Abjection: The Scariest Existential Philosophy Theory You've Never Heard Of

Existence becomes psychologically unbearable when the mind confronts what it usually keeps at arm’s length: the body’s decay, fluids, and mortality. That destabilizing jolt is the core of Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” from her 1980 work *Powers of Horror*—a visceral experience where the boundaries that define “me” versus “not-me” collapse. Abjection matters because it reframes disgust not as a minor reaction, but as a philosophical alarm system: the self is maintained by exclusion, and abjection reveals that what’s expelled is still part of the self.

Kristeva ties the experience of abjection to the way people construct identity through borders—physical borders like skin, and conceptual borders like traits and values. Conscious life, in her account, relies on repression and denial of the body’s vulnerability: illness, death, bodily waste, and the fragility beneath everyday composure. When those repressed realities surface—through corpses, blood, vomit, rot—the mind loses its clean separation between subject and object. The result is ambiguity: the threat remains close, neither fully inside nor fully outside, leaving a limbo where stability and normalcy feel like thin fictions.

From there, the transcript moves from abjection to a broader moral mood: the “object” of disgust can expand into a wider contempt for humanity, often described as misanthropy. Misanthropy treats human vice—selfishness, hypocrisy, ignorance, cruelty—as so pervasive that it eclipses everything else. The discussion places this outlook across a spectrum of thinkers. Thomas Hobbes portrays humans as driven by competition, fear, and glory, with violence emerging when no absolute sovereign restrains people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while arguing humans are naturally good, still lands on a cynical diagnosis of society as corrupting—producing vanity, pride, and loathsomeness. Other figures are grouped as expressing resignation or self-aestheticism, and writers are cited for channeling rejection of humanity through art.

The transcript then pushes the logic further into anti-natalism, described as the ethical position that assigns a negative value to bringing sentient beings into existence. Unlike misanthropy’s attitude, anti-natalism targets reproduction as morally wrong because it concerns the prevention of suffering. David Benatar’s *Better Never to Have Been* (2006) is presented as the central framework: pain and discomfort outweigh pleasure and joy, and people underestimate how bad existence really is due to optimism biases such as the “Pollyanna principle.” Benatar’s “asymmetry argument” claims pleasure is good, pain is bad, absence of pain is good even when no one exists, and absence of pleasure is neutral unless someone is deprived.

To test that asymmetry, the transcript uses thought experiments: an uninhabited Mars is morally neutral, but a Mars full of suffering sentient beings would be regrettable. It also acknowledges objections from metaethics—why suffering should be prioritized over pleasure, and whether the claim rests on intuition rather than objective truth. Even so, the discussion stresses that many anti-natalists are motivated less by hatred than by compassion and pity.

The closing turn is existential rather than purely theoretical. Even if humanity phased out, suffering could persist in other forms; life’s drive to continue is portrayed as a combustible force that cannot be reasoned away. The transcript ends by emphasizing humanity’s distinctive capacity to endure and to generate moral reasons—attempts to reduce pain, even if the underlying “order and chaos of nature” cannot be escaped.