Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Bulgarian-French linguist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1941-) is the author of Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, and Female Genius, among many others. She has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize. Her work has been highly influential in a wide variety of fields, including (but not limited to) feminist and queer literary studies, cultural criticism, Marxist critique, and linguistics. Her conception of the abject, the subject-in-process, the Semiotic, and intertextuality have deeply impacted postmodern studies.

Sigmund Freud (1836-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the father of modern psychotherapy. His most important work (such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Ego and the Id, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle) focused on the ways that the unconscious mind affects conscious behavior. In addition, his theories concerning human psychosexual development, based on the myth of Oedipus, continue to exert wide influence across many fields, including psychology, literary criticism, and cultural analysis. The cultural influence of the Oedipus complex—whether or not it is accurate—cannot be overstated; as Terry Eagleton writes, “The Oedipus complex is for Freud the beginning of morality, conscience, law, and all forms of social and religious authority” (Eagleton, Terry.