Powers of Horror

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Author	Julia Kristeva
Original title	Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection
Translator	Leon S. Roudiez
Language	French
Series	European perspectives
Subject	Abjection
Published	1980 (Le Seuil, in French) 1982 (Columbia University Press, in English)
Publication place	France
Media type	Print
Pages	219 pp.
ISBN	0231053460
OCLC	8430152

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (French: Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection) is a 1980 book by Julia Kristeva. The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection,^[1] in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.

According to Kristeva, the abject marks a "primal order" that escapes signification in the symbolic order; the term is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other.