Fabio Casartelli

01Kristeva coined 'abjection' to describe the process by which the maternal body is expelled to create the illusion of a clean, bounded self.
02She argued that horror literature and religious pollution taboos — blood, corpses, excrement — share the same unconscious target: the mother.
03Published in France in 1980, the text was taught in feminist theory courses before it was taught in psychoanalysis programs.

Plate 34: Por una navaja ( For a clasp knife ). A garroted priest grasps a crucifix in his hands. Pinned to his chest is a description of the crime for which he was killed—possession of a knife.

Fabio Casartelli

An Olympic gold medalist struck his unprotected skull on a stone culvert at 88 km/h on Stage 15, 1995. Teammates crossed the finish line the next day holding his bicycle above their heads.

Battle of the Little Bighorn

Custer split his 700-man 7th Cavalry into three columns at Little Bighorn, then led 210 men in a direct charge against a Lakota-Cheyenne encampment later estimated at 1,500–2,000 warriors. Not one of his column survived.

Powers of Horror

Julia Kristeva's 'Powers of Horror' argued that civilization is built by expelling the mother's body — its fluids, its borders, its intimacy — and that all disgust traces back to that founding rejection. The self is a structure built on maternal revulsion.

2008 Mumbai attacks

Ten men from Lashkar-e-Taiba landed by inflatable dinghy in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, killing 166 people across twelve sites over sixty hours. One attacker was captured alive and hanged four years later.

Bodo League massacre

In the summer of 1950, South Korea's own government executed between 60,000 and 100,000 suspected leftist civilians — teachers, farmers, prisoners — in mass graves nationwide, before the North ever reached them.

Aleister Crowley

Crowley published occult texts, ran secret orders, and maintained a heroin habit measured in grains-per-day in his personal ledgers — for thirty years. His mages followed him into addiction. Who was the ritual for?

The Disasters of War

Goya etched 82 plates of castrated soldiers, impaled civilians, and mass graves — then hid them. They weren't published until 1863, 35 years after his death. The plates still exist; one shows a man arranged like a broken doll.

Drexel Burnham Lambert

Drexel Burnham Lambert collapsed in February 1990, wiping out in days the firm that had financed the entire decade of hostile takeovers. It left a $650 million crater and 5,000 unemployed bankers before a single competitor blinked.

Majungasaurus

Majungasaurus ate its own kind — we know because its teeth left marks on its own species' bones. A cannibal confirmed not by behavior but by the wound it signed.