Simultaneous with this linguistic development are several crises which Kristeva borrows largely from the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. Now, one is not born speaking rather, language is a gradual development during the course of one's childhood. Kristeva believes that the entire world, including one's self, is understood through language it is the only lens, so to speak, by which we can understand anything. In order to understand why the abject is not an object, one must under the post-modernist theory of language that Kristeva subscribes to. The abject, in short, is a kind of non-object that lingers in a person's psyche, the consequence of repression. From that basis, she goes onto give it a more rigorous definition. This means that Kristeva uses her personal experience-and the expressed experiences of others-to get some idea of what the abject is. Kristeva begins with what she calls a "phenomenological" investigation of the abject.
She turns to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine as an almost ideal example of the cathartic, artistic expression of the abject.
Poison opens with a quote from Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers: "The whole world is dying of panicky fright." This intertitle sets all.Kristeva examines the notion of abjection-the repressed and literally unspeakable forces that linger inside a person's psyche-and traces the role the abject has played in the progression of history, especially in religion. Both works were also palpably born out of the first phase of the AIDS emergency in the United States. Poison and Safe form a complementary pair, in my view, despite their discontinuous treatment of gender and their striking formal differences, because both lay out in paradigmatic terms the issues that have continued to preoccupy Haynes in his more recent films. This essay examines Haynes's handling of the abject in Poison and Safe, with a particular view toward the question of what kinds of political work these films perform. In Safe, Carol White's (Julianne Moore's) body itself becomes the site of the abject's disruptive return, which manifests in the form of environmental illness. Safe (US/UK, 1995) and Far from Heaven, for instance, take up the cinematic conventions associated with the maternal melodrama (the former in a much quieter way than the latter, to be sure) in order to foreground that which cannot be accommodated within the bounds of bourgeois domesticity-life-threatening illness and racial and sexual otherness. The second problematic to which Haynes's films repeatedly return concerns the psychosomatic costs of a too-forceful repudiation of the abject, or of the constitutive exclusions that are a precondition for the achievement of normative femininity.
Based on the autobiographical novels of Jean Genet, (1) and intercutting three different narratives rendered in three distinct visual modes, Poison introduces us to a host of marginal figures who, in masochistically embracing their abjection, ascend (or perhaps one should say descend) into Genetian sainthood. Jack Fairy's tactics of resignification, for example, unmistakably recall the performative strategies adopted by the outcast characters in Haynes's earlier film, Poison (US, 1991). The first concerns the performative resources provided by the condition of abjection or rejection by the social order at large. The release of Far from Heaven (US/France, 2002), in fact, makes it possible (if it was not so before) to discern in Haynes's oeuvre a pattern of alternation between two key problematics, each of which approaches the issue of abjection from a different angle. This is as true of the so-called women's films as it is of his more explicitly queer works. Though characterized by extraordinary stylistic diversity, the films of Todd Haynes have maintained a consistent focus on the theme of abjection. The very stigmata that brand him as a pariah literally provide the raw materials for his transformation into a flaming proto-pop icon. Todd Haynes, UK/US, 1998), future glam-rock trendsetter Jack Fairy stands in front of a mirror and, having been brutalized earlier by a pack of schoolyard bullies, smears the blood from his split lip into a glistening, cherry-red smile, satisfied in the knowledge that "one day the whole bloody world would be his." This is a signature Haynes moment: Fairy converts the corporeal sign of his abjection into the brazen emblem of his star power. In the opening sequence of Velvet Goldmine (dir.