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Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics
Abstract
Disgust is among the strongest of aversions, characterized by involuntary physical recoil and even nausea. Yet paradoxically, disgusting objects can sometimes exert a grisly allure, and this emotion can constitute a positive, appreciative aesthetic response when exploited by works of art-a phenomenon we might consider "aesthetic disgust." While the reactive, visceral power of disgust contributes to its misleading reputation as a relatively "primitive" response mechanism, it is this feature that also gives it a particular aesthetic power when manifest in art. Most treatments of disgust mistakenly interpret it as only an extreme response, thereby neglecting the many subtle ways that it operates aesthetically. This study calls attention to the diversity and depth of its uses, analyzing the emotion in detail and considering the enormous variety of aesthetic forms it can assume in works of art and, unexpectedly, even in foods. In the process of articulating a positive role for disgust, the nature of aesthetic apprehension is scrutinized and an argument developed for the distinctive mode of cognition that disgust affords-an intimate apprehension of physical mortality. However, despite some commonalities attached to the meaning of disgust, this emotion assumes many aesthetic forms: it can be funny, profound, witty, ironic, unsettling, and gross. To demonstrate this diversity, several chapters review examples of disgust as it is aroused by art. The book ends by investigating to what extent disgust can be discovered in art that is also considered beautiful.
... This chapter explores the concept of 'aesthetic sublation' -a performative mode of meaning making that seeks to degrade its object (Ylönen, 2016;Korsmeyer, 2011). Here, the phenomenon of aesthetic sublation is discussed as a form of resistance. ...
... But how do we conceptualize this form of aesthetic control or management? This article explores the methodological potential of concepts through a discussion of the concept of 'aesthetic sublation' -a performative mode of meaning making that seeks to control its object via a willful lowering ( Korsmeyer, 2011;Ylönen, 2016). Here, the phenomenon is discussed as a form of resistance. ...
... For example, the Danish restaurant Noma served live ants as part of a dish (Markwell, 2012). Experiencing disgust in such a safe environment can have a positive effect, as it can create a certain "macabre allure" and evoke attraction to food practices and products (Korsmeyer, 2011). As such, disgust can play a role in rich user experiences (Fokkinga & Desmet, 2012) and can be an integral part of aesthetic experiences in the context of art, drama and food (Ablett, 2020;Lemke & de Boer, 2022;Menninghaus et al., 2017). ...
... Most of the results in our study show opposing patterns for disgust and fascination, leading us to wonder if some of the stimuli in our study could be the exception to the rule by displaying some "macabre allure" (Korsmeyer, 2011) and evoke both emotional responses. The most likely candidate in this case would be the speculative design, which has a high rating for Disgust (5.05) and one of the highest for Fascination (4.00). ...
... The so-called aesthetic solution might seem a peculiar way to overcome disgust, because it invites indulging in the emotion, fully experiencing it, maybe even savoring it (Korsmeyer 2011). Admittedly, it sounds like an eccentric, even aberrant task. ...
... Philosophers argue about how the deliberate arousal of unpleasant emotions such as fear, disgust, horror, and so forth can be also a source of satisfaction, with different analysis ofered by the likes of Aristotle and Hume as well as contemporary afcionados of horror (Korsmeyer 2011;Freeland 2000;Carroll 1990). Much of the debate involves disputes over what counts as satisfaction, pleasure, or appreciation. ...
... 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. ...
... 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. ...
... Algunos conceptos de esta teoría ayudan a enriquecer la interpretación y aportan nuevas claves de lectura. Los estudios de los alimentos viven un tremendo auge en nuestros días, se dedican a pensar de forma crítica cuál es el papel de la comida en diferentes disciplinas científicas como puedan ser la agricultura, la nutrición o las propias artes culinarias (Cruz, 2022), pero también en materias de las Humanidades como la historia (Sciolla, 2013;Algranti, 2020), la antropología (Appadurai, 1981), la sociología (Goody, 1982;Bourdieu, 2002;Nestle, 2002) e incluso la filosofía (Curtin, 1992;Korsmeyer, 2002Korsmeyer, , 2011 y el periodismo (Climent-Espino, 2021a). De igual manera, recientes aproximaciones se han centrado en dilucidar qué papel juega la comida en las artes, ya sea en el teatro (Tobin, 2002), en el cine (Padrón, 2011;Seldmayer, 2023) y, por supuesto, en textos literarios de diversa índole (Climent-Espino, 2020) 2 . ...
Este texto se ocupa de hacer una lectura crítica enmarcada en los estudios de los alimentos de dos odas a la comida de Pablo Neruda. Además, se establecen relaciones intertextuales con poetas del ámbito hispánico como Miguel Hernández y Gabriela Mistral que, por distintos motivos escribie- ron sobre temas relacionados con la comida. Por último, el artículo abre una reflexión sobre qué her- ramientas retóricas utilizó el Premio Nobel chileno en dos de sus odas gastronómicas para vehicular discursos ideológicamente comprometidos en relación con la comida y con su ausencia –el hambre– y poner de manifiesto que los alimentos son un bien común que deben estar al alcance de todos. --- Original en español.
... The general field of aesthetics has its historical roots in the philosophy of perception from the 18th century (Crawford, 2001;Williams, 2009;Hayn-Leichsenring and Chatterjee, 2019), with a strong emphasis on the perception of visual art (Zeki, 1999;Leder et al., 2004). The field has a primary focus on positive-valenced aesthetic appraisals -mainly beauty and transcendence -to the exclusion of negative-valenced appraisals, although a number of theorists include negative-valenced emotions as aesthetic emotions, such as dislike (Zangwill, 1999;Saito, 2017), disgust (Rozin, 1999;Korsmeyer, 2011), terror (Berleant, 2009), and the negative sublime (Berleant, 2009). Aesthetics is, at its cognitive core, an emotional appraisal of the appeal of objects (Ortony et al., 1988), and so this applies comparably to negative and positive evaluations by perceivers. ...
Within cognitive psychology, there are separate experimental fields devoted to the study of creativity, on the one hand, and aesthetics, on the other, with virtually no cross-talk between them. In this article, I propose a means of uniting creativity and aesthetics via a consideration of the mechanisms of cultural evolution. I call this the creativity/aesthetics cycle. The basic tenet of the model is that creativity and aesthetics mediate, respectively, the processes of variation (production) and selection (perception or consumption) in evolutionary models of culture. By means of this cycle, creators produce works that they hope will be evaluated positively by consumers, where such appraisals ultimately feed back to influence the subsequent decision-making processes of creators. I discuss the implications of this model for the fields of creativity and aesthetics.
... While disgust is typically considered as a negative emotion, as one of the so-called modes of aversion (Kolnai 2004), recent work on disgust proposes to introduce the category of aesthetic disgust to indicate that there are disgust experiences that are aesthetically appreciated in virtue of them being disgusting (e.g. Korsmeyer 2011). This idea suggests that the acceptance of insect consumption need not necessarily proceed through the removal of all disgusteliciting elements from the product but can also take place through the explicit highlighting of disgusting features to give rise to an aesthetic experience. ...
Disgust is a strong emotion influencing human behaviour in many domains, including food choices. For example, many western consumers are hesitant about eating insects. This is understandable as insects have been connected with the emotion of disgust. We conducted two design workshops to gain a better understanding of factors that can give rise to the emotion of disgust in the context of grasshoppers and explore alternative food design solutions. Based on the insights, we created four design fiction examples to illustrate how disgust can be an integral part of grasshopper consumption. We argue that changing the attitude of Europeans towards novel food items like grasshoppers requires exploring design strategies that neither solely focus on the sustainability benefits of insect consumption nor take disgust to be something that must be circumvented.
... Even so, "who's afraid of the neo-avant-garde" was a repeated question in the mid 1990s 2005a) when a part of contemporary art did the return to the real, some of it with "the aesthetics of shock" (Féral, 2012). 13 Feinberg, 1985;Hunter, 1992;Graff, 1992;Heins, 1993;Pally, 1994;Harer, & Harris, 1994;Steiner, 1995;Peter & Crosier, 1995;Raven, 1989, Rochlitz, 1994Doss, 1995;Jensen, 1995;Williams, 1997;DiPasquale & Glaeser, 1998;Korsmeyer, 2011;Dubin, 1992;Bolton, 1992;Sharp, 1999Sharp, , 2005DiMaggio et al. 1999;Nolan, 1996;Zimmerman, 2002;Fiorina, 2004;Webb, 2006;Hunter, & Wolfe, 2006;Thomson, 2010;Chapman, & Ciment, 2015;Hartman, 2015. As for the arts, freedom of speech was at stake though appealing in the both sense of a general right of citizenship and specific for the arts, say with a a civilian difference: No less was questiones the "impunity of art" with respect to striking cases. ...
... Blood has been recognized as something that can elicit disgust and lead to avoiding meat (Kubberød et al., 2008), and can, similar to a carcass, be an unwelcome reminder of the animal origins of meat (Rozin and Fallon, 1987). Thus, the materials of disgust connect with its meanings, wherein disgust originates from the ambivalent boundaries between life and death, the organic mess where the living comes into contact with the lifeless (Korsmeyer, 2011;Kristeva, 1982). In addition, Kaija's example points to the infrastructures that intertwine with disgust. ...
The affective turn has highlighted the need to study emotions, visceral reactions and embodied experiences within social sciences, and its importance has also been recognized within theories of practice. However, practice theoretical discussions of affects, especially empirically grounded ones, are still sparse and fragmented. This article seeks to further these nascent discussions by arguing that affective practices present one fruitful avenue forward. Originally introduced by Margaret Wetherell within social psychology, affective practices are theoretically developed further in this article within sociological research on consumption practices. This is done by suggesting that affective practices can be operationalized as meanings, materials and competences, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s work. To explore how these three interdependent elements fit within affective practices, the article utilizes examples of disgust as an affective practice from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices among Finnish consumers. This provides a rich area of enquiry, since meat consumption mobilizes many affects in these times of mounting sustainability, health and animal rights concerns, and disgust within it entangles with visceral reactions as well as moral aversion. Altogether, the article provides a conceptualization for studying how affects themselves are constituted practically (affects as practices), to compliment previous research that has considered affects or emotions as parts of certain practices (affects within practices). Approaching affects as practices makes it possible to see affects’ ontological variability and trajectories over time, as well as their relations to cultural and social values and feeling rules.
... For philosophical discussions of the aesthetic enjoyment of disgust specifically, see e.g. Korsmeyer (2011); and for a critical discussion of the idea that disgust itself can be pleasant, see Robinson (2014). Immediately, this account is confronted with the problem of substituting one difficult problem for another-for what is beauty? ...
I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem).
... While Shelley's emphasis is on the conceptual fault line in the default theory in general, my own focus will be on how the example of non-perceptual aesthetic experience can help us revise our underlying conception of the aesthetic. (Korsmeyer 2011;Schellekens 2007). Fourth, a commitment to the standard conception severely impedes our efforts to explain and integrate aesthetic practice (b), as well as the habit of attributing aesthetic character to other objects of experience which do not afford straightforward sense-perceptual manifestations, such as moral character (Paris 2018), or indeed literature (Lamarque and Olsen 1994). ...
The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central rather than marginal to our philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly.
... Whereas laughing at someone may reproduce disgust in the context of mortality, I argue that laughing with someone at the assumed disgustingness of mortality could ease the social stigma related to aging and death. Stand-up comedy is a performative communication mode, and according to Korsmeyer (2011) performative modes have the potential to force people into paying attention to the structures of disgust, and consequently to change social norms. Thus, when comedians joke about aging or death, they ofer a space in which to make fun of social norms of disgust related to mortality. ...
... There is no shortage of words to describe the antithesis of beauty and sublimity. Yet our vocabulary for the processes and entanglements of disgust-related production and consumption seems incomplete, as some of the more recent attempts at coining new terms such as "stuplimity" (Ngai 2005) or the "sublate" (Korsmeyer 2011) attest. To make something seem inappropriate or ofensive is to defle or to corrupt, to make disgusting. ...
Many theorists note the important role that wonder can play in our lives. Yet, little attention has been given to the associated character virtue; characterizations of it do not go much further than basic sketches that draw on Aristotle’s view about emotional dispositions that are proper to virtue. This paper fleshes out such sketches, which helps us understand what type of virtue this trait is. The account of virtuous wonder I develop here vindicates brief suggestions in the literature that this trait is an intellectual and aesthetic virtue and reveals in what sense it is a moral and environmental virtue.
Shaunak Sen’s powerful documentary All That Breathes (2022) tells the story of two brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohamed Saud, and their assistant Salik, who have devoted their lives to saving black kites that have been dropping from the skies of Delhi in alarming numbers for over a decade. They work tirelessly in the makeshift hospital in their cramped basement, taking care of these regal creatures. This article argues that Sen’s documentary provides an example of planetary care via the portrayal of the wildlife rescue work done by the brothers. It analyzes the film’s depiction of entangled interspecies relations via a triangulation of the brothers, the kites and the material environment, arguing that the brothers’ enactment of a sense of obligation, care and commitment contrasts starkly with the abject conditions in which they live and work. In proposing a profound ethic of multispecies care, I argue that the film also subtly critiques India’s right-wing Hindu majoritarianism and the state-endorsed violence against Muslims, which provides the film’s backdrop. It does so by engaging with a discourse of disgust that is often invoked against the Muslim by majoritarian groups in India when calls are made to rid the imagined Hindu nation space of the Muslim Other. Furthermore, the tender moments of care become themselves moments for the production of an aesthetics of disgust. By intermingling depictions of care with representations of disgust, the film critiques the national politics of alterity and exclusion while urgently calling for interrelational webs of care. However, I argue that despite Sen’s attempts to humanize the Muslim Other for a majoritarian audience, the film ultimately remains somewhat circumscribed within a liberal sensibility, thereby missing the opportunity for an even more nuanced representation of human–animal entanglements and an intimate understanding of the Muslim Other.
Apresentação à Texto Poético 44.
The mannequin is a paradoxical figure, simultaneously captivating and disturbing. Within this ambiguity, the Surrealists explored the boundary between the animate and the inani- mate in search of that uncanniness that aligns with Freud’s concept of the Das Unheimli- che. This study investigates the peculiar sensation of disgust and repulsion provoked by this human simulacrum in surrealist fashion photography. The analysis is structured as a visual mapping of the mannequin, examining photographs published in Vogue between 1925 and 1945. The investigation reflects on the concept of disgust, here framed within Freud’s notion of the uncanny and interwoven with the Surrealist concept of convulsive beauty, tracing back to the Surrealists’ critique of capitalism, of which the mannequin becomes a vehicle. A comparison with Hans Bellmer’s explicitly disturbing Poupée highlights the polished perfection of the mannequins staged in fashion editorials by photographers such as Man Ray, Horst, Hoyningen-Huene, and Blumenfeld. Drawing upon theories of psychoanaly- sis, aesthetics, and art history, the study examines the factors that render these images disturbing: their artificiality, lifelessness, and resemblance to the human form. However, the Surrealist operation has a subversive edge: discomfort serves to reveal the circular relationship between art and consumerism. The visual trope of the mannequin, with its intrinsic duality of elegance and the abject, serves as a lens through which to examine this subtle undercurrent of unconscious disgust that permeates surrealist fashion photography, pushing the boundaries of artistic expres- sion and critique of modern society.
We study co-constructed narrative exchange in online storytelling. Our test case is the Finnish YouTuber Niilo22, an unemployed person who broadcasts frequent video clips of his everyday activities while chatting on stock issues and interacting with his followers. Followers engage in lively commentary and team up to make evaluative interpretations of Niilo22’s life on the go. The interpretive frames imposed draw on pre-existing story templates rooted in culturally shared actor categories. We propose the concept of storybaiting to denote the two-way dynamic between Niilo22 and his followers whereby responses triggered by the clips produce further input in the narration, resulting in shared and circularly progressive authorship. This action blurs the ownership of the story and dilutes the teller’s privileges. Life storying in online platforms turns into interactive storybaiting where everybody involved gives and takes cues to evaluate the social media personality and position him in regard to repeated story templates.
For this Roundtable, we asked several leading scholars working on issues
of social justice and cognition in fi lm and media studies for a brief response
to the prompt: “Explain one current theory, approach, or research fi nding
that you think is particularly important in addressing stigma and inclusivity
in screen media.” Participants drew from their own current work and insights,
and they pointed to new strands of inquiry that they found exciting.
Their responses represent a range of interests across diverse specialisms,
and comprise an interdisciplinary showcase for the state of current research
in social justice, cognition, and media, including ideas on how the
fi elds could grow from here.
The topic of imaginative resistance attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years. Yet, with a few exceptions, no historical investigation of the phenomenon has been carried out. This paper amends this gap in the literature by constructing a Humean and a Kantian explanation. The main contributions of this historical analysis to this debate are to make room for emotions in explanations of resistance reactions and to upset the polarization between rival accounts by suggesting that our possible responses to morally flawed works can vary. In some cases, we resist imagining counter‐evaluative claims due to our unwillingness to do so, and in others, due to our inability.
This Element turns to the stage to ask a simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in affect, disgust. It explores both the textual "performance" of affect, how literary language works to evoke emotions and the ways disgust can work in theatrical performance. Here Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece is the classic paradigm of sexual pollution and shame, where disgust's irrational logic of contamination leaves the raped wife in a permanent state of uncleanness that spreads from body to soul. Staging Disgust offers alternatives to this depressing trajectory: Middleton's Women Beware Women and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus perform disgust with a difference, deploying the audience's revulsion to challenge the assumption that a raped woman should “naturally” feel intolerable shame.
This chapter investigates neo-Victorian material culture and more specifically the way in which neo-Victorian writing engages with Victorian discourses on dirt, discarded, “abject” material or, “displaced” matter. The complementary Victorian obsession with hygiene, pollution, contagion and adulteration will also feed into this analysis. As interest in Victorian dirt and waste has become one of the foci of recent historiographic and interdisciplinary research while material culture is now a prime concern in neo-Victorian research a few forays into (bodily as well as non-bodily) neo-Victorian dirt have followed suit. The chapter summarises and further investigates how neo-Victorian narratives re-view Victorian practices of disposal, exclusion, cleaning, and recycling, as well as the transformation of these practices into ideologies of eradication of dirt. The chapter will focus in particular on well-established discourses focused on the River Thames (cholera and sewage in Matthew Kneale, Sweet Thames; Clare Clarke, The Great Stink), on bodily disgust in texts such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and The Apple or Claire Boylan’s Emma Brown and, finally, on neo-Victorian re-visualisations of dirt in adaptations of Faber, Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, or Penny Dreadful.
Organized around eight themes central to aesthetic theory today, this book examines the sources and development of Kant's aesthetics by mining his publications, correspondence, handwritten notes, and university lectures. Each chapter explores one of eight themes: aesthetic judgment and normativity, formal beauty, partly conceptual beauty, artistic creativity or genius, the fine arts, the sublime, ugliness and disgust, and humor. Robert R. Clewis considers how Kant's thought was shaped by authors such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Meier, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Sulzer, Johann Herder, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Henry Home, Charles Batteux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. His resulting study uncovers and illuminates the complex development of Kant's aesthetic theory and will be useful to advanced students and scholars in fields across the humanities and studies of the arts.
The founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, had strong opinions about William Faulkner’s novels, to say the least. Sanctuary, especially, ignited his ire. In a scathing essay entitled “The School of Cruelty,” published in March 1931, Canby deplored what he perceived as the terrible situation of Southern writers, declaring Faulkner the figurehead of a so-called “American sadism.” “So it will be with this new sadism,” Canby wrote, “the novel cruelty by which the American scene with all its infinite shadings is made into something gross, sordid, or, as here, depraved with an ironic depravity in which the trivial by a kind of perversion becomes more horrible than professional evil.” Faulkner is expectedly not the only example of literature deemed “disgusting:” according to Chuck Palahniuk himself, seventy-three people have fainted during public readings of this short story “Guts.” Despite the writer’s obvious delight in describing in vivid detail the fainting spells he witnessed, this specific number is difficult to corroborate. However, numerous readers’ reviews on the popular website Goodreads.com indicate that Palahniuk’s assertions were not unfounded. One reviewer wrote: “I need to talk to someone about this book. I’m trying to digest it. I don’t know if it’s vile trash or provocative writing. It made me feel very strong emotions, which is usually a hallmark of good writing in my opinion, but the emotions were so, so unpleasant […]. I don’t know if my heart or stomach can handle the rest of the book. Is it worth it?” A good question indeed. How can a text, which relies on words on a page and not images, provoke such violent reactions? And finally, can a text be “digested”? Can there be any “pleasure of the text,” to use Roland Barthes’ expression, in the description of something “so, so unpleasant”? This paper is interested in the literary and aesthetic mechanisms enabling a profoundly somatic reading of fiction, especially in the violent experience of disgust, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg and Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. I will try to determine the aesthetic and political role disgust plays in these works, in order to prove that the physical unpleasantness caused by the experience of disgust forces readers to confront their societal conditioning by bringing them to the limits of readability.
The aesthetics of body and dress are in a continuous flux. The body, being the locus where fashion challenges the traditional norms, escapes from the narrow boundaries of the conventionally beautiful; the disgusting soma, in the realm of Negative Aesthetics, takes its place. In this paper, I attempt to define what is disgusting fashion and how can contribute to the deliberation of the body from the restricting margins of the aesthetically beautiful. The distorted imagery of the feminine soma is the center of the analysis of the non-beautiful as an aesthetically pleasing phenomenon. Different examples of repulsive clothing are analyzed from a philosophical point of view, in order to understand the relation between the negative emotional responses towards disgusting fashion and its aesthetic value.
This paper explicates the concept of aesthetic resistance (AR) and its connection to sociopolitical change, drawing from resistance studies’ frameworks. Combining semi-structured and integrative reviews of literature on resistance in art and aesthetics across the humanities and social sciences, the paper performs a thematic analysis to identify patterns in AR’s definitions, modes and domains, attributes, and transformative variables. These are synthesized in terms of the evolving resistance studies’ frameworks and an understanding of aesthetics as relating to the sensorium, ultimately revealing three interlocking issues: (1) publicness, (2) potentiality, and (3) plexus. These AR-specific issues contribute to the categorization of resistance, its identification, and the tracing of its network en route to change.
Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative aesthetics are not mere occurrences of disgust or repulsiveness in art and in everyday life, but ways of addressing the repulsive in relation to the culturally variable scope of art and aesthetics. Besides the classical paradigm that associates repugnant subjects with their pleasure-inducing imitations in art, and the transgressions of modern and contemporary art that increasingly shocked their audience, revulsion can also be regarded as a form of displeasure linked to the quotidian, yet aesthetically relevant forms of life. By virtue of this ordinary nature, which is not unfamiliar to other (non-Western) cultures, revulsion could be placed at the core of everyday aesthetics, since it confirms both the transition from contemplation to action in recent aesthetics, that is, the practical preoccupation with the aesthetic quality of living, and the broader redefinition of aesthetics in terms of sensory reactions.
A major part of Ordinary Aesthetics has been to include the traditionally marginalized aesthetic categories excluded when studying beauty, truth, and goodness. These “negative aesthetics” are implicated in the construction, presentation, and sustenance of marginalized identities. For the purposes of my article, I will be focusing on the effort to incorporate the aforementioned in the study of aesthetics, essentially arguing for them to be inherently valuable and not for the sake of producing a “positive.” To this end and keeping up with the thrust to include other traditions within aesthetics, my article will explore certain strands of Sufi poetry, namely the tradition of Qalandariyat, which present marginalized social identities to our awareness and not for the sake of changing or improving them. I will present some samples from the Persian poetry of Hafez and Rumi, as well as Punjabi couplets of Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain, for a hermeneutic study that grounds the aesthetics of their Qalandari-themed literature in the usage of “negative” aesthetic categories. This exercise contains the promise of expanding the horizons for our field of sensibilities, by engaging with those social identities that have remained outside them and that too on their own terms.
En los últimos años, asistimos a una proliferación de ficciones en que se refleja un creciente interés social por visibilizar violencias normalizadas e invisibilizadas. Entre estas violencias, una de las más arraigadas en nuestra sociedad es la que supone la “cultura de la carne” (Potts, 2016), que afecta a los animales no humanos. Este artículo, que se enmarca en una investigación amplia en torno a los mecanismos empleados en la narrativa breve española contemporánea para desestabilizar el binomio vida política / vida fisiológica y así cuestionar la cultura de la carne, se centra en las figuras híbridas humanimales. En concreto, se estudian dos relatos en que un cuerpo simultáneamente (animal) humano y (animal) no humano es consumido: la sirena en “Los frutos del mar” (2018), de José María Merino, y la cecaelia en “Espuma de color lavanda” (2019), de Covadonga González-Pola. A partir de las ideas de figuras como Carol Adams, Derrida, Haraway o Agamben, se analizan estas ficciones como espacios de resistencia frente a los discursos hegemónicos que naturalizan la violencia de la cultura de la carne. Además, puesto que la parte humana de los cuerpos híbridos es femenina, se estudian los vínculos entre la violencia patriarcal y la especista a los que apuntan las ficciones.
In his Lectures on Fine Art (1835), Hegel emphasizes the grotesque character of Indian art. Grotesqueness results, in his view, from a contradiction between meaning and shape due to the incongruous combination of spiritual and material elements. Since Hegel's history of art is teeming with examples of inadequacy between meaning and shape, this paper aims to distinguish the grotesque from other types of artistic dissonance and to problematize Hegel's ascriptions of grotesqueness to ancient Indian art. In the first part of the paper, I characterize the grotesque by the unnatural distortion of natural shapes with the purpose of achieving a direct sensuous manifestation of an indeterminate and impersonal divinity, Brahman. Such an attempt is, in Hegel's view, self-contradictory and self-defeating, leading to an exaggeration of the conflict between nature and spirit instead of the intended reconciliation between the two parts. In the second part of the paper, I compare Hegel's account of Indian art to the ‘monstrous myths’ of early modern Europe. Unlike his predecessors, Hegel legitimizes the grotesque representations of Hindu gods as endowed with profound meaning and the result of a universal human need, yet he describes them as ultimately irrational and repulsive based on a prejudiced view of the Indian people(s). In this sense, Hegel's assessment of Indian art functions as a reflection of modern European culture, its fascination and horror in the face of what Enlightenment could not entirely purge, rather than as a truthful and objective account of Indian art and culture. By questioning Hegel's characterization of Hindu iconography and mythology, this paper contributes to underexplored areas of Hegelian aesthetics, namely Hegel's account of symbolic art, especially Indian art, as well as his views on negative aesthetic experiences and values.
The plague that closes Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura is a spectacle of disgust. Throats sweat with blood (6.47f.); tongues drip with gore (6.1149); breath reeks like rotten cadavers (6.1154f.); drinking water is contaminated when the sick dive into it (6.1174f.); black discharge pours from stomachs (6.1200); foul blood seeps from noses (6.1203); the sick slice off their own hands, feet, and genitals (6.1209f.); dead bodies are entombed by ulcers (6.1271). Again and again Lucretius hits upon domains that have been identified as key disgust elicitors. In Book 6, more than in any other book of the epic, we encounter what is taeter , ‘disgusting’. This adjective appears nine times in the final book (22, 217, 787, 807, 976, 1154, 1200, 1205, and 1266) after showing up one time each in Books 1 (936), 3 (581), and 5 (1126); six times in Book 2 (400, 415, 476, 510, 705, 872); and five times in Book 4 (11, 124, 172, 685, 1176). The vast majority of these instances describe disgust working upon our senses of taste, smell, sight, and even hearing ( OLD s.v. 1); that is, ‘primary’ or ‘core’ disgust. At 2.510f., for instance, Lucretius speaks of a substance that is taetrius… / naribus auribus atque oculis orisque sapori (‘more disgusting to noses, ears, eyes, and the taste of the mouth’). But the word can also carry an ethical or moral nuance ( OLD s.v. 2), suggesting ‘secondary’ disgust. At 5.1126, for example, the word describes Tartarus, into which thunderbolts ‘scornfully’ hurl sinners ( contemptim in Tartara taetra ). Here, Lucretius wants his reader to feel a sense of moral aversion to the idea of the Underworld, which throughout the epic he is at pains to prove is nothing but a poetic fiction.
In the text, we assumed that the type of secondary school students may differentiate preventive
health-oriented behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the text is to analyze the
differences and to adopt recommendations for different types of secondary schools. The results of
the study on a sample of 746 people aged 14 to 22 show that students of general secondary schools
during the COVID-19 pandemic engage in more health prevention behaviors and have a more positive attitude towards them than students from technical secondary schools and from sectoral vocational schools. We design recommendations for educational practice within the framework of the
Health Beliefs Model.
In this paper I will show how contemporary feminist artists whose works concern femicides address three senses of the term “to disappear”. These works can be particularly disturbing, along the lines of Danto’s notion of disturbatory art, since these kinds of works use artistic means to unveil the social and subjective implications of gender crimes.
What place do experiences of beauty have in a meaningful life? A marginal one, at best, it would seem, if one looks at the current literature in analytic philosophy. Treatments of beauty within so‐called “analytic existentialism” tend to suffer from four limitations: beauty is neglected, reduced to artistic production, saddled to theology, or taken as a mere application of a broader theoretical framework. These discussions fail to engage with the rich tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In this essay, I begin by responding to the contention that experiences of beauty cannot lend life meaning because they are passive. Drawing on work in philosophical aesthetics, I then argue that encounters with the beautiful count as genuinely meaning‐conferring because they have features commonly taken as marks of meaningfulness.
In this paper, I review developments in discussions of fiction and emotion over the last decade concerning both the descriptive question of how to classify fiction-directed emotions and the normative question of how to evaluate those emotions. Although many advances have been made on these topics, a mistaken assumption is still common: that we must hold either that fiction-directed emotions are (empirically or normatively) the same as other emotions, or that they are different. I argue that we should reject this dichotomy.
“Mythorealism” is a formal literary experiment developed by Yan Lianke, whose 2008 novel Ballad, Hymn, Ode ( Feng ya song) produces a cumulative effect of absurdity that has provoked controversy over the extent to which it offers an effective social critique. In response to the scholarship based on realist readings of the novel, this article analyzes it from a “mythorealistic” perspective. It argues that the mythorealist narrative does not necessarily cancel out Yan’s social commentary but instead transfers his critical impulse to a psychological exploration of marginal intellectuals in a desymbolized society. In particular, this article is concerned with thematic interpretation and the relation between literary form and meaning in Yan’s parody of the Shijing in Ballad, Hymn, Ode. By focusing on Yan’s symbolic representation of sex and disgust, this article investigates how such imagery and motifs speak from their own space to reveal Chinese intellectuals’ spiritual crisis in an academic world pervaded with an instrumentalist ethos.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the interpretive potential of disgust, examining the pop culture zombie figure. The analyses are conducted from the perspective of aesthetic education. The author
focuses on such aspects of the zombie figure as: epidemic, impurity, concept of the Other, abjection, the body, and corporeality. The literature used in the analyses comes from various disciplines: psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, pedagogy, etc
This article uses Carl Plantinga’s and Noël Carroll’s theorizations regarding cinematic disgust to analyze Carl Franklin’s 1995 film noir, Devil in a Blue Dress. Plantinga argues for a link between disgust and ideology that helps to reveal deeper cultural significance in film, which Carroll’s work likewise supports. Plantinga further argues that disgust in art may be strangely attractive as well as repulsive, thereby eliciting reflection. I argue that combining these elements with philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s explanation of how moral revolutions happen by means of honor codes helps to clarify not only viewer sympathy and solidarity for this film’s African-American protagonist, but also viewer moral disgust at another important white character’s racism. In particular, the film encourages its more thoughtful white viewers to reconsider as well as potentially change their affective responses, ideological predispositions, and habits of perception and attention regarding race, thereby facilitating fundamental moral change and even the possibility of moral revolution.
Burke is an important exception to Nietzsche's claim that philosophical aesthetics ignores physiology and the role of practical
interest. Grounded on the powerful interest of survival, Burke's theory of the sublime also offers a physiological explanation
of our feelings of sublimity that explicitly defines certain conditions of our nerves as the ‘efficient cause’ of such feelings.
While his general account of sublimity is widely appreciated, its somatic dimension has been dismissed as hopelessly misguided.
In examining Burke's views in relation to contemporary somaesthetics, cognitive psychology, and physiology, this paper shows
that though Burke's somatic arguments can be criticized as overly simplistic and mechanistic, his recognition of the crucial
bodily dimensions of aesthetic experience should be taken more seriously. In refining Burke's insight that bodily factors
can help explain our aesthetic reactions, somaesthetics further urges that improved somatic understanding and performance
can provide valuable means for enhancing our aesthetic response.
In this article I am not going to try and define introspection. I am going to try to state as precisely as possible how the practice of introspection can be improved, starting from the principle that there exists a disjunction between the logic of action and of conceptualization and the practice of introspection does not require that one should already be in possession of an exhaustive scientific knowledge bearing upon it. (Just suppose that before studying cognition, you were required to define it or that you were required to have a complete knowledge of perception before being permitted to read a set of instructions). To make matters worse, innumerable commentators upon what passes for introspection do not seem to have practised it and have certainly never contributed anything to its development. My aim is therefore to bring to light a procedure for progressive improvement in the practice of introspection when it is employed in a programme of research.
Diacritics 32.1 (2002) 19-37
Over the last twenty years or so it has become a commonplace in discussions of "aesthetics" or of "art" in the most general sense to note that the term "aesthetics" was only very recently invented by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, where it appears in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [see Menke 40; Dickie; Eagleton]. But the force of this observation in regard to the relative youth of the concept is rarely, if ever, commented upon. As many philosophers and critics have pointed out, Baumgarten's use of the term was not primarily angled at what today might be unproblematically called "artworks"—say, paintings in the European grand master tradition—since his new kind of investigation was to be a "science of sensual recognition," that is, a general inquiry into how we come to know the world from the evidence of our senses. But, as is also frequently remarked, early on in the tradition of speculation now associated with "aesthetics as the study of art" the mutual attraction (to put it in the most anodyne terms) of "art" and "aesthetics" seems to have been extremely strong. As Jonathan Ree remarks, "the real begetter of the philosophical doctrine connecting the arts with the empirical senses—what we might call the aesthetic theory of the arts—was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing" [58]. From this point on (for heuristic purposes it may be identified with the date of publication of Lessing's Laokoon in 1766), artworks, which heretofore had not required a specific branch of inquiry in order for them to make sense or be conceptually grounded as art, are almost universally assumed to require "aesthetic" contemplation or appreciation. It is curious, then, that before 1766 such a mode of experiencing artworks had not been felt to be lacking.
One might understand this observation both historically and philosophically, and both approaches, it seems to me, are needed. In the case of the first, a number of material effects conspired across mid-eighteenth-century Europe to produce what was in essence the modern art market. These include the legal establishment of copyright, first in England in 1709 but only by the end of the century in France and Germany; the foundation of various institutions whose primary purpose was the promotion and establishment of the fine arts: academies of painting, sculpture, or letters either with or without royal patronage; the public exhibition of paintings (from 1737 in France and 1761 in England); the opening of royal collections to public view (during the second half of the century in London, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Rome); the development of public concerts of secular music (in small scale from the 1670s in England but only becoming fully integrated in fashionable social life by mid-century); the construction of purpose-built concert venues (the Gewandthaus in Leipzig, a former cloth merchant's hall, was remodeled in 1781 in order to accommodate a resident orchestra, in effect becoming the first dedicated concert hall in Europe); the foundation of literary periodicals and review media; the emergence of social spaces and rituals encompassing polite discussion of literature (coffeehouses, the construction of dedicated library rooms in domestic settings); and the promotion of architecture to a fine art through various societies, competitions, and the public display of architectural drawings in exhibition contexts (the Royal Academy yearly show included both drawings and models). These and other material conditions helped define the fine arts and construct a market in and for them. By the 1770s the category of the "fine arts" was well established in Britain, Germany, and France: Charles Batteux's Les beaux arts reduit a un meme principe, first published in France in 1746, was quickly translated into English as The Polite Arts; or, a Dissertation on Poetry,Painting, Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence in 1749 and into German in 1751. By 1771 a four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts had been published for the German public by J. G. Sulzer.
All of this points to the fact that the concept of the "artwork" is subject to both historical and material pressures. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century (though of course...
Disgust is not a pleasant subject. It is perhaps partly for this reason that it has not been much discussed in philosophical literature, or, indeed anywhere else. Disgust has considerable moral significance however, and appreciating its significance will illuminate the present state of our morality. One may be led to this view by reflecting on several recent works on pollution. The pollution in question, of course, is not of the air, soil, or water, but that of people who have violated moral taboos of their society'.
[FIRST PARAGRAPHS]
From Plato through Aquinas to Kant and beyond beauty has traditionally
been considered the paradigmatic aesthetic quality. Thus,
quite naturally following Socrates' strategy in The Meno, we are
tempted to generalize from our analysis of the nature and value of
beauty, a particular aesthetic value, to an account of aesthetic value
generally. When we look at that which is beautiful, the object gives
rise to a certain kind of pleasure within us. Thus aesthetic value is
characterized in terms of that which affords us pleasure. Of course,
the relation cannot be merely instrumental. Many activities may
lead to consequent pleasures that we would not consider to be aesthetic
in any way. For example, playing tennis, going swimming or
finishing a book. Rather it is in the very contemplation of the object
itself that we derive pleasure. As Kant puts it:
We dwell on the contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself. The case is analogous (but analogous only) to the way we linger on a charm in the representation of an object which keeps arresting the attention, the mind all the while remaining passive.
Thus contemporary philosophers have, following this tradition, defined aesthetic value in terms of our delighting in and savouring an object with pleasure.* An object is of intrinsic aesthetic value if it appropriately gives rise to pleasure in our contemplation of it. Of course background knowledge of particular art movements, cate- gories or artistic intentions may be required to perceive an artwork appropriately. Nonetheless, given the relevant understanding, it is in attending to and savouring uhat is presented to us that we are afforded pleasure.
This paper is concerned with the possibility of an objectivism for aesthetic judgements capable of incorporating certain ‘subjectivist’
elements of aesthetic experience. The discussion focuses primarily on a desired cognitivism for aesthetic judgements, rather
than on any putative realism of aesthetic properties. Two cognitivist theories of aesthetic judgements are discussed, one
subjectivist, the other objectivist. It is argued that whilst the subjectivist theory relies too heavily upon analogies with
secondary qualities, the objectivist account, which allows for some such analogies at the epistemological level, is too quick
to ground aesthetic judgements in perceptual experiences alone. Further, it is held that aesthetic justification can, contra the objectivist theory under scrutiny, be based on an appeal to generally available justifying reasons without overthrowing
the non-inferential character of aesthetic judgements. This possibility relies on a clearly established delineation between
(i) aesthetic perception and aesthetic judgement, (ii) justifying reasons and explaining reasons, and (iii) judgement-making
and judgement-justification.
Disgust has arrived as an emotion attracting intense study by clinical psychologists. The purpose of this essay is to address several themes adumbrated in the articles in this special series. Topics covered include disgust and evolutionary theories of phobia, disgust and cognition, and the relation between disgust and cannibalism, violence, and fine art.