Literary Review

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Recommended: an essay about Sigmund Freud's Psychosexual Development

In this review I will attempt to analyse four documents which I have read and studied with a view to informing myself on the arguments surrounding my chosen subject for my thesis on Abject Art and the promotion of anarchy. I will address the arguments given and points made in each text, analyse the construction of these texts, placing them in context with other texts in this field. I will also attempt to highlight the gaps in the texts and points that have not yet been raised and why this is. These texts are a starting point to further research on this subject and are primarily from an anthropological, biological and psychoanalytical perspective. I have chosen these angles with a view of coming to a better understanding of this thematic so that I can analyse the use of the abject in contemporary art from an informed position. I have chosen various chapters, excerpts, journals and essays from authors as varied as Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Valerie Curtis and Winfried Menninghaus, and intend to prove why these documents are relevant.

The first text I will review is the chapter “Dirt, Disgust and Disease: Is hygiene in our genes?” by Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran from the journal “Perspectives in Biology and Medicine” Volume 44, Number 1, Winter 2001 pp. 17-31. In this text Curtis and Biran explain their hypothesis from a scientific point of view, touching on morality, based on extensive research into disgust using information obtained from qualitative field work, interviewing several hundred people from various countries and economic classes. Their argument is that disease avoidance is equally, if not more so, answerable for certain behaviours such as disgust towards examples of the abject such as feces, vomit, spilled blood...

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...its field for the provoking of rethinking the universally generalised predispositions we hold in relation to these principles. He hypothesises that humans maintain a desire to retreat to a previous condition of imperturbability, the state of non-existance or “the death instinct”. I found that it is this hypothesis that can be used in comparison with the physical abject, as the death-instinct is a complete contradiction of the social “norm”. When the idea of body should ultimately mean life, the corpse confuses us and encourages an intrigue and fascination into the condition of the “life-less”. It provokes desire and appetite to probe and inspect but must effectively and immediately be ignored and forsaken. The engrossing must become the gross for the benefit of the tribe. For this reason I intend to continue with Freuds theories on the life-less state.
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