As a resident of Chalmette, I unfortunately have to wake up earlier than most in order to make it to Loyola, commuting those extra twenty-five minutes or so proving a sometimes-torturous task. However, the drive could hardly be described as boring as a multitude of varying sights present themselves: car accidents, demolitions, rusty drawn bridges, trains decorated with graffiti, road renovations, and of course, the New Orleans population. Yet, a certain segment of this population makes me particularly uncomfortable when I’m the first to pull up to a red light: the homeless who resort to begging—aggressively hassling you one minute, blessing you the next.
Slowing down as I approached a red light near the ramp to the interstate on the corner of Elysian Fields and Claiborne, I instantly noticed the destitute appearing man holding a sign that more than likely spoke of his troubled past, uncertain future, and burdens at hand; I’ve read so many that I often get them muddled. And while I wanted to make eye contact with the man who shamelessly stood at the corner begging in the increasing heat, something repulsed me from the temptation, for though this man and I shared so many similarities, he came across as foreign. Yet, it was in these moments of discomfort as to how to handle the situation that I thought back to Kristeva’s abject (seriously) and how it could possibly be applied to my feelings of unease that could only be relieved by the signifier of “go,” the green light.
According to Kristeva, the feeling of abjection “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” Taking this definition into account, this seemingly homeless man, while having the world before him, opposed the socially constructed “norms” of making a living through hard, honest work thus making me uncomfortable as I embarrassingly told him I only had a credit card at the time. And while I wanted desperately to understand, to place myself for a moment in the shoes of a man’s life that I could hardly begin to relate, I knew that I could not, that I would not let myself be “seduced.” The man proved “unapproachable and intimate: the abject.” In that moment of desire to self identify with the homeless man, the fragility of the border between the two of us—between the self and other—was thus revealed, threatening meaning. In this man, “I [beheld] the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away.”
Much like the shift in attention from the anxiety produced by my internal confrontation to the interstate that lay ahead, the stoplight quickly changed from red to green.
Michael thanks for offering up such an amazing work of theory-practice, of theory as practice and maybe more importantly of Practice as Theory; our lives made theoretical. I am fascinated by your use of 'seduction' for seduction still carries its' etymological signification of being 'lead astray' when you employed it and perhaps our task is both to be seduced and to avoid seduction. I also think it is difficult to allow oneself to be seduced by the "abject" (the poor in some cases) for those with luxury can never identify with the poor and do so authentically. There remains a lived level of experience in which meaning is clear, distinct and a certain closure occurs. Yet the abject also can seduce one away-from the bourgeois capitalist ideology of justifying wealth through the logic of 'hard work and superior intelligence' and point us to the underlying structural injustices that will never allow for equality and opportunity despite some supposed innate qualities of "ingenuity" and "determination".
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