Translator Roudiez notes the challenge of rendering Kristeva's increasingly metaphorical and poetic language into English.

Kristeva defines the abject as neither subject nor object, yet sharing opposition to the individual 'I.'

Kristeva identifies the human corpse as the ultimate paradigm of abjection, confronting the viewer with their own mortality.

Kristeva introduces 'primal repression,' arguing that a form of repression occurs before the conscious and unconscious division ever arises.

Kristeva argues the infant's violent separation from the mother constitutes the foundational origin of the abject.

Kristeva sketches the Oedipal Triangle of father, mother, and child, then dismantles it as chronologically insufficient.

Kristeva challenges Freud's two founding taboos, arguing the prohibition on incest is more revealing than the prohibition on murder.

Kristeva distinguishes secular filth from sacred defilement, establishing them as different categories of boundary violation.

Kristeva examines Leviticus's purity codes, concluding the body must be clean and proper to enter the Symbolic order.

Kristeva introduces Céline as her central case study, framing his novels as the paradigmatic example of abject literature.

Kristeva reads Journey to the End of the Night as a narrative suspended between 'apocalypse and carnival.'

Kristeva identifies a childbirth scene in Céline's novel as reaching the 'ultimate of abjection.'

Kristeva examines Céline's pro-Nazi pamphlets and argues his antisemitic rage is directed against Symbolic Law itself.

Kristeva close-reads Céline's later style as 'spoken writing' that smuggles speech into prose to subvert grammar.

Kristeva reaffirms that literature is the site where the abject ruptures into the Symbolic, validating her choice of Céline.

Powers of Horror opens by establishing the abject as that which threatens the border between self and other, with the human corpse as its ultimate form. Kristeva traces the origin of abjection to the infant's primal separation from the mother, introducing the concept of primal repression. Moving from individual psychology to collective society, she examines religious taboos and biblical purity codes as cultural mechanisms for managing the abject. Kristeva then turns to Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels as the literary paradigm of the abject, tracing abjection through his depictions of war, suffering, and the maternal. She analyzes his antisemitic pamphlets as an expression of rage against Symbolic Law before close-reading his subversive, speech-like prose style. The book concludes by affirming literature as the only space where the abject can be openly unveiled rather than repressed.

The core argument: abjection, its origins, and literature's power to unveil it.

Roudiez notes that French 'propre' means both 'clean' and 'proper,' demonstrating the connotative difficulty of translation.

Kristeva identifies food loathing and revulsion at bodily waste as the oldest and most basic form of abjection.

Kristeva argues that people with borderline personality disorder have failed to separate cleanly from the abject.

Kristeva argues the superego drives away the abject, yet the abject continues to haunt the speaking subject.

Kristeva revisits Freud's famous case study of Little Hans, arguing the castration fear interpretation is incomplete.

Kristeva argues Hans's phobia originates in a preverbal, pre-sexual failure of object construction rather than castration fear.

Kristeva draws on Mary Douglas's structural analysis to theorize defilement as a cultural boundary marker.

Kristeva argues that through psychosexual development the mother herself becomes an abjected and rejected object.

Kristeva uses Noah's burnt offerings after the flood as an example of ritual purification restoring biblical order.

Kristeva concludes that biblical prohibitions surrounding human corpses function to ward off the psychoanalytic death wish.

Kristeva addresses Céline's Nazi collaboration and antisemitism openly, refusing to condone them while framing them as abjection.

Kristeva argues that only abject literature, not realist fiction, can truly witness the horror and suffering of war.

Kristeva discusses Céline's doctoral dissertation on puerperal fever as foundational groundwork for the themes of his novel.

Kristeva unpacks the 'two-faced mother' theme, analyzing how Céline constructs female characters as simultaneously degraded and dangerous.

Kristeva concedes to the beauty of literature as sublimation, despite her work being one of 'disappointment and frustration.'

This pool traces the secondary argumentative moves that deepen Kristeva's theory of abjection. From the translator's observation about the slipperiness of language to Kristeva's analysis of bodily disgust and borderline psychology, these events flesh out the theoretical groundwork. In the book's middle section, Kristeva draws on Mary Douglas and biblical narrative to show how religious systems codify and manage abjection through defilement and ritual. The discussion then shifts to Céline, whose Nazi collaboration and antisemitism Kristeva refuses to excuse, and whose dissertation on puerperal fever grounds his novel's maternal themes. Through the two-faced mother and the horror of war literature, Kristeva demonstrates how the abject ruptures into Céline's fiction. The pool concludes with Kristeva's reluctant but genuine concession that literature's beauty remains the only available response to nihilistic despair.

Supporting arguments: borderline psychology, cultural taboo, and Céline's literary world.

Kristeva argues the abject haunts the speaking subject as uncanny, familiar from before birth but now deeply disturbing.

Kristeva defines the 'chora' as a preverbal, pre-Symbolic stage of pure drives and feelings lasting the first six months.

Kristeva cites Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Borges, and Artaud as writers who each engage the abject in distinct ways.

Kristeva argues Hans's father substitutes language for maternal care, placing the phobia's root in a preverbal rupture.

Kristeva reveals that the real danger of incest is non-differentiation from the mother, not societal disruption.

Kristeva analyzes Sophocles' Oedipus plays, arguing abjection erupts when Oedipus discovers both desire and death at once.

Kristeva distinguishes two interpretations of impurity: disobeying divine law versus making contact with a demonic force.

Kristeva interprets Christian confession as a spoken ritual of purification that acknowledges the believer's contact with the abject.

Kristeva concludes that in Christianity, power resides in language and the spoken word rather than in the 'Judge-God.'

Kristeva invokes Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque to frame how Céline disrupts social hierarchies in his fiction.

Kristeva describes the father figure in Céline's novel as 'cartoon-like' and places the narrative on the brink of fascism.

Kristeva argues Céline views Jewish individuals as envied 'preferred sons,' revealing the psychological core of his hatred.

Kristeva connects Céline's antisemitism to abjected femininity, suggesting repressed homosexual desire as a motivating force.

Kristeva concludes Céline's merging of syntax and emotion can only produce the nihilistic 'laughter of the apocalypse.'

Kristeva warns the abject will keep inserting itself into culture as phobias and neuroses, demanding direct psychoanalytic confrontation.

This pool gathers the pivotal intellectual turns that reorient Kristeva's argument at each stage of the essay. It opens with her identification of the abject as uncanny and her definition of the pre-symbolic chora, then pivots through her references to literary figures who each engage the abject in distinct ways. The case of Little Hans reveals how language substitutes for maternal care, and the analysis of Sophocles shows how abjection surfaces in the discovery of desire and death together. Moving through Jewish and Christian frameworks, Kristeva maps how confession and language itself become sites of power over the abject. In the Céline chapters, Kristeva uncovers increasingly disturbing revelations: the cartoon father, the envied Jewish 'preferred son,' and the link between antisemitism and abjected femininity. The pool ends with Céline's apocalyptic laughter and Kristeva's warning that the abject will keep reasserting itself unless confronted directly.