the abject

One of the significant concepts that Kundera, a Czech-French novelist, criticizes in the novel is the concept of Kitch. Kitch is all that is outward and flashy, based on the form and the image, and refers to non-thought ideas and non-genuine thoughts but prevalent. According to its general character about imagology (dominance of the demonstrative, propagandistic, and suggestive), Kitch rejects any strange, alien, and unknown phenomena. The novel's mission is to resist and defend something that Kitsh denies as an unknown and the abject, according to Julia Kristeva's thought. In the present article, it has been shown through the phenomenology method that the abject closely overlaps with Heidegger's Being, and the novel Immortality revolves around the heterogeneous subject of Agnes and her ontological strangeness in the world based on kitsch. Agnes is an isolated subject and does not belong to the world around her. Her reflections are explained in three axes: criticism of kitsch society, criticism of imagology, looking for the way of Being, and transgression of symbolic matters. As a result, the novel Immortality ironically prevents forgetting and rejecting Being due to the characteristic of representing Being and the abject.

In Shakespeare’s portrayal of madness, mind and body are not considered as binary opposites; on the contrary, they appear to be closely intertwined. A number of the most memorable characters in Shakespeare’s dramatic works suffer from mental disorders. A study of these characters’ mental problems on the basis of new psychological perspectives reveals that many of their mental obsessions and anxieties result from considerations pertaining to body. The interrelation between psyche and soma is most clearly discernible in the process of subjectivity in the course of which speaking subjects have to demarcate the territory of their independent and autonomous self primarily through separation from the maternal body and by constructing an independent, clean and proper body of their own. Such a body has a clear territory and exact borderlines. Besides, it has a distinct sexual identity. The subject’s effort to construct such an image of his/her body is not merely a personal and private matter. It is influenced by social, cultural, and biological standards since the subject tries to harmonize this image with these norms. Therefore, body in this sense is not just a material or biological entity; it turns out to be a social and cultural issue. The present study is an attempt to analyze the interrelationship between psychological tensions and corporeal considerations in the male subject’s psyche through studying the mental obsessions of Hamlet, as one of the most outstanding of Shakespeare’s mentally disturbed characters. To fulfill this purpose, some of his inner conflicts are analyzed in the light of Julia Kristeva’s theories regarding abjection, confrontation with the abject and the role of these procedures in the formation of subjectivity in order to gain a better understanding of the latent causes of Hamlet’s psychic trauma’s and mental disturbances. Viewed from this perspective, it is revealed that anxieties and concerns about the body of the masculine subject and cultural measures for the sexual identity of the male sex are at work behind the symptoms of Hamlet’s madness. The psychological crisis which Hamlet has to deal with after his father’s death has got several dimensions some of which will be analyzed in this research in reference to Kristeva’s notion of abjection. In this regard, Hamlet’s desperate battle to reassert his male identity, his quest to restore purity and purge himself and the whole world from corruption, as well as his hatred and fear of female body and sexual desire as a source of contamination and a serious threat to his manhood are most significant. In addition to the effeminizing effect of the female heterosexual love and the contaminating contact with the female body, the female kind’s power of regeneration terrifies Hamlet as well. All these features contribute to Hamlet’s identifying the female body as abject and lead to his repudiation of any attachment to it. Thus, it is possible to explain why Hamlet dedicates himself wholly to the sacred mission of revenge and solidifies homosocial bonds with his male companions since through these strategies, he believes he can confirm his autonomy and independence as a masculine subject and secure the territories of his clean and proper body.