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Céline carefully walks on the edge of this vortex of ecstatic negativity like the hero of edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelström" (1841), flirting with it but avoiding complete immersion into it, which would mean a descent into madness. Here, of course, Kristeva confronts the big problem. One would have expected that such a confrontation with the abject and its libidinal vortex, allowing it to penetrate our universe of meaning, would have a liberating effect, allowing us to break out of the constraints of symbolic rules and to recharge ourselves with a more primordial libidinal energy; however, as is well-known, Céline turned into a fully pledged fascist, supporting Nazis to their very defeat. So what went wrong? At a general level, Kristeva's reply is to avoid both extremes; not only is the total exclusion of the abject mortifying, cutting us off from the source of our vitality (when the abject is excluded, "the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless an empty castle" [''P,'' p. 49]), but the opposite also holds. every Every attempt to escape the patriarchal/rational symbolic order and enact a return to the pre-patriarchal feminine rhythm of drives necessarily ends up in anti-Semitic fascism: "Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Célinian anti-Semitic fantasy?" (''P,'' p. 180).
The reason is, of course, that Judaism enacts in an exemplary way the monotheistic rejection of the maternal natural rhythms. However, Kristeva's account of Céline's move to fascism is more complex; the fascist anti-Semitism is not just a regression to the domain of the abject but also a regression controlled/totalized by reason. "The return to what [reason] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)" is in itself liberating; it brings about an inconsistent bubble of fresh insights. Problems arise when this anarchic schizodisorder, its mad dance, is totalized through a paranoiac stance that totalizes/unifies the entire field, generating a spectral object like "the Jew" that allegedly explains all antagonisms and dissatisfactions:
"One has to admit that out of such logical oscillations there emerge a few striking words of truth. Such words present us with harsh X-rays of given ''areas ''of social and political experience; they turn into fantasies or deliriums only from the moment when reason attempts to ''globalize, unify, ''or ''totalize. ''Then the crushing anarchy or nihilism of discourse topples over and, as if it were the reverse of that negativism, an ''object ''appears—an object of hatred and desire, of threat and aggressivity, of envy and abomination. That object, the Jew, gives thought a focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied. " [''P, ''pp. 177–78]
The limitation of Kristeva's theory of the abject resides in the fact that she conceives the symbolic order and abjection as the two extremes between which one has to negotiate a middle way. What she neglects to do is to inquire into ''what the symbolic order itself is in terms of the abject''. The symbolic order is not just always already embedded in the feminine ''chora'' (or what Kristeva in her earlier work referred to as the semiotic), penetrated by the materiality of its immanent libidinal rhythms that distort the purity of the symbolic articulations. If it is here, it had to emerge out of ''chora'' through a violent act of self-differentiation or splitting. Consequently, insofar as we accept Kristeva's term ''abjection ''for this self-differentiation, then we should distinguish between ''chora'' and abjection; abjection points towards the very movement of withdrawal from ''chora,'' which is constitutive of subjectivity. This is why we had to further specify Kristeva's diagnosis: every "unilateral call to return to what [the Judeo-Christian compound] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)" generates fascism (as in Céline's work) not because it regresses from the symbolic but because it obfuscates abjection itself, the primordial repression that gives rise to the symbolic. The dream of such attempts is not to suspend the symbolic but to have the (symbolic) cake and eat it—in other words'', '''to dwell in the''' '''symbolic without the price we have to pay for it '''''<nowiki/>'''(primordial repression, the subject's ontological derailment, antagonism, out-of-joint, the violent gap of differentiation from natural substance), the ancient dream of a masculine universe of meaning, which remains harmonically rooted in the maternal substance of ''chora''. In short, what fascism obfuscates (forecloses even) is not the symbolic as such but the gap that separates the symbolic from the real. This is why a figure like that of the Jew is needed; if the gap between the symbolic and the real is not constitutive of the symbolic, if a symbolic at home in the real is possible, then their antagonism has to be caused by a contingent external intruder—and what better candidate for this role than Judaism, with its violent monotheist assertion of the symbolic law and rejection of the earth-bound paganism?'''
