Describing the ineluctable appeal and appallingness of what is thrown away, Kristeva writes, "the jettisoned object is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master," (2). This sounds like the recipe for a particular kind of discursive, angry writer, like Lawrence occasionally, or Céline always. Céline, for this reason, is Kristeva's poster child for writers of abjection. .
Like an artist, an abjected person theorizes or visualizes his dilemma spatially. He asks, not who am I? but where am I? (Kristeva 8). He situates himself among the displaced and identifies most strongly with other outsiders. He strays, and yet he feels that "the more he strays, the more he is saved" (Kristeva 8). Beware the redemptive script, however. When Kristeva describes the abjected person in an experience of jouissance (translated as passion, joy, release), it is not a joyful experience, as that other, more commonly known meaning of the term suggests. It is a meeting at, "a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence," (9). In plain terms, it seems to be an intense recognition that the Other is so repugnant because it both is and is not the self. One resembles it almost too much to acknowledge. In this jouissance, the Other, "keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant" (Kristeva 9). Is this to say that the very act of loathing something keeps us alive (and whole) because it is so energetic? After the moment of jouissance, the abjected person experiences meaning. Although ambivalent, this meaning is something the subject can call its own because the Other, having dwelt in the subject as alter ego, "points it out [to the subject] through loathing" (Kristeva 10).