Some parts: Georgelou, Konstantina (2014) “Abjection and Informe: operations of debasing”, Performance Research Journal ‘On Abjection’ 19: 01, 25-32.

p. 25

This article contends that abjection operates as a performative notion on the basis of a network of vectors and not of a substance used therein. It proposes studying and theorizing abjection alongside the notion of l’informe (in English, ‘the formless’). Both of these notions derive from Georges Bataille’s writings (particularly from the 1930s) and point to an operation of debasing.

p. 26

abject art has been associated with dirt, bodily waste and other substances but also with grotesque perspectives of femininity

Julia Kristeva offers a psychoanalytical and philosophical reading of abjection, she proposed an understanding of this notion that links it to moments that the subject is ‘in crisis’. abjection is linked to the shattering of subjecthood.As a psychic process it refers to a crisis of the subject, to a violent but nevertheless intimate borderline experience of the constitution of the ‘I’. In her study, abjection of the moment the infant is separated from the maternal, which mark a primordial moment of individuation.

p. 27 – 32

L’abjection et les formes misérables [Abjection and miserable forms] Bataille, 1934: this essay exposes the complex social processes of separating and connecting the ‘nobles’ and the ‘misérables’. The contact between the two is inevitable, and this is how abjection is being generated. The ‘nobles’ are – in a scatological sense – inevitably connected to the production of this waste, while at the same time they deny its existence. This paradox causes repulsion and violence.

The writing of the non-representable waste of society is a manifestation of accepting its exclusion (and eventually, destabilizing it), which is a political and subversive act in itself. Through such a reading of Bataille’s essay, one can therefore recognize the operation of the abject. It is not just used as a word to define a class or some substance but more as a conceptual and performative tool for delving into and marking out the perversion of how the ‘lower than low’ is being produced and manifests itself in the society.

l’informe: points to the undoing of form from within, to an operation of formlessness that evokes an experience of the limits. Bataille resists against the desire to attribute certain “shape to the universe”.

Bataille attacked classic materialism, which expressed an ontological approach to matter, in the sense of understanding matter as a thing-in-itself. And at the same time, he insisted on a ‘base matter’ that is foreign to human ideals and refuses to let itself be reduced by the great ontological machines (Bataille 1970: 225)

Krauss precisely remarks that it is ‘a way for Bataille to group a variety of strategies for knocking form off its pedestal’.