Kolnai made a breakthrough in the phenomenology of aversion when he showed the "double intentionality" of emotions like fear, focusing on both the object of fear and the subjects' concern for his own well-being, this being one of the ways in which fear differs from disgust. In a surprising yet persuasive move, Kolnai argues that disgust is never related to inorganic or non-biological matter, and that its arousal by moral objects has an underlying similarity with its arousal by organic material: a particular combination of life and death. Kolnai gives an analytic list of various kinds of disgusting objects (which should not be read just before lunch) and shows how disgust relates to the five senses.

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."

What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light? Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.

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 labelled here "aesthetic disgust." While the reactive, visceral quality 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, this book examines the nature of aesthetic apprehension and argues for the distinctive mode of cognition that disgust affords -- an intimate apprehension of physical mortality. Despite some commonalities attached to the meaning of disgust, this emotion assumes many aesthetic forms: it can be funny, profound, witty, ironic, unsettling, sorrowful, or 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.

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

This book explores the intersubjective nature of disgust, the fascination that often accompanies it—along with repulsion—and the ethical implications of the experience. With attention to what emotions do rather than what they necessarily are, it examines the ways in which disgust works to create structures of meaning about selfhood, interpersonal relationships, and the worlds we inhabit. Offering a critique of existing approaches to disgust, the author advances a feminist intersubjective perspective, drawing on the work of Jessica Benjamin to understand the relational aspects of disgust encounters. Thus, the focus is not on defining disgust definitively, nor debating what objects invoke disgust, nor on whether it is a universal experience, but on the effects of disgust once invoked, what the experience does and the impact it has. Through a case study of incarceration and death by self-inflicted strangulation—a death that was later ruled a homicide—this volume sheds light on the nature of the ethical demands of disgust and its nature as an active struggle for recognition. As such, A Politics of Disgust will appeal to scholars of gender studies, social theory and philosophy with interests in the emotions and intersubjectivity.

Susan Miller, author of two foundational works on shame (The Shame Experience [TAP, 1985/1993pbk]; Shame in Context [TAP, 1996]), now turns to disgust, an intriguing emotion that has received little attention in the professional literature. For Miller, the psychological study of disgust revolves around boundary issues: We tend to feel disgusted about things (from bodily processes to decaying organic matter to ethnic attributes of "foreign" people) that lie on the border between our sense of self and nonself or between our sense of "good self" and "bad self." Miller's clinical and everyday examples of disgust lead her to explore the developmental grounding of the capacity to disgust, and this topic opens to consideration of the relation of the various sensory modalities to disgust reactions. Why, Miller asks, do we see disgusting images and smell disgusting smells but not hear disgusting sounds? And further, what makes sensory impressions or objects "disgusting" to certain people but not to others? Why do the images and smells of disease so frequently elicit disgust? And what is the relation of disgust to sex, procreation, and human intimacy? Laced with developmental insights and vivid illustrations of disgust-related syndromes, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion incorporates cultural analysis that links disgust to images of illness and health, to family life, to group identity, and to artistic and scientific creativity. For Miller, the central disgust dialectic - the self's need to safeguard itself against noxious intrusions from without and simultaneously to nourish itself through contact with "otherness" - obtains whether the discourse concerns nature, nations, or noses. With her typically graceful and gracious prose, Miller puts disgust on the psychological map and thereby adds a chapter to our understanding of the role of emotion in therapy and in everyday life.

The human reaction to insects is neither purely biological nor simply cultural. And no one reacts to insects with indifference. Insects frighten, disgust and fascinate us. Jeff Lockwood explores this phenomenon through evolutionary science, human history, and contemporary psychology, as well as a debilitating bout with entomophobia in his work as an entomologist. Exploring the nature of anxiety and phobia, Lockwood explores the lively debate about how much of our fear of insects can be attributed to ancestral predisposition for our own survival and how much is learned through individual experiences. Drawing on vivid case studies, Lockwood explains how insects have come to infest our minds in sometimes devastating ways and supersede even the most rational understanding of the benefits these creatures provide. No one can claim to be ambivalent in the face of wasps, cockroaches or maggots but our collective entomophobia is wreaking havoc on the natural world as we soak our food, homes and gardens in powerful insecticides. Lockwood dissects our common reactions, distinguishing between disgust and fear, and invites readers to consider their own emotional and physiological reactions to insects in a new framework that he's derived from cutting-edge biological, psychological, and social science.

Aesthetic disgust is a key component of most classic works of drama because it has much more potential than to simply shock the audience. This first extensive study on dramatic disgust places this sensation among pity and fear as one of the core emotions that can achieve katharsis in drama. The book sets out in antiquity and traces the history of dramatic disgust through Kant, Freud, and Kristeva to Sarah Kane's in-yer-face theatre. It establishes a framework to analyze forms and functions of disgust in drama by investigating its different cognates (miasma, abjection, etc.). Providing a concise argument against critics who have discredited aesthetic disgust as juvenile attention-grabbing, Sarah J. Ablett explains how this repulsive emotion allows theatre to dig deeper into what it means to be human.

Our notion of the self depends on it; cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers; and love depends on overcoming it. Miller traverses literature, philosophy, history, political theory, and psychology to show how disgust animates our world.