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Pathological Identity and the Ambiguities of Race and Class: Nature and the Anxious Naturalism of Frank Norris and Rebecca Harding Davis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Stephen Germic
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Extract

Distinctions are most zealously produced in theory where they least exist in fact. This axiom is a crucial aspect of the concept of abjection as it is used by theorists of white male hysteria. Julia Kristeva writes that, for the abject, “‘unconscious’ contents remain… excluded but in a strange fashion.” They remain excluded to a degree that “a defensive position [can] be established, [but] not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object” (7). In particular, it is the presence of the other with the self around which the often hysteric dance of exclusion takes place. Kristeva writes, “I abject myself within the same motion through which T claim to establish myself” (3).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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