The Filth, written by Grant Morrison, with art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine, is about how “the shabbiest, shittiest life you can live,” one defined and limited by shame, guilt, fear, hatred, and loneliness, “can be redeemed into glory by the power of imagination,” says Morrison.
The comic’s hero, seemingly, is Ned Slade, a high-ranking officer of the “supercleansing” operation The Hand, who maintains an off-duty persona as Greg Feely, a single man addicted to pornography and accused of paedophilia. This paper reads the relationship between Slade and Feely in terms of Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, as Greg is not a part of Ned, or not a part of what Kristeva terms the “clean and proper” self, the “I” that is constituted by an act of expulsion which establishes the border between inside and outside, between self and other. This process of abjection that Kristeva identifies as key to subject formation is also evident at the societal level, and is key also to the actions of The Hand, which aims to maintain a healthy social order exactly by excluding filth.
In The Filth, therefore, as the name suggests, Morrison places the reader in a world where they can no longer tell if they are on the side of the police or of the perverted. To read The Filth is to know abjection because, as Kristeva puts it, it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that cause abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.” Exposing his readers in this way to the abject, Morrison subjects them to what he calls a “healing inoculation of grime.” By requiring them to comprehend incompatible narrative possibilities which destabilise categories of hero and villain, male and female, or reality and fantasy, he seeks to provoke that leap of the imagination into glory.