Search Results

The Conclusion situates the findings of the book in relation to the current environmental crisis, arguing that effective responses to this crisis demand a plurality of approaches to nonhuman life, rather than an empathy which is restricted to certain living beings. It argues that literature is not a protected, apolitical space, but a world-making space, whose tools – metaphor, trope, allegory – should be evaluated as better or worse tools of being-with other forms of life, rather than merely in terms of their representational value. The Conclusion appeals to a mode of ‘noninnocent thinking’ which links the critical and imaginative, and advances ways of cultivating less violence, rather than eradicating it completely.

This chapter demonstrates that unmanliness was written onto ill-formed, unappealing bodies and faces, which prompted disgust, fear, and shame. It shows that adult men were instructed on how to avoid unmanliness through emotionalised bodies: failing, uncontrolled, unattractive bodies created by unchecked appetites and bad habits such as drunkenness, and sexual vices. Men were thus taught that the inability to master one’s self caused literal physical, mental, and moral disintegration. Lack of self-control became more dangerous in the nineteenth century as excessive passions, bodily appetites, and feelings were increasingly pathologised as causes of disease and insanity. Responsibility was placed upon the male individual for failing to exert enough moral control to avoid his illness. The discussion of the relationship between unmanliness, bodies, and emotions that follows reveals the inherent paradox of masculine identity, since many unmanly behaviours were also those which, in a managed form, were central to the performance of normative masculinity. Thus, men had to navigate considerable ambiguities in performing their gender. The chapter shows how unmanliness was especially complicated for those men whose bodies were lacking, due to disability, age, or infirmity. (184 words)

This chapter tracks the flying and scurrying of disparate unpinned insects, emphasising both their instrumental and intrinsic value, and the necessity of supplementing empathetic with non-empathetic approaches when thinking and writing with them. It examines three figures of the insect: the first, the insect as other other in Damien Hirst’s work, exposes the limitations of empathetic responses to nonhuman life. The second, the queer insect, draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin, Roger Caillois’s interpretation of mimicry and Lee Edelman’s work in queer theory to argue that the insect provides a figure of the inhuman that counters logics of heteronormative futurity. The final figure, that of the disgusting insect, is generated through Rosi Braidotti’s reading of Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion of G.H. and Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The chapter concludes by advancing disgust as a useful tool in the development of inhuman ethics.

This chapter argues that rasa theory should be taken seriously in Christian theology. Its aesthetic perspective relates contextual and bodily aspects of emotion to religious experience, sheds light on human flourishing, and has much to offer a holistic theological anthropology. A holistic theology of the emotions will do more than prescribe emotion’s regulation. It will savor all nine of the traditional emotions (navarasa) of rasa theory. The chapter first considers a positive role for fury and the other “negative” emotions of terror, disgust, and pathos from the perspective of liberation theology. This liberative perspective then illuminates the “positive” rasas of humor, courage, peace, and love. The discerning spectator (sahṛdaya) will aim to understand each emotion, critically evaluate its religious usefulness, and pursue each emotion as a potential taste of the divine.

This chapter opens with a critical discussion of the notions of horror, terror and dread, which are defined according to a dialectic between the presence and absence of “monstrous” stimuli. The analyses show that the 1970s films consistently undermine the opposition between human and monster, revealing that the monster and the “monstrous” are not discrete concepts but shifting values within the films, and surely within the viewers’ cultural frameworks. As for the 2000s remakes, they significantly increase the danger factor by playing up the “monstrous” characters’ superhuman strength and omnipotence. This contemporary trend affects both the politics and the aesthetics of contemporary horror films: first, it somewhat downplays the “monstrous” characters’ status as victims that enabled a progressive subtext in the 1970s films, even though the contemporary films emphasize these characters’ motives on the diegetic level; secondly, it leaves less time to contemplate the “monstrous” stimuli that are, quite simply, too effective.

Economic efficiency is a criterion commonly used in economic analyses to establish an order of preference between different policy alternatives. However, in many societal situations where decisions on policy are made it would seem that this criterion is not the one most often prevails. This paper examines a disgust or repugnance factor, and examines how this factor operates as a restriction on certain transactions in the market and the consequences of these restrictions. This repugnance concept, developed by Al Roth (2007), suggests that some transactions, such as the purchase and sale of kidneys for transplants are illegal simply because a sufficient number of people find it repugnant. This paper demonstrates that the level of the repugnant reaction depends on circumstances and is closely associated with the social cost imposed by the development, prohibition or regulation of a kidney transplant market.

Chapter 3 is devoted to Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud (1971–72), an epic artwork in which she orchestrated typewritten texts and painted images to seize the monstrosity attributed to white women if they do not stay within patriarchal constraints. The chapter analyses Codex Artaud as a feminist claim to women’s aggressive capacities and all they connect to: sexuality, disorder, insanity, and protest, but also the capacity to represent oneself as other. The reading focuses on Spero’s conflicted engagement with Antonin Artaud’s writings and the fact that though he was insane, he was able to command the patriarchal orders of language to create a mobile range of self-representations. Spero’s engagement with Artaud’s texts produced a form of writing that both emulates and critiques the masculine privileges that make such self-representations of otherness possible, thereby revealing the aggression from which women in western culture have been traditionally barred. To evoke the psychic mechanisms that enforce this exclusion, the chapter turns to Sigmund Freud’s definition of sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his articulation of the expectation that women should not indulge in the pleasures of aggression, but should instead create aesthetically pleasing images devoid of shame and disgust..

An important question to address is why insects are not commonly consumed in Western culture. This chapter investigates global patterns of insect consumption, the psychology of disgust, and the physiological mechanisms of tastes, and determines that there is nothing inherent about insects that make them disgusting. Instead, the presence or absence of edible insects in a culture is best understood as a combination of factors including environment and colonial history.

Even as “disability” constitutes an aesthetic judgment against certain human lives, increasingly disabilities accrue to human bodies as an effect of human-occasioned environmental damage. To love the world through the Anthropocene passage as well as to hold one another in the commons of social flesh, any number of us must work through habituated disgust, which threatens to expel the anomalous other. The theo-philosophical work of Simone Weil is here engaged in itself and as resource for thinking with “Christ as grotesque” (itself perhaps a version of corpse meditation)--as a way then to dampen the disgust reflex and to counter culturally induced exclusions.

This chapter examines Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's (1804-1887) deconstruction of the association between modernity and progress on the one hand and civilization on the other in Kashf al-Mukhabbaʾ ʿan Funun Urubba (Revealing the hidden in European arts) (1863). A man of letters and intellectual from Mount Lebanon who rebelled against Church authority and lived in exile across the Ottoman world, al-Shidyaq systematically attempts to diagnose and explain the way the British define and practice civilization. He treats civilization as a proliferation of symptoms manifested on the body, in city streets, and in food consumption and preparation. Focusing on episodes (aḥdāth) of ingestion and expulsion, the chapter argues that al-Shidyaq's aversion to British food, embodied in his physical collapse and intellectual crises, satirically exposes the notion of civilization as an exclusionary structure and points to its inherent contradictions and epistemic violence. Through a dialogue with theoretical articulations by Louis Marin, Giles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, the chapter demonstrates that the affects of the Arab traveler's body enact in the text a form of deterritorialization that depicts in this context processes of kashf (revealing, unveiling) and taʿriya (stripping naked) of language and cultural discourse.

This essay analyses Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1754) alongside his idiosyncratic medical tracts Institutes of Health (1761) and Phisiological Reveries (1765). It explores the importance of disgust in Cleland’s representations of desiring (and desirable) bodies and the contradictory impulses produced by smell, skin and contamination, the mouth and ingestion. It argues that negative affects in Coxcomb are a symptom of embodied subjectivity. Analysing the novel’s notorious tableau of adult breastfeeding, it shows how Cleland’s mobilization of taste and distaste diagnoses the latent perversity of inter-subjective appetites.

This chapter demonstrates that unmanliness was written onto ill-formed, unappealing bodies and faces, which prompted disgust, fear, and shame. It shows that adult men were instructed on how to avoid unmanliness through emotionalised bodies: failing, uncontrolled, unattractive bodies created by unchecked appetites and bad habits such as drunkenness, and sexual vices. Men were thus taught that the inability to master one’s self caused literal physical, mental, and moral disintegration. Lack of self-control became more dangerous in the nineteenth century as excessive passions, bodily appetites, and feelings were increasingly pathologised as causes of disease and insanity. Responsibility was placed upon the male individual for failing to exert enough moral control to avoid his illness. The discussion of the relationship between unmanliness, bodies, and emotions that follows reveals the inherent paradox of masculine identity, since many unmanly behaviours were also those which, in a managed form, were central to the performance of normative masculinity. Thus, men had to navigate considerable ambiguities in performing their gender. The chapter shows how unmanliness was especially complicated for those men whose bodies were lacking, due to disability, age, or infirmity. (184 words)

This chapter surveys media that elicits laughter from the spectator. The chapter examines laughter as an involuntary response to a wide range of experiences, and not simply things that could be considered humorous. Laughter (particularly in the communal setting of a theater, or among friends) might follow jump-out-of-your-seat frights in a horror film, giddiness in response to sex, perhaps a nervous response to things that disgust. Whatever it might be, the chapter considers laughter that is spawned by something other than jokes—in the most generic sense. Jokes necessitate narrative contextualization, and this chapter looks beyond that, to examine laughter in response to other phenomena, such as bodies in pain (in the Jackass films, for instance) and the depiction of grotesque bodies (as in the film Taxidermia). The phenomenon of YouTube reaction videos—such as those to the infamous viral video 2 Girls 1 Cup—are discussed. Mikhail Bakhtim’s notion of the carnivalesque is explored at length.

This chapter explores the inclusion of graphic sexual content in post-millennial cinema. Art films have increasingly incorporated scenes of unsimulated, hardcore sex acts—traditionally associated with pornography—into their narratives in recent years. Arousal, perhaps more so than any of the other themes explored in Extreme Cinema, wields the potential for affective dissonance. In these films, sexual transgression and eroticism might turn towards disgust, signifiers of pain might be confused for signifiers of sexual arousal, or morally objectionable content might elicit sensual arousal—at the intersection of violence and fetishism. The films discussed in this chapter include: Wetlands, Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II, 9 Songs, Helter Skelter.

Much of this chapter focuses on the melodramatic genre and its application in contemporary extreme cinema. Melodrama typically involves loss, and/or a character that arrives too late. In Linda Williams’s notion of the “body genres,” these are films designed to elicit tears, and they frequently revolve around family. However, these are narrative concerns and therefore speak to emotions—particularly sadness. Extreme Cinema attempts to demonstrate how contemporary practices might embellish emotive narrative content with affecting cinematic techniques. Lars von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist, for instance, is about the death of a child and how the parents of the deceased child negotiate their grief, anger, and guilt. Von Trier visualizes the overwhelming anxiety and suffering by means of hyper-stylization—exaggerated colours and lighting, audio design, slow-motion, rapid-fire editing, extreme close-ups, etc. Also discussed is the work of Japanese filmmaker Shion Sono, particularly his films Strange Circus and Why don’t you play in hell?.

This chapter reviews the book The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), by William Ian Miller. Aristotle's students did not want to study the parts of animals. Recoiling in disgust from the study of blood and flesh, they found the distant stars cleaner and more appealing. But Aristotle advised them not to “make a sour face” at biology. Miller finds nothing but disgust in the contemplation of what he calls “thick, greasy life.” He maintains that our disgust with our own feces, sweat, hairiness, or semen is a major element in our humanity—not only in the personal life, where it explains why sex is “so difficult,” but also in public life, in political life. Miller's book has three goals: to analyze the emotion of disgust; to give an account of when and where people experience disgust in daily life and in the sexual realm; and to investigate the role of disgust in morals and politics. His account of the emotion of disgust draws on psychology, literature, and history—all filtered through his own vivid narrative of the phenomena of bodily existence.