Nature as 'abject', and the ecological crisis

Julia Kristeva is a very original thinker. This Bulgarian-born, French-educated philosopher, practising psychoanalyst and novelist has contributed to humans’ self-understanding in many different ways, not least with her concept of the “abject”.

It was first proposed to explain something that may appear to some to be a lacuna in Lacan’s account of the emergence of the human subject, namely why an infant would leave the reassuring warmth and safety of its mother (or carer) to identify with its own image (in what Lacan famously called the “mirror stage”) as something independent — a “self”, as opposed to an “other”.

If the infant initially clings to the mother in such a way that it doesn’t really distinguish between itself and her body, why separate from her in the first place? Kristeva’s answer is that a process of “abjection”, in the course of which the infant shows signs of “rejecting” the mother’s body as something it wishes to keep at arm’s length, explains why it is possible for the child to turn towards its own ego-formation via the mirror-image. In short: unless “abjection” comes first, “identification” is hardly conceivable.

If all of this seems strange to anyone, consider the familiar phenomenon that children (especially teenagers; not toddlers) don’t seem to like seeing their parents naked, let alone acknowledge that they engage in sex. Mom and Dad have sex? Inconceivable! There may be exceptions to this rule, but by and large, I believe, this is the case, which the phenomenon of “abjection” explains. That which is experienced as abject is not, like a traumatic experience, repressed — that is, relegated to the unconscious; it is there, but on the fringes of one’s consciousness, in a kind of twilight of not-being-acknowledged. A corpse or cadaver is, according to Kristeva, a paradigmatic instance of the abject — it “looks” like a person, but it is no longer one, which is why one shudders at the thought of being close to a corpse.

People experience different things as abject, however — many experience cockroaches in this way, or spiders, or even something as innocuous as the little “skin” that forms on hot milk when it cools down. But whatever your special embodiment of the abject, its psychic structure remains the same: it is something that is always on the periphery of your consciousness, not really being recognised as belonging to existence, and yet, from that distance it exercises a powerful influence over one’s behaviour, albeit in negative terms.

It is like a nightmare that may explode into consciousness unexpectedly, at any time. Sometimes, when one moves rocks in one’s garden, for example, one uncovers a nest of teeming ants, which “grosses one out”, as the saying goes. This is an instance of the abject.

I mentioned the ants and other insects deliberately, because they instantiate what I really want to get to, namely the way that many — if not most — people experience nature. And I don’t mean nature in a neatly kept garden (barring the hidden ants), or in pot plants, although it may even be burrowing away in these, in the shape of the variety of worms that feed on plants. I’m talking about nature in the sense of wilderness, real wilderness, where a snake or leopard could, at any time, appear in the path along which you’re walking. Not the designer wilderness visits that are becoming so fashionable these days, with your luggage being carried for you from rest camp to rest camp.

Nature in its otherness is what I’m talking about. And my contention is that this “nature” occupies the position of the “abject” in the minds of the vast majority of 21st-century people.

Which is a great pity, because it translates into an attitude of, at worst, hostility towards anything reminiscent of nature (except, of course, those ubiquitous forest glades depicted on kitsch greeting cards) and, at best, indifference towards the “condition” or state of nature, including all the species of plants and trees, insects, animals, birds and fish on planet Earth.

Why should we care, many people would respond, despite the fact that in the nether regions of our minds we all cherish certain images of tranquil lakes or mountains as reassuring reminders that we could always “escape” the rat race of city life on a summer holiday if we really needed to. Ironic, to say the least. The very thing, the continued well-being of which hangs in the balance today, functions as a source of images of tranquillity and peace.

If you don’t believe me, use the resources at your disposal — first and foremost the internet — to check on the state of what used to be called “Mother Nature”, the source from which all living creatures came (whether or not guided by some divine intelligence). Her condition is critical, to say the least. Polluting and toxifying the oceans and rivers, overfishing, deforestation, unbridled industrialisation, destruction of wetlands and many more practices that are inimical to planetary ecosystems have brought us to a sorry pass.

I know that nature is resilient — as Jürgen Brauer showed in his book on the first Gulf War, natural ecosystems are capable of recovering in an astonishingly short time from severe devastation. But the continuing pressure on the Earth’s resources — fuelled, I believe, by the fact that nature has the status of “abject” in the minds of most people — does not really give the Earth, nature, an opportunity to regenerate itself. Several writers have suggested, not unreasonably, that the spate of incurable diseases that have emerged in the past few decades may be a manifestation of nature beginning to activate her immune system, in order to rid herself, or at least control, this attack on her resources by humans.

What one too easily forgets, is that nature, far from deserving to be put in the category of the abject, is in us, part of us, and we of it. To think of nature as being separate from the human species is itself a kind of malady the consequences of which may be disastrous, unless humanity comes to its senses and learns to live symbiotically with and within it.

Anyone interested in this subject may wish to read a more exhaustive treatment of it in my paper, Nature as ‘Abject’, Critical Psychology, and ‘Revolt’: The Pertinence of Kristeva. South African Journal of Psychology, Vol 37, No 3, 2007, pp 443-469