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That which disturbs the self by provoking an *uncanny feeling of disgust, fear, loathing, or repulsion. The abject is the excessive dimension of either a subject or an object; it is that which cannot be assimilated—i.e. we cannot make it part of ourselves. The paradox of the abject is that it is simultaneously outside or beyond the subject and a product of the subject. Our own bodily fluids are for the most part loathsome to us, but the intensity of that loathing owes precisely to the fact that they come from inside us. Thus, human faeces are more disgusting to us than dog faeces, despite the fact that there is no real material difference between them. The abject is not, therefore, an intrinsic quality of a thing, a being, or a state of affairs; it is rather a disturbance in a state of affairs characterized by matter being out of place (e.g. faeces in the toilet do not bother us as much as faeces on the kitchen floor). The abject tends to be subject to moral, religious, and cultural laws of taboo and proscription. It is not merely considered dirty in other words, but also profane and profaning. It manifests as a peculiar type of response, an inherently ambiguous and ambivalent ...

As Bronwyn Carlson demonstrates in The Politics of Identity (2016), Aboriginality is a highly contested term that has real, material effects. Aboriginality is a term the Australian government uses to classify people who are entitled to receive various government benefits made available to Indigenous people in Australia (housing, healthcare, education support, and so on). In this sense Aboriginality is used as a kind of racial litmus test—it amounts to asking if someone is Aboriginal ‘enough’? By the same token, the term has also been used by the Australian government to justify the exclusion of Aboriginal people from citizenship and the rights that usually attach to citizenship—in this sense it amounts to saying someone is too Aboriginal. For example, Aboriginality justified the shameful practice of removing Aboriginal children from their birth families and placing them with white foster families, which created what is now known as the ‘stolen generation’. Marcia Langton has tried to reclaim the term for critical theory by using it to conceptualize the disparity between representations of Indigenous Australians in film and media and their actual life circumstances. Aboriginality, like ...

In art, a movement away from *representation and *mimesis towards a kind of imagery that aims to provoke a response for what it is rather than what it looks like. For this reason, it is also known as non-figurative art. Abstractionism can take a variety of forms—in the ...

A term created by theatre critic Martin Esslin in his 1961 book, The Theatre of the Absurd, to encompass a wide range of works produced in the two decades after World War II which seem to dramatize ...

A logical category in the narrative grammar devised by the Paris-based, Lithuanian linguist Algirdas Julien *Greimas. The actant is in Greimas’s language an isotope of the action. This means narrative analysis occurs at a level below that of character and indeed of character type. Thus to take one very restricted example, if detective fiction can be understood as a battle between doing good and doing evil then good and evil actants are required by the narrative structure. The obvious implication of this insight is that the detective can be a man, woman, child, alien, good or bad, all without altering the formal structure of the narrative. Moreover, multiple characters may fulfil the various actants each narrative type requires. For Greimas, the actual detective is an ...

German philosopher Friedrich *Nietzsche (and after him French philosopher Gilles *Deleuze) used these categories to describe two different ways of acting and—by extension—being in the world. An action (which may be a thought, feeling, or practice) is active when it takes something as its object; conversely, it becomes reactive when it is made the object of someone or something else. Thus, if we feel sad (or happy) and we do not know why we feel this way, then we are reactive; if, however, we can discover the reason we are feeling this way, we can convert reactive forces into active forces. Reactive is not the same as negative and should not be thought of as intrinsically bad; it is, rather, the usual state of things. It is, however, a limiting state of things, because it separates us from what we can do—if we are sad for no apparent reason, and we do not seek out the cause, then we are prevented from forming an appropriate response to that cause, and our power to act is reduced. We are reacting when we could be acting, and more problematically still we are using our reaction to excuse our lack of action. Nietzsche generally refers to this state as ...

Any agent, perceptible at the level of *discourse, who plays a part in a narrative. In contrast to the ...

A material-semiotic theory of social action. Developed by the sociologists Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris in the early 1980s as a means of explaining the conditions for the emergence of innovation. It is characterized by its treatment of people, things, and ideas as ...

A modal distinction proposed by French philosopher Gilles *Deleuze as a replacement for the problematic real-possible distinction more commonly used in philosophy. The possible is a bad concept according to Deleuze because it presupposes that everything that is real must also be possible (which rules out a great number of conceptual inventions, consigning them to the ontologically lesser category of the unreal, or impossible), and it is unable to explain why that which is possible has not already come into being. For Deleuze, both the actual and the virtual are fully real—the former has concrete existence, while the latter does not, but it is no less real for that fact. The importance of this distinction can readily be seen by giving thought to the state of being of an idea: it may only exist in our heads, or on paper, but its effects are fully real and may also be fully actual too. Initially treated as an esoteric distinction of interest only to specialists in the field of ...

and key member of the *Frankfurt School. A refined cultural critic with an incredible range of interests, Adorno wrote influential essays on music, literature, philosophy, sociology, and contemporary mass culture. He is justly regarded as one of the great thinkers of the ...

That which the body and mind suffers (in the classical philosophical sense), which means simply that it is something we experience passively rather than ...

A core idea of *New Criticism. In a famous paper, entitled ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1954), W. K. Wimsatt...

Born in Rome, Agamben studied at the University of Rome, where he completed a doctorate on the political thought of Simone Weil. He undertook postdoctoral study in Germany, participating in ...

In sociology and philosophy, the degree to which a *subject is able to determine the course of their own actions. The concept is generally used in the context of discussions about the factors that shape ...

Karl *Marx used this term to describe the changes in the economic and social conditions of *modernity which separated (i.e., ...

A translation of German Verfremdung; however, *estrangement-effect is the preferred English term.

A form of artwork (whether architectural, textual, visual, plastic, or musical) whose outward appearance is contrived to suggest a hidden or second order of meaning that is in some sense the ‘true’ meaning. This is often achieved by means of symbols, but there are many other techniques as well, such as personification and ...

The otherness of the other. Alterity refers to both the quality of strangeness inherent in the other and the fact of their strangeness. Strangeness here means simply that neither our prior knowledge nor our prior experience prepares us for the encounter with ...

The theory in development studies and *Postcolonialism that different parts of the world experienced *modernity in their own fashion and at their own time. This theory is especially prominent in China and Brazil, where it is argued that modernity means something quite specific and different from modernity as experienced elsewhere. ...

and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His work fused the insights of *Marxism, *...