Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License Crashaw and Abjection: Reading the Unthinkable in his Devotional Verse

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. (Julia Kristeva, Opening of Powers of Horror) Julia Kristeva begins her Powers of Horror by probing the belly of the beast. She is writing about abjection but her opening remarks would not sound out of place in a critical study of the seventeenth-century English poet Richard Crashaw. Indeed it is surprising how uncannily her words mirror the horrified reaction of many readers to his devotional verse on the Passion and Crucifixion, and especially to that little poem which imagines the unthinkable, “Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked.” Kristeva develops her theory of abjection out of Freud’s speculation that the ‘uncanny ’ is a primitive and instinctive reaction of dread and horror to what is unknown but strangely familiar, and which ultimately proves to be death, the hidden presence lurking in wait for us all throughout life.1 Kristeva argues that abjection is a psychic defense against a “massive” and life threatening attack of uncanniness in which the subject is assailed by a premonitory fear of what death carries like a carrion – the “loathsome, ” the “Not me, ” a “weight o