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Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development when we established a border or separation between human and animal, between culture and that which preceded it. The abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious. (On the symbolic order, see, in particular, the Lacan module on psychosexual development.) As Kristeva puts it, "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (Powers 10). It is neither object nor subject the abject is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic order.

Whereas the objet petit a allows a subject to coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of meaning and intersubjective community to persist, the abject "is radically excluded and," as Kristeva explains, "draws me toward the place where meaning collapses" (Powers 2). Kristeva's understanding of the "abject" provides a helpful term to contrast to Lacan's objet petit a (or the "object - cause of desire").