Indeed, art is indispensable to investigating the abject, because its non-linguistic nature prevents it from ever being directly expressed. This can happen occasionally in something like the slip of the tongue-the so-called "Freudian slip"-but it also happens in art. Kristeva follows Freud in her belief that repressed desires tend to manifest themselves unconsciously and symbolically. Therefore, religion creates a buffer between one's mind and the abject and further represses them. Religion is a natural response to the abject, for if one truly experiences the abject, he is prone to engage in all manners of perverse and anti-social behaviors. Kristeva argues that the abject exerts a tremendous psychological impact on individuals and, indeed, on societies as a whole. As this complex is largely pre-linguistic-or, at least, before linguistic abilities have fully developed-the lingering, repressed remnants of this lust continue to linger in the soul but they never gain the "substance" of expression. Ultimately, he resigns himself to the fact that he will never have his mother and represses the desire for her. Most important of these crises is the Oedipus complex, in which the child begins to lust for his mother but is unable to have her because of his father. Simultaneous with this linguistic development are several crises which Kristeva borrows largely from the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. Now, one is not born speaking rather, language is a gradual development during the course of one's childhood. Kristeva believes that the entire world, including one's self, is understood through language it is the only lens, so to speak, by which we can understand anything. In order to understand why the abject is not an object, one must under the post-modernist theory of language that Kristeva subscribes to. The abject, in short, is a kind of non-object that lingers in a person's psyche, the consequence of repression. From that basis, she goes onto give it a more rigorous definition. This means that Kristeva uses her personal experience-and the expressed experiences of others-to get some idea of what the abject is. Kristeva begins with what she calls a "phenomenological" investigation of the abject. She turns to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine as an almost ideal example of the cathartic, artistic expression of the abject. Kristeva examines the notion of abjection-the repressed and literally unspeakable forces that linger inside a person's psyche-and traces the role the abject has played in the progression of history, especially in religion.
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