  Although this is not primarily Kristeva's concern, abjection can also be understood as a social phenomenon, one with political implications. The psychically primitive experience of egoic instability can be propelled into the political realm, and be socially accentuated or reinforced. In abjection, subjects confront what they must exclude or expel in order to maintain identity, that is, they confront their own dependency, mortality, finitude, and materiality. This strangeness experienced at the porous edges of identity can rebound into troubling relations with others, including especially with others who are perceived as lacking intelligible identity, socially marginal, or refusing cultural assimilation. While Kristeva's own focus is less on what is abjected than the process of abjection, that is, less on the expelled non-object than on the violence of separation that brings objects (and others) into being, her work provides the theoretical underpinnings to ask questions about who bears the burden of abjection, how and why some are figured as inhuman, animal, or alien. Her analysis of abjection exposes the ways in which social life is dependent on jettisoning or containing disorder and disruption, and managing the fear of contamination.