23 April 2009: "Just want to be a good/cool parent."

This post is about the abject. Carles is talking about the threat to the subject/object dichotomy posed by the newborn child, which is at once with and without identity, but beyond that he is concerned with the same abjection inherent in conformist consumption that effaces subjectivity or confronts us with the threat that our subjectivity will be decentered in our own consciousness: appropriately Carles calls this material "the kewlest shit." Kristeva infamously argued that "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of preobjectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" -- in other words the "powers of horror" in the primal ur-abject scene of childbirth. The substances of our own mortality and infirmity -- vomit, feces, a propensity to listen to Creed (whose lyrics Carles reproduces here to incite abject responses in his readers and thus inscribe on the body of the reader his philosophical axioms) -- evoke abjection. Carles, by merely appropriating the band's lyrics, figures Creed's music as an irruption of the Real:

With arms wide open
Under the sunlight
Welcome to this place
I’ll show you everything

Through the invasion of a culturally constituted object of desire (petit A?) into the space of our own self-automated subjectivity, "everything" becomes the intolerable assurance of our death. Our autonomous acculturation is threatened by the very existence of popular music that cannot be assimilated to an individualized notion of the good, in a Platonic or Aristotalian sense. "This place" is the womb space of pure abjection, covered in placental tissue and umbilical fluids as well as the the "tears of joy" that "stream down."