Ghiñn: A Reading of Disgust as a Literary Device in Subimal Mishra’s Short Fiction (original) (raw)
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HIDDEN FOUNDATIONS OF DISGUST: REEVALUATING THE EXISTENTIAL NATURE OF DISGUST
2017
In spite of the many important findings made within the theory of emotions, scholars still struggle to coherently account for the unique structure of disgust or determine its essence. In contrast to much of the contemporary literature on disgust, I aim to show that, through employing the phenomenological method in his 1929 essay "Disgust" (Der Ekel), Aurel Kolnai was able to grasp the real significance of the phenomenon of disgust. The current study aims to clarify and present Kolnai's insight into the nature of disgust wherein the latter is first and foremost conceived as an ambivalent, multifaceted, but coherent phenomenon. Namely, as a defense mechanism that reacts against the proximity of a disturbing object charged with an ambiguous value of confusion that fluctuates between surplus of life and intention towards death. In order to achieve this goal, I present Kolnai's notion of disgust by first focusing on the foreground of the phenomena of disgust: the essential features of the intentional content of disgust, the object of disgust in particular. I then present and analyze the life-death complex as the underlying structures of the visceral sense of disgust. Lastly, I show how the lifedeath complex relates to the visceral sense of disgust, thereby affirming the coherence of disgust.
On the Good Life of Disgust. L’esthétique du stercoraire and the Postmodern Society
2013
Starting from a debate which took place at the beginning of the twenty-first century between Jean Clair and Arthur C. Danto, we will focus on the link between art and disgust, because we wish to show what art is now ‘doing’ with disgust. Our hypothesis is that art is part of the general process of self-reshaping that is underway in today’s capitalist societies. Therefore, by commenting Aurel Kolnai’s phenomenological analysis of disgust, we will gain the tools to try to show how disgust could be a crucial factor in the above process. Finally, we will recall the work of artists such as Pasolini, Nebreda, and McCarthy, in order to suggest how art could use disgust and have an actual political effect by orienting that process. All this is possible, because disgust has to do with the good life.
(review essay) Comments on Disgust: Serena Feloj's The Aesthetics of Disgust
Critique, 2019
My (English) comments for a symposium on Serena Feloj's book (Italian): Estetica del disgusto. Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rappresentazione (Carocci 2017). The comments were written for the online forum, Critique. (published July 15, 2019) Original link: https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/robert-r-clewis-on-serena-felojs-estetica-del-disgusto/
2022
Study of feeling/emotion in modern and contemporary literary, cinematic and cultural texts has always been a topic of theoretical and critical attention, with a growing number of conferences, fellowships, books, and journal articles devoted to it. This course examines human feelings/emotions as a theory for understanding the expression and formation of modern social identities and contemporary cultural and political formations. That the feelings/emotions do not only vary from culture to culture but also have histories within cultures is our guiding supposition. By watching films and reading novels, short stories, and essays by some prominent modern and contemporary fiction writers we will examine the relationship between the emotions and current socio-cultural formations. We will ask whether it makes sense to understand our contemporary world as a number of characteristic ways of feeling.
Introduction: The Gift of Being Disgusted
2019
This introductory chapter outlines the book’s theoretical concerns: how the political is thought as a distinction between politics (le politique) and the political (la politique); the need to argue for hope as a possibility of the present, disentangled from teleological or theological forms, framed by Andrew Benjamin; and, the indivisibility of politics and aesthetics (the political aesthetic) conceptualised by Rancière. It covers the crucial difference between Schmitt’s ‘enemy/friend conflict’ and ‘dissensus’, which Rancière poses as a struggle for emancipation played out on the aesthetic plane. An important thrust of the book is to see artists’ relationships to others as a quality and methodology that inheres in the practice itself. This is a demand for an ethics of practice (Simon Critchley) that disavows the autonomy of art as an act or an object separated from its making or worldly context. [139]
The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust
This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plas ticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revo lutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force that can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the " Hunger Artist " offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising lastpage revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of ab jection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as selfperformance or political resistance, the teratological versus the to talitarian, the anorexic harbouring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the " dark grotesque " which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.
From Visceral to the Aesthetic
Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral, 2022
We recoil at the thought of eating rotten meat or moldy strawberries and feel uncomfortable with the bad breath of a person we do not specifcally like. We may feel disgusted when Divine, one of the protagonists of John Waters' flm Pink Flamingos (1972) eats dog feces-or when Akwaeke Emezi, in her debut novel Freshwater (2018), describes how the protagonist, in veterinary school, mutilates cadavers, separates skin from muscle, and lifts "delicate sheets of fascia" with the scalpel (Emezi 2018, 41). Disgust is, alongside surprise, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and contempt mentioned in the list of so-called universal emotions (Ekman 1970). It is often visualized as a wrinkled nose. According to Winfred Menninghaus, who terms disgust "one of the most violent afectations of the human perceptual system" (2003, 1), disgust is probably the most visceral of these basic human emotions. From psychologists (Angyal 1941) and epidemiologists (Curtis 2013) to philosophers (Korsmeyer 2011), scholars have recognized the way disgust has the potential to turn our bodies upside down through a spasming stomach and gag refex. Disgust extends, though, far beyond the visceral. When disgust is discussed, the attention is often on the extremes, but there is a broad variety of levels and types of disgust one could focus on (Korsmeyer 2011). There is shallow disgust as much as there is violent. The afects, sensations, and reactions that we associate with "disgust" tend to be very varied in origin, intention, and intensity. A similar scope and variety touches upon the broad array of objects that tend to be associated with disgust (see e.g. Curtis 2013, 1-11). According to Sianne Ngai (2005), disgust is only the outer limit, or threshold, of "ugly feelings" such as envy, irritation, anxiety, and paranoia. Ngai claims that the language of repulsion is much more narrow and restricted than the language of attraction: often disgust is supplanted by weaker styles of "indignation and complaint"-especially in the bourgeois world, where she argues "the vocabulary of indignation is exclusively moral" (2005, 338). Without forgetting the variety of possible forms, origins and levels of disgust, or language games associated with it, this anthology presents studies from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives and traditions. The scholars of this volume work in the felds of, among others, cultural studies, art education, folklore, sociology, history, and philosophy-and we, the editors, have not aimed to package all thoughts under one stylistic or professional umbrella, but rather desired to keep the work truly interdisciplinary. This book thus ofers a continuum from visceral reactions to rotten or tabooed foods (see Section IV) to the way disgust can be mobilized as a moral and symbolic emotion (see Section III).
What's Not to Like? Review of The Meaning of Disgust, Colin McGinn (Oxford University Press)
European Journal of Philosophy, 2016
is not known for being a traditionalist in every respect. With The Meaning of Disgust, however, he offers a distinctly traditional exercise in phenomenology and speculative explanation. This traditionalism is both the book's strength as a piece of literature and its weakness as a philosophical effort. The Meaning of Disgust is, first of all, a work from the armchair: not for McGinn any fashionable appeals to the findings of psychology and biology and neuroscience. His objective is to identify that in virtue of which disgusting things are disgusting, and this is presented as an investigation at the level of properties (as states of the world), and not just of our concepts or ways of thinking of those properties. One might suppose, then, that the findings of science would be relevant. McGinn does refer to 'data' but he uses the term, almost charmingly, much as Collingwood or Ayer or even Strawson might have done-to refer either to the immediate contents of experience or to the observation-based judgements they yield. McGinn's 'data' are also largely restricted to the deliverances of his own experience, while he does, on occasion, invite the reader to check whether or not s/he, too, responds to this or that (disgusting) item as does the author, most of the evidence adduced is unashamedly first-personal.