Abjection, affect and othering through art

In keeping within a new materialist approach, this paper involves a transversal encounter with, Kristeva’s thinking on abjection. She says of abjection, that it is a primer of culture, because as a process it is fundamental to the constitution of identity and the renewal of meaning through an expansion of language. Here, I will argue that abjection is also a primer of affect and is the operation through which affects are given valency: either negative or positive, which in turn articulate modalities of othering as oscillations between the empathetic and ethical, or repellent and adversarial derived from an instinctual movement towards what is enabling and away from that which present threst or danger to the organism. I argue further, that it is the notion of jouissance and positive affect that distinguishes Kristeva’s account of cultural production from other thinkers such as Freud, and that this has significant implications for understanding the dynamics of othering or the kinds of relationality made possible through language.