Literary notes about abjection (AI summary)
In literature, "abjection" is often employed to evoke deep emotional despair and a state of degradation, whether social, moral, or spiritual. Writers use it to describe the plight of individuals or groups trapped in conditions of disgrace and dehumanization—as when the suffering of slaves is portrayed as a profound inability to rebel ([1]) or when characters endure relentless inner torment ([2], [3]). The term also appears in religious and philosophical texts, capturing the tension between divine grace and human unworthiness ([4], [5]), and is invoked to critique social and political order, highlighting the abject state of marginalized peoples or degraded cultural values ([6], [7]). This versatility ensures that "abjection" remains a potent literary device to illustrate the chasm between idealized beauty or honor and the raw, sometimes brutal realities of human existence ([8], [9]).
- You sink in your own sight; you go down; you understand that abjection of slaves which kept them from rising against their masters.
— from The High Heart by Basil King - Every night I sat beweeping our separation and that which I suffered, since thy departure, of humiliation and ignominy, of abjection and misery.
— from The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Volume 10 - Remember that of yourself you are mere nothingness, possessing only the abjection of your sins and of your countless imperfections.
— from Selected Letters of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal by Chantal, Jeanne-Françoise de, Saint - Unless thy law had been my meditation, I had then perhaps perished in my abjection.
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - Every soul is on fire with love, and, at the same time, annihilated in its own unworthiness and abjection….
— from The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation by Anonymous - I have already answered the Nationalist [274] leader's charge that the French Canadians are stupidly rotting in " COLONIAL ABJECTION ."
— from England, Canada and the Great War by L. G. (Louis Georges) Desjardins - to rise from a state of abjection and poverty.
— from Argot and Slang A New French and English Dictionary of the Cant Words, Quaint Expressions, Slang Terms and Flash Phrases Used in the High and Low Life of Old and New Paris by Albert Barrère - Unreality and nothing, the passion that drags the gambler into economic ruin and moral abjection?
— from The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic by Benedetto Croce - No more shall the necks of the nations be crushed, No more to dark Tyranny's throne bend the knee; No more in abjection be ground to the dust!
— from Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre by Voltairine De Cleyre
