num_pages: 482
description: 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.
language: English
title: Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation
titlecomplete: Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation (Suny Series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)
genres: Nonfiction
ratings_count: 26
series: SUNY Series: Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
publisher: State University of New York Press