There is an entire school of thought dedicated to understanding the relationship between desire and disgust. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposes that desire has little to do with the material; instead, desire is created under the influence of social structures and strictures, an imagined version of reality.^[1] Conversely, French philosopher Julia Kristeva studies disgust through the lens of the abject, human reactions to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, self and other.^[2]

The formulation of the “I,” the very essence of who we are as people, is defined by early examples of abjection: hunger, pain, exhaustion. Gradually, we begin to differentiate between that which hurts us and that which we desire. We choose what to ascribe to our growing sense of “I.” We point to that which disgusts us and we tell the world, “that thing is not a part of me; I reject that thing; I push it away; I establish boundaries.”

Everybody has dirt. Everybody points to those things on the outside, those discarded sights, sounds, sensations, and substances that we treat as suspect, as separate from the inside. Abjection as a term is considered an inherent designation: there is no agency in terms of abjection. The concept of abjection is best described as the process by which one separates one’s sense of self from that which immediately threatens one’s sense of life, or desire.

People generally pride themselves as being perceived as clean. If the “I” is formed through disgust, through the rejection of dirt, then what is it to present yourself as clean? Traits associated with cleanliness are defined by other people. For example, the term “clean-cut” is understood to describe not only the physical reality of a person’s appearance, but the way in which they are socially or emotionally perceived: friendly, approachable, with a “wholesome appearance.”^[3] In seeking cleanliness, one seeks to create a version of themselves that other people would not just accept, but embrace as a part of themselves. It’s the version of ourselves that others would look to and say, “I understand you; I accept you; I recognize you; I let you in, here, within the safety of my walls and my community.”

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