Disgust

Supra-Aryanist wrote:

Mark of independence to grow out one's own shit.

Freud didn't think so...


Disgust and Repression: Civilization, Tyranny and evolution of the nose.

Menninghaus wrote:

"The birth of olfactory disgust—“[The] feelings [of disgust] seem originally to be a reaction to the smell (and afterwards also to the sight) of excrement”—is at the same time the birth of sexual repression and of the aesthetic and ethical ideals of cultural development. “The principal sense in animals (for sexuality as well) is that of smell, which has been reduced in human beings. As long as smell . . . is dominant, urine, feces, and the whole surface of the body, also blood, have a sexually exciting effect.” At the origin of the affect of disgust stands the phylogenetic “abandonment of former sexual zones.” The withdrawal of sexual energies from those zones in turn engenders the dark continent of “sexuality gone under (and become virtual).” At the same time, it is the condition for the possibility of all repression, all perversion, and all neurosis:

I have often had a suspicion that something organic plays a part in repression; I was able once before to tell you that it was a question of the abandonment of former sexual zones . . . ; in my case, the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations, attached to the earth, becoming repulsive—by a process still unknown to me. (He turns up his nose = he regards himself as something particularly noble.) Now, the zones which no longer produce a release of sexuality in normal and mature human beings must be the regions of the anus and of both the mouth and throat. This is to be understood in two ways; first, that seeing and imagining these zones no longer produce an exciting effect, and second, that the internal sensations arising from them make no contribution to the libido, the way the sexual organs proper do. In animals these initial sexual zones continue in force in both respects; if this persists in human beings too, perversion results. We must assume that in infancy the release of sexuality is not yet so much localized as it is later, so that the zones from which sexual cathexis withdraws later (and perhaps the whole surface of the body as well) also instigate something that is analogous to the later release of sexuality.

Along with Winckelmann and Lessing, Freud regards “the genitals” themselves as incompatible with the law of “beauty”:


It is above all the coprophilic instinctual components that have proved incompatible with our aesthetic standards of culture, probably since, as a result of our adopting an erect gait, we raised our organ of smell from the ground. The same is true of a substantial part of the sadistic urges which are part of erotic life. But all such developmen- tal processes affect only the upper layers of the complex structure. The fundamental processes which produce erotic excitation remain unaltered. The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known dictum of the great Napoleon: “Anatomy is destiny.” The genitals themselves have not taken part in the development of the human body toward beauty: they have remained animal, and thus love, too, has remained in essence just as animal as it ever was.

The human anatomy itself contributes to the “cultural repression” which prescribes the “transformation of affect”:18 where there was oral and anal libido, there disgust shall be. The partial failure of this law has two results: (1) perversions and (2) neuroses as “the negative of perversions.”

Civilization is the permanent production of abject antiworlds, counterworlds, and underworlds, which are labeled “disgusting, abhorrent and abominable.” Disgust is the name for this transformation of affect. The ambivalence and the costs of this transformation constitute the discontents of civilization. In a long footnote to his 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud reformulates the speculations which the 1897 letter to Fliess had dedicated to the subject of man’s rendering his own four-footed animal nature disgusting:

The organic periodicity of the sexual process has persisted, it is true, but its effect on psychical sexual excitation has rather been reversed. This change seems most likely to be connected with the diminution of the olfactory stimuli by means of which the menstrual process produced an effect on the male psyche. Their role was taken over by visual excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent olfactory stimuli, were able to maintain a permanent effect. The taboo on menstruation is derived from this “organic repression,” as a defense against a phase of development that has been surmounted. All other motives are probably of a secondary nature. . . .

This process is repeated on another level when the gods of a superseded period of civilization turn into demons. The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings of shame for him. The fateful process of civilization would thus have started with man’s adoption of an erect posture. From that point, the chain of events would have proceeded through the devaluation of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of the menstrual period to the time when visual stimuli were paramount and the genitals became visible, and thence to the continuity of sex- ual excitation, the founding of the family and so to the threshold of human civilization . . .

A social factor is also unmistakably present in the cultural trend towards cleanliness, which has received ex post facto justification in hygienic considerations but which manifested itself before their discovery. The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of the excreta, which have become disagreeable to the sense percep- tions. We know that in the nursery things are different. The excreta arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from it. Here upbring- ing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worth- less, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable. Such a reversal of values would scarcely be possible if the substances that are expelled from the body were not doomed by their strong smells to share the fate which overtook olfactory stimuli after man adopted the erect posture. Anal eroticism, therefore, succumbs in the first instance to the “organic repression” which paved the way to civilization. The existence of the social factor which is responsible for the further transformation of anal eroticism is attested by the circumstance that, in spite of all man’s developmental advances, he scarcely finds the smell of his own excreta repulsive, but only that of other people’s.

Like several eighteenth-century authors—and in contrast to his immediate predecessors Darwin and Richet—Freud associates disgust, first of all, with the sense of smell; he sees in its evolution, however, an achieved break with the archaic economy of scenting and with the libidinal impulses rooted in the olfactory. Disgust originates in the interstices—in fact, as the fracture—of nature and civilization. It is a “defensive symptom” vis-à-vis the very nature to which, owing to its connection with the “lower” and “more obscure senses,” it has often been ascribed. Like all other such symptoms, “the defensive symp- tom of disgust” is a compromise formation: it not only testifies to the power of repression but, in the mode of “conversion,” it also brings the repressed impulses to a negative “presentation” in conformity with censorship. Instead of being, as in Mendelssohn, the only one of the “unpleasant sensations” inca- pable of assimilation to (aesthetic) pleasure, disgust is in itself pleasure—plea- sure both abandoned and surviving in the form of conversion: “libido and dis- gust,” so runs the early letter, “would seem to be associatively linked.”

If, according to eighteenth-century aesthetics, the effects of disgust escape the (illusory) processing of the nature-art distinction, with Freud this nonapplic- ability of the nature-art distinction to disgust can be stated differently: disgust cannot be grasped in terms of the distinction between nature and art, because it first of all grounds this distinction. Up through Kant, it is not only the “life” of aesthetic illusion and aesthetic ideals, but also the life of the body itself that depends on the rejection of the disgusting. If the “vital sense” of disgust stops working, then one is threatened with the danger of incorporating the unwholesome and, finally, with death. Freud has set down the reverse side of this success story. With its power of rejection, the affect of disgust in the end threatens the foundations of life itself and also of the very civilization which is furthered by the evolution of disgust. Disgust is the catalyst for order and cleanliness and yet, precisely as such, it also powers a disruptive trend that Freud evokes as nothing less than a secular apocalypse, as “the danger of the extinction of the human race.” Given the rejection of all “instinctual compo- nents which have proved incompatible with our aesthetic standards of culture,” the affect of disgust serves to further a structural “non-satisfaction” of the sexual instinct:

What civilization aims to make out of [the instincts of love] seems unattainable except at the price of a sensible loss of pleasure; the persistence of unrealized impulses makes itself present in sexual activity as the feeling of non-satisfaction. Thus, we may perhaps be forced to reconcile ourselves to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of sexual instinct to the demands of civilization; and that—in consequence of our cultural development—renunciation and suffering, as well as the danger of the extinction of the human race in the remotest future, cannot be avoided.

Freud’s narrative of the suppression of instinct is the basis of all sexual-polit- ical rehabilitation of abandoned practices in the field of culture itself. As a matter of fact, nearly all of Freud’s thinking is in some degree oriented, with a considerable touch of nostalgia, toward the continent of “sexuality gone under (and become virtual)” of which the letter to Fliess speaks in connec- tion with disgust and repression. The theory of a childhood sexuality orig- inally free of disgust retraces, on an ontogenetic level, the incessantly repeated process by which oral, anal, and excremental pleasure is made dis- gusting. The theory of perversions considers the insistence of culturally “overcome” practices in the field of fully developed barriers of disgust. The theory of neuroses shows what can happen to suppressed libidinous impulses when the way to open perversion is not followed. And, finally, Freud’s stud- ies of religion, language, superstition, literature, and art address above all the traces of censured desires and pleasures formerly rendered disgusting. All these expeditions into the underside of disgust breathe an unmistakable sym- pathy with their object—an affect for the uncivilized, which habitually infuses even the most striking “perversions” as proof of the power of the abandoned positions of libido.

In terms of its metapsychological and epistemological implications, such an archaeology of the “disgust sensation” presupposes the indestructibility of unconscious desires and libidinous impulses: “It is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indestructible. In the unconscious, nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.”

“Every earlier stage of development persists alongside the later stage which has arisen from it,” but “the primitive stages can always be reestablished; the state of the soul is, in the fullest sense of the term, imperishable.” For the life of individuals and for the work of therapy, this “indelibility that is characteristic of all mental traces” can often make for a heavy burden. For the “fateful development of civilization,” however, these “wishful impulses . . . which can neither be destroyed nor inhibited” signify a hope: namely, that the forfeitures of plea- sure through the cultural process—instead of terminating in the “extinction of the human race”—will be countered by the stubborn obtrusion of archaic libido-positions. The child, the “uncultivated lower strata of society,” the per- verts, and the neurotics are, each in their own way, tropes for the persistence of certain pleasures in the civilized field of disgust—pleasures which, in pri- mordial times, held no suggestion of disgust:

To understand the mental life of children we require analogies from primitive times. Through a long series of generations, the gen- itals have been for us the “pudenda,” objects of shame, and even (as a result of further successful sexual repression) of disgust. . . . What is to be found among us in the way of another view of sexual life is con- fined to the uncultivated lower strata of society; among the higher and more refined classes it is concealed, since it is considered culturally inferior, and it ventures to put itself into practice only in the face of a bad conscience.

In the primeval days of the human race, it was a different story. The laborious compilations of the student of civilization provide convincing evidence that originally the genitals were the pride and hope of living beings; they were worshipped as gods and they transmitted the divine nature of their functions to all newly learned human activities. As a result of the sublimation of their basic nature, there arose innumerable divinities; and at the time when the connection between official religious and sexual activity was already hidden from the general consciousness, secret cults devoted themselves to keeping it alive among a number of initiates. In the course of cultural development, so much of the divine and sacred was ultimately extracted from sexuality that the exhausted remnant fell into contempt. But in view of the indelibil- ity that is characteristic of all mental traces, it is surely not surprising that even the most primitive forms of genital-worship can be shown to have existed in very recent times and that the language, customs and superstitions of mankind today contain survivals from every phase of this process of development." [Disgust]

Disgust and Perversity.

Menninghaus wrote:

"In the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud briefly summarized his canonic theory of infantile sexuality and its phenomenal similarity with a variety of perversions:

What in adult life is described as “perverse” differs from the nor- mal in these respects: first, by disregarding the barrier of species (the gulf between men and animals); secondly, by overstepping the barrier of disgust; thirdly, by overstepping the barrier of incest (the prohibition against seeking sexual satisfaction from near blood-relations); fourthly, by disregarding the prohibition against sexual intercourse with mem- bers of one’s own sex; and, fifthly, by transferring the part played by the genitals to other organs and areas of the body. None of these barriers exist from the beginning; they were only gradually erected in the course of development and education. Small children are free of them. They recognize no frightful gulf between human beings and animals; the arrogance with which men separate themselves from animals does not emerge until later. At the first, children exhibit no disgust at exc- reta but acquire this slowly under the pressure of education; they attach no special importance to the distinction between the sexes, but attribute the same conformation of the genitals to both; they direct their first sexual lusts and their curiosity to those who are nearest and for other reasons dearest to them—parents, brothers and sisters, or nurses; and, finally, they show (what later on breaks through once again at the climax of a love-relation) that they expect to derive pleasure not only from their sexual organs, but that many other parts of the body lay claim to the same sensitivity, afford them analogous feelings of pleasure, and can accordingly play the part of genitals. Children may thus be described as “polymorphously perverse.”

“Perversion” is therefore, first of all, an anachronism, a false coincidence of infantile practices and post-infantile behavior, a desynchronization of sexual and cultural development: “When, therefore, anyone has become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say that he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited development.” The barrier of disgust figures as one of the five “barriers” whose transgression serves to measure the deviation from the “normal.” It remains peculiarly vague because, in contrast to the other four barriers, it is not elucidated by any set of specific phenom- ena. Other texts—above all, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—present the overcoming of disgust as an intrinsic factor in the overcoming of the other four barriers. Thus, perversion and the violation of postinfantile barriers of disgust appear as coextensive.

“Perverse” is then the absence of disgust in a context where reactions of disgust and repression are normally expected; it is the untimely persistence of infantile libido, the breakdown of the civilized devaluation of smells, excrement, mouth and anus (a devaluation serving to promote purely genital sexuality). Wherever Freud observes “perverse” viola- tions of the barriers of disgust, a memory of the archaic nobility of these practices is not far away—be it only in the form of a wary proviso:

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together. This exception is the point of contact with what is normal. Those who condemn other practices (which have no doubt been common among mankind from primeval times) as being perversions, are giving way to an unmistakable feeling of disgust, which protects them from adopting sexual aims of this kind. . . . Here, then, our attention is drawn to the factor of disgust, which interferes with the libidinal overvaluation of the sexual object but can in turn be overridden by libido. Disgust seems to be one of the forces which have led to a restriction of the sexual aim. These forces do not as a rule extend to the genitals themselves. But there is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics, and especially of hysterical women. The sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding this disgust. Where the anus is concerned, it becomes still clearer that it is disgust which stamps the sexual aim as a perversion. I hope, however, I shall not be accused of partisanship when I assert that people who try to account for this disgust by saying that the organ in question serves the function of excretion and comes in contact with excrement—a thing which is disgusting in itself—are not much more to the point than hysterical girls who account for their disgust at the male genital by saying that it serves to void urine.

Like “libido” or “morality,” “disgust” figures here as a quasi independent agent, a prosopopeia of an affect. Its psychohistorical achievement in transforming childhood sexuality is twofold. It is “one of the forces which have led to a restriction of the sexual aim,” and as such contributes to “cultural repression.” At the same time, and precisely in this capacity, it has a cognitive function: it “counteracts the libidinal overvaluation of the sexual object.” In this way it constitutes the “realistic” antidote to the disposition of infatuation which, in the grip of blind libido, transfigures its “object” with all possible desirable attributes and hence “cannot be easily reconciled with a restriction on the sex- ual aim to union of the actual genitals.”

Despite the irony infusing Freud’s treatment of infatuation in his theory of sexual overvaluation, he does not even here give the last word to the disillusioning corrective that is disgust. On the contrary: Freud cautions against “using the word perversion as a term of reproach”—and precisely in cases where “the sexual instinct, overcoming var- ious resistances (shame, disgust, horror, pain) makes for astonishing achieve- ments (licking of feces, abuse of corpses).”

Only when the highly unlikely condition is met that such sexual practices—which also include “looking on at excretory functions” as well as “cannibalistic desires,”—comprise the only and “exclusive” form of sexuality, does Freud accept the term “pathological” as legitimate. Indeed, he “acknowledges” precisely in those sexual practices that “are so far removed from the normal” a supreme triumph of love:

It is perhaps in connection precisely with the most repulsive per- versions that the psychic factor must be acknowledged as playing an extremely important role in the transformation of the sexual instinct. It is impossible to deny that in their case a piece of mental work has been performed which, in spite of its horrifying result, is the equiva- lent of an idealization of the instinct. The omnipotence of love is perhaps nowhere more strikingly proved than in these aberrations. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality: “from heaven through the world to hell.”

In view of Freud’s theory of civilization, the acknowledgment of what “perverse” libido is able to achieve is more than simply reluctant. It is by the repression of precisely these “achievements” that Freud measures the “fateful development of civilization”: “something is considered ‘holy’ because human beings, for the benefit of the larger community, have sacrificed a portion of their sexual liberty and their freedom to enact perversions. . . . Civilization consists in this progressive renunciation. It is otherwise with the ‘super- man.’” The laconic reference to the Übermensch as an antidote to cultural repression may well indicate a direct acquaintance with Nietzsche’s doctrine, which deplores, in the working of disgust, the cultural repression of all ani- mal instincts and presents the superman (the “man without disgust”) as the project destined to counter this repression. Without doubt, Freud’s inter- pretive skills were more than sufficient to appropriate Zarathustra for his gallery of “perverse” overcomers of disgust." [Disgust]

The Servant-maid and the Prostitute.

Menninghaus wrote:

"Conforming to the cultural rules of respect, the “edu- cated” man suppresses his perverse tendencies toward his own wife and thus experiences with her only a sharply reduced sexual pleasure. By the same token, he can develop “his full potency” only in the company of “inferior” women, to whom he “need not attribute aesthetic scruples”:

Freud wrote:

"There are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection and sensuality are properly fused; the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object; and this in turn is partly caused by the fact that among his sexual aims there are perverse components, which he does not venture to satisfy with a woman he respects. He is assured of com- plete sexual pleasure only when he can devote himself unreservedly to obtaining satisfaction, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not dare do. This is the source of his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is sexually inferior, to whom he need not attribute aesthetic scruples, who does not know him in his other sexual relations and cannot judge him in them. It is to such a woman that he prefers to devote his sexual potency, even when the whole of his affection belongs to a woman of a higher kind."

The “average uncultivated woman,” the servant girl, and the prostitute thus come to be seen as virtually unavoidable correlates of the “educated man’s” desired—because healthy—freedom from disgust and freedom for perversion. In Freud’s eyes, the wholesale “aptitude” for prostitution on the part of countless women, their aptitude for all the “perversions” practiced in this “profession,” puts the “definitive” seal to his theory that perversions are “a general and fundamental human characteristic”:

Freud wrote:

"According to the age of the child, the mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust and morality—have either not yet been constructed at all or are only in the process of being constructed. In this respect, children behave no differently than an average unculti- vated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposi- tion persists. Under ordinary conditions she may remain normal sexually, but, if she is led on by a clever seducer, she will find every sort of perversion to her taste, and will retain them as part of her own sexual activities. Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession; and, considering the immense number of women who are prostitutes or who must be supposed to have an aptitude for prostitution without being engaged in it, it becomes impossible not to recognize that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic."

For their part, the women “of a higher kind” also seem bent on confirming Freud’s theory. They develop phobias which reveal that they are barely able to suppress their own talent for prostitution and for “perversions of every kind”:

Freud wrote:

"I have found all sorts of nice explanations in my field. I actually confirmed a conjecture I had entertained for some time concerning the mechanism of agoraphobia in women. No doubt you will guess it if you think of “public” women. It is the repression of the intention to take the first man one meets in the street: envy of prostitution and identification with prostitutes."

The presence of such sexually available servant girls regularly repre- sents a burden for the numerous hysterical daughters in Freud’s case histories:

Freud wrote:

"An immense load of guilt, with self-reproaches (for theft, abor- tion), is made possible by identification with these people of low morals, who are so often remembered, in a sexual connection with father or brother, as worthless feminine material. And, as a result of the sublimation of these girls in fantasies, highly improbable charges against other people are contained in the fantasies. Fear of prostitu- tion (fear of being in the streets alone), fear of a man hidden under the bed, and so on, also point in the direction of the servant girl. There is tragic justice in the circumstance that the master’s stooping to a maidservant is atoned for by his daughter’s self-abasement."

At the same time, this man’s wife is herself debased out of “respect”; that is to say, with the abatement of the man’s potency and libido in her presence, she is deprived of her own sexuality: “it is naturally just as unfavorable for a woman if a man approaches her without his full potency as it is if his initial overvaluation of her when he is in love gives place to under-valuation after he has possessed her.” In her fantasies and phobias, this same woman can then experience “envy of prostitution” and go on to identify with prostitutes. The daughter, finally, is incorporated into this cycle of debasement either directly through acts of perversion and abuse or by detour through hys- terical fantasies, with which she inwardly digests the “master’s stooping to a maidservant” and the diffused sexual relations of brother and servant girl.

Freud has left no doubt about one tenet in particular: worse than the normal “hell” of real- ized perverse practices is the repression of the polymorphous-perverse inheritance in the various pathological forms of neurosis. The greater and more invariable the successes of the culturally sanctioned barriers of disgust, the more certain is the individual’s miserable subjection to henceforth fully unconscious powers severed from the ego." [Disgust]

Lyssa wrote:

Supra-Aryanist wrote:

Mark of independence to grow out one's own shit.

Freud didn't think so...


Disgust and Repression: Civilization, Tyranny and evolution of the nose.

I'd opine that evolution is more associative or multidirectional/dimensional than the linear, correlative reduction described here, but at that it is one part of an inseperable integration when which at a confluence with  amplification a more accurate representation is procured.

Incidentally, where could one obtain some more background on the author?

Disgust and Words.

Menninghaus wrote:

"In vague affinity with the semantics of disgust in Nietzsche and Freud, although in distinct contrast to Kafka’s poetological engagement with the disgusting, the early twentieth-century’s skepticism toward language denounced words as disgusting distortions of the authentic being of things and experiences: “O let the words go, they are harpies,/strewing disgust on life’s blossoms!” Just as civilized modern man’s disgust effectively denies his beast-of-prey nature (Nietzsche), or censures his archaic libidinal impulses (Freud), so civilization’s symbolic medium par excellence—language—is sus- pected of making all meanings and all reference disgusting. A few years after Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal also bore witness to a “great disgust,” a disgust with language itself:

People in fact are tired of listening to talk. They are profoundly disgusted with words. For words have usurped the place of things. Hearsay has swallowed up the world. The infinitely complex lies of time, the musty lies of tradition, the lies of offices, the lies of indi- viduals, the lies of sciences—it all rests like myriad deadly flies upon our poor life. . . . Words do not lend themselves [to serving our purposes] but rather drain all our life away, just as, according to Goethe, women do to certain men. When we open our mouth to speak, always thousands of the dead speak with us.

The famous crisis of language, announced by Lord Chandos, consists pre- cisely in this: the consciousness that all words, and abstract words in particular, are merely “matters devoid of being” which crumble to dust “in the mouth like decaying mushrooms.”

A disgust-based rule for the avoidance of contact is applied to the medium of language, and hence leads to a disruption of communication: “it . . . gradually became more difficult for me . . . to take into my mouth the words that everyone is in the habit of using without thinking.” Words are disgusting because they are common, in a double sense. First, they are common to virtually all people, and, second, insofar as they are imagined as concretely circulating things, they bring us into contact with numberless mouths—dead mouths included—which might elicit disgust. E. M. Cioran later gave expression to this type of disgust with words:

There is something which rivals the basest whore in being dirty, worn, defeated . . . the word, any word. . . . They are tossed to us pre-chewed: yet we would not dream of swallowing food already masti- cated by others. The material aspect of speaking makes us vomit. A brief moment of speaking suffices to realize, under any word, an aftertaste of someone else’s saliva.

Language is disgustingly common, moreover, because it buries all that is individual under its worn-out generality and, instead of “truly” referring to some- thing, puts into circulation only the “lies” of its own mediality. For this form of disgust as well, a female figure serves as emblem: not the whore touched and used by all, but the Harpies robbing or sullying all. Hofmannsthal evokes the monstrous, bird-like women—whose name means “those who rob, snatch up, and plunder”—as a figure for the robbing of life by the generalizing act of signification. At the same time, he makes use of the association with excrement and defilement, an association found in the mythological account of the plaguing of Phineus: the Harpies leave behind their excrement on his banquet table. According to this logic, the words—all words—are disgusting vetulae: worn out prostitutes or contaminating harpies. No less an authority than Goethe is adduced to argue that the use of words brings about the same “draining away” of life that “certain men” experience in their relations to women. The close connection between the idea of disgust and the idea of woman is highlighted through the fact that even a quasi-transcendental cri- tique of the generality of words has immediate recourse to the figure of abject women, the moment its argument touches on the affective value of disgust.

Fritz Mauthner has taken up Hofmannsthal’s identification of the gener- ality of words with their disgusting commonness, and shifted it out of the field of sexual politics to that of class politics. As a “common property,” language is communism in action. To be sure, the inhabitants of cities also share the “poisoned light” coming from gas piping, the “contaminated water” coming from lead pipes, and the canals and fields irrigated with all sorts of “refuse.” But the “charcoal fumes” and the “swamp water” at least need to be paid for according to the respective individual consumption. It is otherwise, and worse, in the case of language:

In its rusty piping, light and poison, water and pestilence flow together, continually splashing aimlessly from the joints and inundating humanity; the whole of society is nothing more than a giant free-flowing fountain for this hodge-podge, every single person is a gargoyle, and from mouth to mouth the turbid source spews forth, intermingling its pregnant and contagious, but unproductive and vile streams, and in the midst of it all there is no property and no law and no authority. Language is a common property. Everything belongs to everyone—everyone bathes in this common property, everyone drinks it, and everyone emits it.

In Hofmannsthal’s early work, the vileness of common sewer- and harpy-words is immediately opposed to the linguistic achievement of the great artist. This latter is capable of effacing the traces of disgusting common usage and restoring language to its function of “pure revelation”: “He has finally tram- pled to death the myriad dead, and when he speaks, he speaks in his own right. Through his voice words regain their elementary power: they are armed tooth and nail, they entice like a smile or a gaze, and they become pure sen- suous revelations of inner being. In his eloquence the soul comes to the fore like a bodily being.”

By the time The Lord Chandos Letter is composed, this optimism has faded. Ranged against the tendency of language to make all “life” disgusting is only a speechless vision of the objects of daily life. The examples invoked are distanced as far as possible from the “commonness” of the city; they breathe the promise of pristine country life: “a watering can, a harrow left standing in the field, a dog in the sun, a rundown churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vessel for my reve- lation.” The letter attempts to describe more closely only one particular “vessel” filled with such “a prodigal surge of a more exalted life . . . that it beggars all words.”

As a verbalization of the transverbal purity and density of experience, this description is ensnared in a palpable contradiction: “But why resort to words again, the very words I have forsworn!” As if to do justice to this medial paradox, on the part of the subject matter serving as an example, too, Hofmannsthal chooses, as the cardinal paradigm of a “more exalted life” uncontaminated by words, the death throes of poisoned rats. Beyond the harpy-words that arouse disgust, even rats—the prototypical object of disgust—can become the “vessel” of a “pure sensuous revelation of inner being”:

Not long ago, for example, I ordered that a generous amount of poison be set out for the rats in the milk-cellars of one of my dairy farms. I then went out riding toward evening, thinking, as you can imagine, nothing further of the matter. Yet as I was cantering across the soft, newly turned soil of the fields, with nothing more ominous in sight than a startled brood of partridges and the large, setting sun in the distance above the rolling landscape, that cellar, crowded with the death throes of a swarm of rats, suddenly opened up inside me. All of it was there within: the cool, dank cellar air, pregnant with the sweetish, biting smell of the poison; the high-pitched death screams echoing off mildewed walls; the contorted spasms of unconscious- ness; all the confused and frenzied dashing about; the crazed search for exits; and the cold leers of rage when two of the beasts collided at a blocked crevice.

This vision confirms Mendelssohn’s theorem that the disgusting always produces an effect of the real, thus erasing the difference between its mere imag- ination, or artificial representation, and a genuine contact with its scandalous “nature.” The rat-poisoning lord procures for himself, by merely imagining the creatures’ death throes, a “vessel” that exalts him above all his doubts concern- ing the words’ disgusting theft of reference and makes possible an uncontaminated “feeling”: “It was both a good deal more and much less than pity: an overpowering empathy [Anteilnehmen], a kind of flowing over into the hearts of those creatures.”

Kafka found the “rat’s nest” not in one of his dairy farms but in the “abominations” of his own self.

In particular, Kafka has nothing to do with the fundamentalist critique of the social constructedness of all communications media, understood as the “common” theft of all pure reference and all unfeigned “life.” What is disgusting, in his mind, are not words per se, as they get chewed up and spat out by all and sundry, but always only specific, individual speech acts. And what is “repulsive” about them is to be found not in the defilement and dissimulation of a purity and aliveness ascribed to some preexistent signified, but rather in the performative disclosure of something disgusting which, without the words, would remain hidden. Kafka therefore considers observa- tions on the “weakness of language” to be “quite fallacious.” It sounds like a credo, maintained in opposition to the sort of Sprachkritik exemplified by Hofmannsthal or Mauthner, when he goes on to say:

What is clear within is bound to become so in words as well. That is why one need never worry about language, but at the sight of words may often worry about oneself. After all, who knows within himself how things really are with him? This tempestuous or floun- dering or morasslike inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may still be veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful or terrible to behold./So protect me, dearest, from these repulsive [widerlichen] words of which I have recently been delivering myself. (LF, 198)

Accordingly, all speaking, in the face of all resistance, is always also an “it speaks,” a secret “being-forced-out” of words, an ungovernable medium of a “self-knowledge” accessible neither to pure intention nor to wordless perception. This psychoanalytic model of a structural unconscious of language subverts the theorem of a disgusting absence of reference on the part of the word-harpies and ennobles the “repulsive words” precisely as a symptom of the real. Of course, Kafka’s poetics does not come to rest with this optimistic credo: rather, it looks for “expedients,” by which immediately to reconvert the “fact” of self-knowledge into a “goal” once again, because it is only under this condition that writing can turn the “openly” acted-out “baseness” into a source of “guiltless enjoyment.” Instead of a disgustingly common withdrawal of “life,” the words thus demonstrate a double power: they unconsciously force out a “self-knowledge” which, in the interests of “life,” they simultane- ously obscure.

In this connection, the argument that inner clarity “is bound” to produce clarity in words as well serves simply to obscure all clarity about Kafka’s “repulsive words.” The affirmation of such clarity and the unequivocal avowal of his own degradation indeed simulate the gesture of penitent confession. If “what is clear within” makes possible clarity in language as well, then the reverse must hold: what is unclear in language refers to what is unclear within. And this, from the start, is Kafka’s way out:

I am driven by this feeling of anxiety in the midst of my lethargy, and I write, or fear I may at any moment write, irresponsible things. The wrong sentences lie in wait about my pen, twine themselves around its point, and are dragged along into the letters. (LF, 198)

If “wrong sentences” “lie in wait” about Kafka’s pen and can be “dragged along into the letters,” then, in the context of the optimistic theorem about clarity, this presupposes that there is in fact no inner clarity—and consequently no negative clarity either—that would merit unequivocal “disgust.”
Kafka man- ages, by such reasoning, to voice a claim for help in the difficult task of alle- viating his own “chaos” (Verwirrung): “When I look into myself I see so much that is obscure and still in flux that I cannot even properly explain or fully accept the dislike I feel for myself.”

According to Hofmannsthal and Mauthner, all words defile true reference, since they are taken into the mouth and cast out in common and indistinct ways. This generalized disgust with language would make it unnecessary—and even impossible—for Kafka to claim, or indeed to produce, an excuse bearing specifically and exclusively on what is “repulsive” in his words only. It follows that Kafka also rejects the prostitute- and harpy-theory of language, the tran- scendental word-disgust propounded by Hofmannsthal and Mauthner, because it would preclude any possibility of polarizing the individual ways by which “words are [secretly] forced out of us,” according to whether they are “splendid” or “repulsive,”—with the “chaos” looming at every point as a tertium datur. Insofar as his own words are concerned, the transition between the two poles is often a matter of only a small step. This corresponds to the (unresolvable) doubleness of self-abjection as “truth” and “method.” At recurring intervals, Kafka pronounces physiologically buttressed condemnations of his writing: “My whole body warns me against every word” (L, 70); “The greatest part of it, I openly say, I find repulsive.”

He sees “the pages being covered end- lessly with things one hates, that fill one with loathing,” and he explains this as the price to be paid for serving the devil, as the inevitable accompaniment of successful writing: “To have to atone for the joys of good writing in this terrible way!” (LF, 76). At such moments, the “construction” of the writer from out of the “pleasure” taken in language-based self-scrutiny becomes brittle—as does the confidence in a spontaneous correspondence of “feeling” and “word.”

Precisely the writerly encounter with words is burdened with doubt and is radically exposed to the nonoriginality of words:

Every word, before it lets me write it down, first looks around in all directions. The sentences literally crumble before me; I see their insides and then have to stop quickly. (L, 70)

Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the con- sonants rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show. My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word . . . (D, 29)

Moreover, hardly a word comes to me from the origin, but is seized upon fortuitously and with great difficulty somewhere along the way. (LF, 225; compare D, 12)

On two separate counts, this type of doubt differs from the paradigms of a harpy-like flaying of reference or a prostitute-like attrition. Not only does it befall the word as much as the speaker/writer—indicating thereby that it is not some doubt originating from a position outside of language. It also has nothing to do with any naively referential adequacy of words, but rather concerns encounters, perceptions, and grasping maneuvers at issue in words as thing-like objects and in their always already self-referential mediality. At the same time, the characterization of one’s own words as “repul- sive” by no means entails the judgment that they have utterly miscarried and cannot be enjoyed. The pages that “fill one with loathing”—which, according to the classical logic, would constitute a threat to well-being and ultimately to life itself—are actually ennobled in accordance with the model of cathartic discharge, understood as a necessary means for the preservation of life: “Can you understand this, dearest: to write badly, yet feel compelled to write, if one is not to abandon oneself to total despair! . . . To see the pages being covered endlessly with things one hates, that fill one with loathing [Ekel], or at any rate with dull indifference, that nevertheless have to be written down in order that one shall live” (LF, 76). In the physiology of Kafka’s writing, even the “repulsive words” are to be preferred to the skepti- cal renunciation of language. Rather than leading into some uncontaminated purity of speechless vision, the stoppage of words results in the com- plementary evils of constipation and bodily expectoration: “Hardly ten days interrupted in my writing and already discarded sputum?” (D, 330). Just as the child, according to Freud, looks on his own excrement with pride, so Kafka, in the face of his own linguistic abject, develops a relation not of simple excretion but of pleasurable rumination: “In the afternoon I couldn’t keep myself from reading what I had written yesterday, ‘yesterday’s filth’; didn’t do any harm, though” (D, 343).

Kafka is not only the jackdaw and the “rat’s nest,” not only the dung beetle and the mole, not only the pig who wallows in the muck, but also the cow, of whose disgust-overcoming rumination Nietzsche says: “To practice reading as an art . . . requires one thing above all, something which today more than ever has been thoroughly unlearned . . . [and] for which one has almost to be a cow, but certainly not a ‘modern man’: rumination . . .” [Disgust]

Supra-Aryanist wrote:

Lyssa wrote:

Supra-Aryanist wrote:

Mark of independence to grow out one's own shit.

Freud didn't think so...


Disgust and Repression: Civilization, Tyranny and evolution of the nose.

I'd opine that evolution is more associative or multidirectional/dimensional than the linear, correlative reduction described here, but at that it is one part of an inseperable integration when which at a confluence with  amplification a more accurate representation is procured.

Incidentally, where could one obtain some more background on the author?

Freud's insights were not unsound, but his perverted moralization of those insights were corrupt.

Regarding the author:

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Thanks.

Becoming Disgusting
Fear/Anxiety is not disgust/repulsion, although the two are intentionally and methodically considered synonyms, so as to construct the victim psychology identifying all threats by describing them with their own feeling of fear, e.g., homophobe, xenophobe, and with their won reaction to a threat which is hate, e.g., misogyny. Here the defensive method is one of projection, inverting the relationship – knowledge of oneself is projected to make another comprehensible, using antipathy rather than sympathy.
Similarly, repulsion is an act of power rejecting what is judged as being toxic, or dangerous... or simply undesirable, unwanted, unnecessary, but the inverting method can also be used to repel a threat by making oneself toxic, undesirable, unwanted and unnecessary; self-preservation via a defensive strategy that utilizes the threat's own strength, preserving purity of motive, i.e., innocence, since the actor does not repel but makes itself repulsive. Its own fear/anxiety is projected as the threat's fear/anxiety which then repels it. The threatened one projects its vulnerability by becoming toxic or by imitating toxicity.
The pretence of being more dangerous, more toxic, than what one really is has become a common defensive strategy – imitating the markers that display danger, e.g., colouring, size, or toxicity, ugliness, deformity.
Self-Handicapping in nature is actual handicapping, displaying the individual's theoretical fitness. Disproportional antlers contradict the rule of symmetry and proportionality so as to outperform a competitor; sacrificing functionality for the sake of self-replication. Such displays are not faked. A peacock tail and deer antlers are an actual burden the male may not endure for long. We can then say that self-handicapping by becoming ugly, unattractive, useless, or toxic – genetically and/or memetically repulsive – would not be faked but would have to actually sacrifice fitness to preserve identity long enough to pass-on its genes/memes, and its unique reproductive strategy.
Survival of individuals is not nature's concern. Individuals are means to an end, viz., passing on genes or memes, before the inevitability of death erases them.
I can think of one group that has adopted a repulsive meme and has learned to thrive by being hated and victimized. Its greatest threat is being accepted and assimilated into another genetic and memetics group. Here being ideologically assimilated is similar to being physically consumed, therefore to prevent this it must make of itself toxic, repulsive, unpalatable. It lacks the power to repel so it must trigger the gag reflex in others – their fear/anxiety of concealed hatred must become a defensive accusation so as to cause a reaction that would consolidate its numbers.
Example: a woman who has suffered the disempowering violence of rape may adopt the behaviour of making herself repulsive, unattractive, or may adopt a very aggressive, angry disposition, as a way of preventing further aggression, knowing that she is too feeble to prevent it otherwise.

Related to Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Paedophilia, Zoophilia, and all forms of paraphilia...and the postmodern defensive shaming of "phobias" and "hate".