“To Forget their Concrete Reality”: Deconstruction, Abjection, and Ethics in Perdido Street Station

Abstract

This paper explores the monstrous slake-moths in Perdido Street Station as an abject threat, destabilizing the modes of categorization by which society is organized but also by which a meaningful subjectivity is maintained. Reconsidering the novel's critical treatment with regard to Miéville's Marxism, I ask what psychological and ethical valences the first of the Bas-Lag trilogy asks of the possibilities of radical deconstructionism which is frequently deployed as the discursive precursor to collectivist politics. I suggest that the text stages a critique of existing modes of rigid categorization, including a particularly troubling mind/body dualism, via the slake-moths’ abject destruction in society. However, I show how the text registers a dissatisfaction with poststructuralism as an endpoint or even as an unchecked tool, maintain the need for internal systems of discrimination, crucial to subjectivity, which must be preserved.