the Hegelian "we."
Not yet subjected to law--as pre-symbolic (see RPL: 27)–the chora is "nevertheless subject to a regulating process" (RPL: 26), an "ordering" –the principle of which, according to Kristeva, is the "mother's body" (RPL: 27). In proposing the chora as susceptible to a maternal and bodily regulation or ordering principle, Kristeva is drawing on Plato's reference to the chora as "nourishing and maternal" (RPL: 26), but she is also indebted to Freudian and Lacanian notions of the unconscious, the drives and primary processes that articulate (RPL: 17 and 30) the fragmented substance (RPL: 22), not yet constituted as the body of the subject (RPL: 25). This articulation is arranged and constrained by "family and social structures" (RPL: 25), configured, in other words, by Oedipal triangulation (see RPL: 22).
Drives are said to be both positive and negative, but their ultimate characteristic is destructive and aggressive, for it is the death drive that predominates (RPL: 28). Thus Kristeva can say, "The semiotic chora . . . can be thought of both as a delaying of the death drive and as a possible realization of this drive" (RPL: 241). Since the death drive is the predominant drive, this Freudian reference only makes explicit an aspect of chora that is already implicit in the very fact that the naming of the chora is also its undermining, its undoing: there is a destructive, aggressive, transgressive movement that belongs to the representation of chora as semiotic, an aspect that is taken up in terms of abjection in Powers of Horror. Here Kristeva comments about primary repression: "what is repressed cannot really be held down, and . . . what represses always already borrows its strength and authority from what is apparently very secondary: language" (PH: 13-14). We encounter here the same problem that preoccupied Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language–the instability, ambiguity, and uncertainty of chora, the way in which primary repression rests upon a borrowed strength. In Powers of Horror chora is a "receptacle of narcissism" (PH: 13), and abjection is "a kind of narcissistic crisis" (PH: 14). In abjection, says Kristeva, we are confronted on the one hand with our animality, and on the other hand with our early attempts to break away from the hold of the maternal object (see PH: 12-13). She says "The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging or (being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm–in other words, the problem she has with the phallus that her father or her husband stands for–-is not such as to help the future subject leave the natural mansion" (PH: 13).
The maternal is thus caught up in narcissism and implicated by abjection. There is a destructive underside of the maternal ethic demanded of women, and this destructiveness is not unrelated to the problem of castration–the fact that women look outside themselves for a paternal figure to represent for them the phallus of which women (precisely as mothers) feel themselves deprived. If women feel the lack of the phallus in ways that concern their inability to guarantee access to it, men experience themselves as failing to have, to control, to possess the phallus, while also finding themselves in the position of being expected to, if not embody, at least symbolize the phallus. The ways in which this deprivation and failure will play itself out in individual cases will of course vary to the extent of sometimes placing women and men in empirically similar situations, although the structures informing these positions will radically diverge.
Part II
Derrida comments that interpreters of the Timaeus generally fail to ask themselves questions about the "tradition of rhetoric which places at their disposal (met à leur disposition) a reserve of concepts (une réserve de concepts) which are very useful but which are all built upon th[e] distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, which is precisely what the thought of the Khora can no longer get along with . . ." (K: 21/92).
The "tradition of rhetoric," a tradition which "places" at the "disposal" of Plato's interpreters "a reserve of concepts" is also–and perhaps above all–a tradition which draws on a remnant, a deposit that it can never fully recuperate, for which it can never properly account, but which remains indispensable for its successful operation. This deposit, this residue, this mess–a chaotic, unformed mass–can be figured as the feminine, as maternal, as that which gives rise to language, gives way to language, provides a place for the said, but as that which is not yet, not ever, in itself, linguistic. The first name, the maternal name, the prename, chora.
The sexing of the chora is already found in Plato, a theme that Derrida picks up on when he says that chora "seems to be . . . determined with regard to the sexual type: Timaeus speaks of 'mother' and 'nurse' in regard to this subject. He does this in a mode which we shall not be in a hurry to name" (K: 91-2/21). What is this "mode," this unnamed mode that is not to be hurried, according to Derrida? And why should we not hurry to name it? The concern about haste, the concern about naming too quickly expresses a wish to linger over the very "possibility of naming" (K: 92/21 ). Such a possibility, "just like the khora and with just as much necessity . . . cannot easily be situated, assigned to a residence: it is more situating than situated, an opposition which must in its turn be shielded from some grammatical or ontological alternative between the active and the passive" (K: 92/22). Here, Derrida returns to the figure of the feminine, in the guise of the mother. This return takes place under the sign of a disruption. The distinction between the proper and the metaphorical, the proper and the improper is disarmed. Derrida says: "We shall not speak of metaphor, but not in order to hear, for example, that the Khora is properly a mother, a nurse, a receptacle, a bearer of imprints or gold. It is perhaps because its scope goes beyond or falls short of the polarity of metaphorical sense versus proper sense that the thought of the Khora exceeds the polarity, no doubt analogous, of the mythos and the logos" (K: 92/22). With this gesture Derrida returns the question of the mother, the nurse, the sexual type to the question of logic that he had posed before the proper opening of his essay, in an epigraph by Vernant, in which the "logic of the ambiguous, of the equivocal, of polarity" is offered by myth, a "logic other than the logic of the logos" (K: 89/16). It seems fitting that Derrida should return the question of sexual difference to a questioning of logic–a logic of excess, a logic that breaks the rules of its own game, a logic of contradiction, that inhabits both sides of the opposition logos/mythos at once, prevaricating, oscillating, being first one, then the other, never being fully identified with either side of the opposition, inhabiting neither one nor the other, rather giving form to, making sense of the opposition as an opposition –and thereby disrupting the authority and finality of either side of the opposition: exploiting and undermining any priority that reason might try to accrue for itself over emotion, or mind might claim over matter, or intelligibility over sensibility. The figure of the feminine is enlisted in this work of disruption.
How can this figuring of the feminine be at once a privileged motif, yet at the same time a disruptive force of resistance? How can it both inhabit one side of an apparently circumscribed and fixed opposition--and yet thoroughly and radically infiltrate and undermine the fixity and authority of the very opposition that situates it? How can the feminine both designate that which is outside, beyond, resistant to any system of opposites, and yet consistently take its place as one partner, one side of the dichotomies that are systematically set in motion by, and which bring to life the dynamism of metaphysical thinking? How does the feminine mobilize and breathe life into the system as one part of a sequence of oppositions, and yet retain a distance, an imperviousness, sustaining itself as outside, as remainder, as excluded other, as foreign alterity, as precisely a figure for expulsion?
Abjection would be the relation between what the system finds unacceptable, and what the subject finds unacceptable in the system. It would both be what confronts the subject as that which cannot be assimilated, or incorporated, and that without which the system could not function as a system. In this sense abjection would provide closure. It would be that which facilitates a cathartic, mimetic, self-sustaining illusion of completeness that the system must maintain for itself in order to keep going, in order for representation to take place, and at the same time, it would be a symptom of that fantasmatic wholeness. An excluded other, the outside, the monstrous, untamed, undigested, profligate, unapologetic criminal. The system spits out its unwanted debris–its spurious others become so many material sacrifices, so many casualities of law and order. The system thus pretends that there is no threat, that the threatening of the threat can be contained, tamed.
We should not assume that those of us who adopt positions of abjection, whether by default or otherwise, from time to time–those of us, let us rather say, who allow ourselves to be abjected, who submit ourselves to abjection, who–let's be absolutely honest–submit others to abjection in our abject modes, for abjection respects no boundaries, whether these markers demarcate self and other, or ultimately any other metaphysical distinction–let us not believe that those who fall upon/are befallen by (the active and the passive is likewise a distinction that ceases to be adequate here [see K: 92/22], which is not to say it becomes entirely meaningless), let us not be so severely mistaken as to think that the mode of abjection lacks jouissance. Abjection exacts its costs, to be sure, but neither is it without a certain painful pleasure. You will forgive me if, at the risk of going to the other extreme, I indulge my resistance to an overly schematic discourse in order to catch sight of something like this forbidden pleasure.
Part III
The approach to abjection occurs indirectly (see PH: 1) A "revolt" "looms" within abjection. The revolt is directed against a "threat," a threat which is indeterminate. It "seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside" (PH: 1)–it appears then to derive from what exceeds the distinction between inside and outside, from a beyond that cannot be calculated as either within the system or outside the system. To locate it inside the system would be to render it thinkable, definable, to tame it, while to banish it as outside the system would be to locate it still in terms of the system–it would be on the other side of the system, outside the boundary or limit of the thinkable, in opposition to what is incorporated by the system. As such the outside would still be understood by reference to the inside, and would be therefore susceptible to being brought within the system: it would be conquerable, colonizable, capable of becoming cultured, tamed, civilized.
Neither inside, nor outside, the abject is unthinkable. It disrupts the terms of the opposition between inner and outer, system and non-system, subject and object. It is not the correlate of the subject–it is not an object. If it has a correlate at all, its correlate (but correlation is not an adequate way of conceiving it, presupposing a kind of correspondence) is the superego: "To each ego its object, to each superego its abject" (PH: 2). If I cannot embody the superego, I will become the abject. Oscillation, rather than correspondence, would better describe this relation. In abjection I will not just fall short of the symbolic other, I will radically and self-destructively undermine its very efficacy. To make abjection into an object would be to reduce the abject to something identifiable, to put it in its place. But the system is precisely incapable of coping with abjection–abjection marks a limit, it is aporetic. The system finds the abject unbearable, intolerable, unassimilable. The abject cannot simply be taken up by the system, rendered intelligible, attributed a meaning, subjected to an economy. It resists incorporation, it disrupts the logic of the system. It is "the place where meaning collapses" (PH: 2). "And yet . . . the abject does not cease challenging its master" (PH: 2). Even if it is not simply outside (as opposed to inside), it still "lies outside, beyond the set" (PH: 2), and as such it still poses some kind of limit, than that of the regional. Not a simple boundary, nor edge, nor opposition, nor negation, but rather the stopping-point, the caesura, the breaking-point, the breakdown of the system. It is in fact another kind of limit. Not one that plays by the rules of the game, but one that refuses the terms: a refusal, a no, a silent scream, an impasse, and in this sense a "safeguard" (PH: 2). Here is where reality is turned down, turned away, shattered: "a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me" (PH: 2), so instead, I annihilate it, at least for a time–and by the same stroke, I annihilate myself, taking on the impossible by destroying myself. For it is something that I cannot take on, cannot bear, cannot submit myself to, and yet I cannot overcome it. I become it, yes, I embrace the abject, abjecting myself, but I do not control or conquer it. I rewrite the rules–precisely by abhoring them, ignoring them, paying them no heed, being unable to abide by them, seeing their impossiblity. I demolish the rules in order to reform reality, to re-structure the world. I erase all the supporting structures in order to have to start again from the beginning, building up again from the start, piece by weary piece. And in the process, I punish myself--and any others who happen to get in the way might be casualties of my own self-denigration. Falling by the wayside, they are included, sometimes and in some respects by my own harsh castigation that observes no boundaries, cannot observe the usual distinctions of self/other, peace/violence, for abjection is in the business precisely of obliterating the meaning and function and safety of these categories.
My vomiting protects me, my gagging prevents me from being taken in, subsumed by the system, depended on, stops me becoming a part of the machine, interrupts the well-being and equanimity of everybody. Stops everybody short. You cannot merely go on, in the face of abjection. I will make myself a mess, I will mess up the system, I will infect you with the impossibility you have demanded of me, and which I cannot be, and I will turn it into another kind of impossibility. You have produced a system that is intolerable, and I have introduced the intolerable back into the system, thrown it back as impossible, taken on the impossibility you ask of me, the unbearable and the intolerable, I have become it. I have taken on what cannot be taken on, I have been transformed by something, I have become inhuman. I am not me. This is what was required of me, not to be me, and yet in becoming not me, I have upset the system that asked me not to be me. For I am not the objectified object that was required, I am no longer subject, but neither am I object. I have defied these categories, I have misaligned the categories, I have thrown a spanner in the works. Usually through some kind of bodily incursion–whether I impose my body on the world, or allow the world to cut up my body, or refuse, using my body as an instrument of denial, the world, or reduce the world to the bodies of others–my body is all that is left. I become nothing but my body, my mind all but gone, used up, and using up other peoples' bodies, other peoples' minds. And soon even my body is nothing, wasting away.
Of course, "I" have done nothing–it is not I: this shrill, unnatural, unimaginable being, I am no longer me. It is not something I have done, not what I have accomplished, it is not an act. It has no telos, issues from no deliberation, is no part of a rational plan. I did not do it. I am abjected, called by the abject, outside myself. I do not recognize myself, I am not me, I am no longer me, I am someone else. Who is this, whose wrists have been cut, whose faeces have been smeared on my body, whose body refuses to contain the food it tries to eat–who must ingest the Other–whether food, or sex, or something else that represents the Other--this is not me, I have not done this to myself, not to me. I was not here when it happened. I haven't been around for a while.
I insist, I am not the author of this –this abomination. This abomination is the author of me, as if I was not responsible, and cannot be held to account. But I still speak of myself, I still speak, I am still I.
And you, a sad, side effect of the system that ate me up, threw me out, a carcass, a shell, a hollowed out frame, you demand of me a reason, an apology, an excuse? How ironic! Don't you see the point? I can give no excuse, or reason, or apology, I have nothing left. I have destroyed everything. Don't you see? This was not directed against you, you are nothing–you are nothing–in all of this, this is not about you. That is so much beside the point. What is there, after all, to understand? A lapse, an interruption, a break. A rupture, a cataclysmic rupture. There is nothing here to be understood, just a breakdown, a refusal, a no–the screech of ravens, a catastrophic rending, and my being impaled on this unimaginable plane I have created for myself, with no escape. And yet I am above all of that. There is nothing here for you, nothing here for you to understand, nothing here, no cleaning up for you to do. No astringent, no solvent, nothing can disinfect me of this. Only memory allows a fading to take place, time passes, wounds heal, memory gives way to new events, and old ones become just a perspective, only a time glimpsed behind curtains, just a scene that sometimes intervenes when you least expect it, none of its horror alleviated, but newly transmuted by who knows what underground terrain.
There is only the insistence of this voice that I did not discover, it discovered me. I had given up trying at the time. Thinking it could not be found, expression would not come, events refused to be reported, life just went on. It tried to go on.
An incursion, an inversion, a revolt of being. A stick, a stone, a moan.
Denial, guilt, frustration, yelling.
I will watch your embarrassed smiles, and I will not try to account for myself, nor try to deny a thing, I will not apologize for what your world has made me do, this world you have accepted, for which you have made every accommodation, and for which you will continue to compromise yourselves, sickeningly, maddeningly, tolerating, bearing, putting up with everything, finding even good ways of living in this perverse, corrupted, world. We will see if you can put up with me. I will watch your embarrassed smiles, your words of solace, dancing around what I have done, not quite coming to it, not quite mentioning the unmentionable, the unconscionable, the event, night of horror, il y a. You are paternal, maternal, you are kind and generous, you are open, you understand how things can go wrong under pressure. You will not judge, you will give me coffee and biscuits, feed me red wine, offer me salad. And I will take none of it seriously, will be grateful for nothing. You will let me stay in you house, sleep in your bed, lie on your couch, pet the dog. The children will still like you, your eyes will tell me benignly, they are glad to have you here, we know you are safe now we are looking after you. You will be the conversation in all the houses.
You will elicit my promises to keep in touch, you will repeat "if there is anything I can do . . . " and you will mean it, you will do it, should I ask. And you will know that I will not return, that I will not ask, even before I do.
The spring will come, the leaves will turn, hope will return. Delicate branches produce their expected flowers and everything in the world outside will appear to be normal. The days will pass, the grass will be green, and the world will be a brighter place. Life continues, other peoples' crises will erupt. I will be asked to cope with them. Coping will take me out of myself, it will reconstruct me. I will even feel, by and by, that I must have been chosen in some way, I will learn from the experience, I will become a better person, more caring, more capable. I will be able to relate to others in their pain and sorrow. Abjection makes the world a viable place, makes the world go round, it enters into the economy it seeks to undo precisely by remaining forever and impossibly outside it. By naming it, we incorporate it, by incorporating it, we sanctify and purify it, rendering it safe, subjecting it to rules, codifying it, explaining it, understanding it. But nothing addresses the moment when abjection has its way, and I am crushed by it. Nothing can atone for this. So I will continue to exact punishment in its name, although any remnant of the I that remains knows that I have already gone way too far--beyond redemption, beyond the bearable, beyond the acceptable, beyond forgiveness, beyond what can be humanly tolerated. And still I will push on--beyond the all the limits, emptying out any possibility of hope. Even when hope stares me in the face saying "there is still time, you can still come back, I will boldly, slyly hold my ground. My face will be masked, my eyes hooded, I will not look you in the eye. I will be a stone. I will close my mind, set myself against you, so early in the morning. The emptiness, the speechlessness of abjection prepares me for nothing, finally, only its inevitable return. Nothing can be adequate to this, no amount of seeking damages, or compensation can speak to the abject as such. The abject can be named, can be identified,