THE OCEAN AS ABJECT
13th February, 2017
The Ocean as Abject is an ongoing project that is also collaborative. In 1980 The Bulgarian-French Philosopher, Literary crtitic, and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva published a book called Powers of Horror. In this book she coined the phrase Abjection, which although treads a fine line with the Sublime, is not the sublime. Of the Abject Kristeva says, "There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, dircted against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable".
The idea of being, "ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the unthinkable" to my mind is a fitting desription of the possible death of the oceans. Climate Change juxtaposed with the constancy of the Carbon Dioxide Dilemma and ocean acidification, could well bring about the death of the oceans as we know them. This in terms of humanity presents an equal threat to mankind.
It is proposed to present a body of work that adresses this by approprating the notion of abjection and directly relating it to the oceanic and cultural phenomenon of our time. The work will take on the apocalyptic in terms of presence. The work has begun but not concluded and at this time is ongoing. The idea of the ocean as other is central to the idea, evoking an ocean that would indeed be beyond the scope of the possible or the unthinkable, a world that we could not live or survive in.
Julia Kristeva lives and works in Paris where she is a Professor at The University Paris Diderot. She also has a blog and her own official website.