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Notes
notes
1 For elaboration of this process and clarification of terms see Kristeva, Powers of Horror, esp. chapters 1 and 2.
2 The modern subject, as I read it, does not have a categorical origin but is an entity that evolves, from around the time in which René Descartes was writing (the mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth century), up to and through the period de Bolla delimits (1756–63). More generally, though, the concept of a self (or ego) can be traced at least as far back as Saint Augustine, and is probably as transhistorical as (and a product of) Kristeva's abject.
3 Sublimation is nothing else than the possibility of naming the … pre-objectal … In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being. (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 11)
4 This idea relates to the logic of the parergon in Derrida's Truth in Painting.
5 Along with Hadewijch I am thinking, in particular, of Marguerite Porete (c.1250–1310), Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210–c.1285), and Angela of Foligno (c.1248–1309), which are each illustrative of a new mysticism that arose in the thirteenth century, which, through the process of self-sacrifice to/for an absolute Other (God), helped to forge new (especially female) subject positions. On this idea see McGinn 141–42, 199, 12.
6 On this point, along with Easthope's article, see Castle's The Female Thermometer.
7 Wolfreys, for instance, sees the spectral “at the heart of any narrative of the modern” (3).
8 See Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime 180; and Freeman 69–70.
9 See Janowitz 3; and Ashfield and de Bolla 233–43.
10 See Burke, Enquiry, in Ashfield and de Bolla 139.
11 On the “semiotic” modality of signifying practice see Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, esp. chapter 1.
12 See Kristeva, Black Sun 97–103.
13 See my article “Coleridge's Translucence.” On the idea of the deject see Kristeva, Powers of Horror 8.