Prompt 1: Does psychoanalytic thought (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, etc.) construe waste as a necessary “other” to psychic health in a consistent way? Or is there a break between Freud and later psychoanalytic theorists in their approach to waste?
Prompt 2: How is waste gendered in the different psychoanalytic thinkers we’ve read this week? Is this gendering consistent? Is there a politics behind this gendering, and if so, is it positive?
Prompt 3: Can Ana’s crisis in Clarice Lispector’s story “Love” be elucidated through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection? Does waste at either the conceptual level or the material level play a part in her crisis?
Kristen’s idea of abjection is ‘the jettisoned object is radically excluded and draws me toward the place-where meaning collapse (2).” Ana crisis in “Love'”, she is inside the tram and notices a blind man, the tram intentionally slowing down speed and stops, however for him, he really stopped; he was blind.
Ana shocked, compassion was suffocating her and fallen into an excruciating benevolence (119). Ana walking back home, passed through the Botanical Garden, imagined the Garden so pretty that she was afraid of Hell. Kristen’s argues that sublime has no object and removed to a secondary universe, where one is lost, delighted and fascinated. Ana also fascinated in the ‘imaginary garden’, but in contrary, was nauseated and haunted as well.
The ‘waste’ of the ‘broken eggs’ and ‘slipped coffee’ from her husband, refers to the collapsed normalcy and idea of abjection; it is not lack of cleaniness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order (4).