… These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands …
This is from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva (1980):
… The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irredemiably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death — a flat encephalograph, for instance — I would understand, react, or accept.
[line break added] No, as in true theater, without make-up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.
… In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.
-Julie
Coloring 