Dignity of the Abject

Released as part of a five-album series in late 2021, Arca’s KicK iii is a cacophonous mix of genres that coalesce around themes of sex, violence, and transformation. This article positions KicK iii as operationalizing an aesthetic of the abject, generated through sexual excess and anticipation’s affective contours of anxiety, by listening for dissonance, repetition, deferral, and glitched and pitchy sounds. Using the uncertainty and discomfort of anxious anticipation and its coexistence with sex, this article additionally stitches together an edging-as-listening practice to argue that the album’s aesthetics of abjection allows the listener to inhabit negativity without the satisfaction of a neat resolution. Instead, this residual negativity undermines the notion of affect as a site of limitless potential for world-making projects, which permeate sound studies and affect theory. Ultimately, this article proposes that if one is to take the anxiety of anticipation’s negativity seriously, it provides neither a roadmap for a future world nor quite reaches the dissolution of one. Rather, it joyously approaches the latter in what is described as the fullness of anticipation’s jouissance.