The first few lines of Kristeva's book (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) could easily be confused for a synopsis of the central conflict in The Matrix:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.... The abject has only one quality of the object-- that of being opposed to I. (1)

The duality is apparent. Inside the matrix, computers dominate the minds of humans. The machine are the "exorbitant inside." When people die or defy the computers' domination, they are cast out of the system-- abjected.

Or are they?

Down the Rabbit Hole or Down the Drain?

Exactly which characters are abjected in The Matrix is open to interpretation. From the machines' perspective, it is the rebels. They have defied the order of the programmed environment. Kristeva argues that it is not "lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs the identity, system, order." (4) Because they reject their "semantic" names for their "poetic" hacker aliases, they disturb the programmed concept of identity. The rebels become a very real threat to both the "system" (the matrix) and to "order."

As Morpheus explains, "no one can be told what the matrix is." As Kristeva points out, the object of abjection lies close by-- in fact, all around Neo and the others-- but it cannot be assimilated. Morpheus adds that the matrix "is the world that has been pulled over [Neo's] eyes to blind [him]." Neo will never be able to metacognitive conceptualize the matrix. He must literally and metaphorically be "unplugged" from it.

As he attempts to prepare Neo for what is to come, Morpheus quips that Neo must feel a bit like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. As Morpheus knows, that analogy is uniquely accurate. Once Neo makes his choice to take the red pill, he becomes a threat to order and must suffer the consequences. Morpheus explains the pill is actually part of a trace program that "disrupts his carrier wave." It counters the programming of the matrix. As a result, the machines move to cast Neo out of the system. He is no longer "plugged in" and under control therefore he must be ejected. From a Kristevan standpoint, it would seem apt that Neo is flushed from his pod. His abjection is literal in his elimination from the system like human waste in a huge toilet.

But the symbolism here is conflicted. Is his ejection a literal and metaphorical "flush" or is he reborn and traveling through a symbolic "birth canal"? After all, he is leaving a slime-covered existence in the pod to be plunged into water-- in effect, being "baptized." Shortly after his immersion he is pulled into the heavens toward a bright light. All elements that could easily convey some sense of religious or divine rebirth or transcendence. In essence, his physical abjection begins the ritual of his purification.

As Neo will learn, the revolutionaries do not see themselves as the abject. Rather, they see those enslaved by the matrix in that state. Their mission is the liberation of the abject; the unification of the human race without machine domination. As a sympathetic audience, we tend to share the point of view of the protagonists. But the actions of Cypher remind us that it is all a matter of perspective. Cypher betrays his comrades because he sees himself as "cast out" and feels miserable. He explains to Neo that he has been thinking one thought ever since he was freed from the matrix: "Why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill?" He wants to be reinserted into the system. He does not want to remember his abjection or his separation. Furthering his assertion that "ignorance is bliss," he explains to Trinity that for him the matrix is more real (and more desirable) than the physical world. In short, Cypher typifies one of Kristeva's contentions: "There is nothing like abjection of self to show that all abjection is, in fact, recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded." (5)

Abjection • Duality • Defilement