Michaux

Powers of Horror was one of the four books I brought with me into Baghdad. Peter L. Wilson advised me to bring two long and difficult books because wars are both boring and scary so it is important to keep the mind sharp. Of course I over packed and brought four.
This is all I had read from Kristeva. I couldn't read anymore, or rather I couldn't take in what she was writing about anymore. The simultaneous experience and reflection (through the difficult terrain of Kristeva's language of psychoanalysis and literature) of suffering and abjection was too much.

	Fragment from Powers of Horror
	JULIA KRISTEVA There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful -- a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. Back
	Powers of Horror was one of the four books I brought with me into Baghdad. Peter L. Wilson advised me to bring two long and difficult books because wars are both boring and scary so it is important to keep the mind sharp. Of course I over packed and brought four. This is all I had read from Kristeva. I couldn't read anymore, or rather I couldn't take in what she was writing about anymore. The simultaneous experience and reflection (through the difficult terrain of Kristeva's language of psychoanalysis and literature) of suffering and abjection was too much.