Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation

SUNY Series: Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

by Winfried Menninghaus, Howard Eiland (Translator), Joel Golb (Translator)

Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says no to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives.

In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting otherness with truth and the trans-symbolic real in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an Angel of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising purity; and recent debates on Abject Art.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

480 pages, Paperback

First published June 24, 2002

About the author

Winfried Menninghaus teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin and at Yale University.

Reviews

[Philipp Homan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disgust is a charged emotion since it has strong moral implications (see the work by Jonathan Haidt and more recently Simone Schnall). A better understanding of what it is from a historical perspective is urgently needed. And this book, extraordinary in many respects, delivers it. Argues that the history of aesthetics can be (best?) understood from the perspective of what has been avoided. Surprisingly, this is not so much the ugly as it is whatever provokes disgust (although the two may overlap). The readings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka are remarkable and quite original.