Odpad w obiegu: strategie symbolicznego recyklingu

• Authors: Anna Chromik-Krzykawska

Title variants

EN

Between Use and Refuse: Reclaiming the Abject into Culture

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

Anna Chromik-Krzykawska Between Use and Refuse: Reclaiming the Abject into Culture The paper deals with the notions of filth and waste understood as embodi­ments of cultural transgressions. The fear of pollution which underpins our culture can be read as a metaphorical anxiety of losing self-integrity: blurring the subject/object distinctions, confusing categories, and reminding us of the conventionality of any borders. Abject entities, such as human and animal excreta, putrefying corpses or corporeal fluids, are thus seen as filthy sub­stances which breech the clear-cut borders of the Symbolic. What is more, their threatening power lies also in the fact that they surpass the modernist discourse of rationality, being the ultimate embodiment of what the utilitarian system does not account for, that is, waste. In order to be reclaimed by culture, the abject must be drawn into the circuit of usefulness, and thus renamed, re­cycled and domesticated. From the anatomical renaissance which rationalized exploration of the body innards by translating it into the system of language and diagrams to the nineteenth century utopian fantasies turning polluting substances into productive riches, Western modern discourses are to a large extent delineated by their relation to the abject.

EN

Anna Chromik-Krzykawska Between Use and Refuse: Reclaiming the Abject into Culture The paper deals with the notions of filth and waste understood as embodi­ments of cultural transgressions. The fear of pollution which underpins our culture can be read as a metaphorical anxiety of losing self-integrity: blurring the subject/object distinctions, confusing categories, and reminding us of the conventionality of any borders. Abject entities, such as human and animal excreta, putrefying corpses or corporeal fluids, are thus seen as filthy sub­stances which breech the clear-cut borders of the Symbolic. What is more, their threatening power lies also in the fact that they surpass the modernist discourse of rationality, being the ultimate embodiment of what the utilitarian system does not account for, that is, waste. In order to be reclaimed by culture, the abject must be drawn into the circuit of usefulness, and thus renamed, re­cycled and domesticated. From the anatomical renaissance which rationalized exploration of the body innards by translating it into the system of language and diagrams to the nineteenth century utopian fantasies turning polluting substances into productive riches, Western modern discourses are to a large extent delineated by their relation to the abject.

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach / Śląsk Sp. z o.o. Wydawnictwo Naukowe
• Journal: ER(R)GO: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura
• Year: 2007
• Issue: 14

Dates

published

2007-01-01

Contributors

author

Anna Chromik-Krzykawska