Disgust

Henry Picou. Venus.

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Meninghaus wrote:

"Wrinkles, puckers, warts, and gristle are the least of the “revolting” threats to the uninterrupted skin-line of the softly-blown body. For obvious reasons, the physical interior, the inner organs, and all processes of resorption and excretion do not only remain invisible in a field focusing exclusively on the beautiful facade; more to the point, they are among the “extra-essential accretions” to be painstakingly avoided. For Winckelmann, ideally beautiful bodies are not only able to dispense with the disturbingly excrescent “nerves and sinews,” they also have “no need of those parts destined for the nutrition of our bodies.

And this explains Epicurus’ view of the shape of the gods, to whom he gives a body, but an apparent body, and blood, but apparent blood—a remark Cicero finds obscure and incomprehensible.”The aestheticians of the 1750s and 1760s, however, found the same remark to be as highly illuminating and to the point as their own “as-ifs.” For they thought of a body’s beauty precisely as a self-idealizing sensuality—a sensuality appearing at a maximum degree (as Plato put it, ekphanéstaton23), hence leading to the edge of the sensual, indeed opening a vista beyond the edge. It was for the sake of such immanent self-transcendence of the aesthetic that the integrity of uncovered skin had to be preserved most strictly. Otherwise, that maximal value of phenomenality alone allowing the beautiful body an “expression of aesthetic ideas” (Kant),24 or an expression of “soul,” would not be attainable. For this reason, the aes- thetically pleasing body has no interior, hence allows no dissection or anatomy: “for thinking beings, art’s highest subject is man, or [more precisely] his external surface alone.”

Aesthetics and anatomy, which boom simultaneously in the second half of the eighteenth century, are thus opposing disciplines. According to one of Diderot’s reflections, “peeking under the skin” is “highly dangerous,” having “ruined more artists than it has perfected.”Goethe confirmed this rule ex negativo. In his “Outline of a Comparative Anatomy” he finds himself forced to expressly defend the sciences devoted to the inner body, “dissection as well as physiology,” against the aesthetic reaction of disgust. With regard to the skin’s pure and uninterrupted surfaces, these sciences descend into a void: what appeared “as if ” a body turns out to be an “ethereal” and hybrid “creature” of “supersensual sufficiency”—a creature that had simply been “cloaked on its outside . . . with a human form.”

In the realm of the ideally beautiful, when not only the body’s excretions, but literally its inner organs become visible on the outside, what is at play can only be the disgusting in the service of the monstrous or ridiculous. Thus Lessing’s example from the “Hottentott Tales,” when the protagonists have “wound fresh intestines around their feet and arms.”

Herder’s troping of the softly-blown corporeal likewise implies a hollowing-out of the body. Among the meanings of German verblasen, in the sense of blowing fluid glass, one is here worth noting: “to consume through blowing: the entire glass-mass has already been blown into all sorts of bottles etc.”

In this sense blowing devours its material, transforming it into beautiful hollow forms; the aesthetic body resulting from such blowing is a hollow bottle—or a glass puppet without an inner corporeal life. Carrying ad extremum Winckelmann’s notion of ideally beautiful bodies “inflated as by a gentle breath,” Herder ventures to speak of (marble) “sheaths” (or “veils”—his word is Hüllen), “tender as a soap-bubble.” Such imaginary orality and airiness of the statue—its beautiful stony form as an effect of “breathing” and “blowing”—realizes disgust’s avoidance: through a consequent sublimation of all materiality and scripturality on and beneath the skin of the beautiful.

As the “expression”—or Ausdruck—of the beautiful figure, “soul” (Seele) and “spirit” (Geist) are meant to be visible in an invisible manner. On the other hand, the digestive and excretory organs are meant to be invisible in a visible manner. The figure must look as if it has no corporeal interior; put otherwise, it must appear in a manner necessarily suspending any thought of such interiority. This rendering visible of an inherent invisibility fuels the determination to focus on a phantasmatic inner corporeal life of statues. At stake in this apparently paradoxical logic is a different type of invisibility: one that accompanies and governs the sculpture’s visibility like a shadow. Apparently, this second type of invisibility can be established only at the expense of the first type. To realize this effect, the statue sets in motion a game of changing sides and of mutual exclusion: the soul as the invisible “inside” can only become visible when—in a manner that is itself visible—the invisible corpo- real inside has been eviscerated.

The topos of “breathing” and “blowing” regulates the transition from one invisibility to the other: as a description of the beautiful fleshly line, it sublimates all “corners” and all the resistance of bodily material; and at the same time “breath” is itself a synonym, rich in tradition, for the soul—a metaphorical representation of its peculiar presence.

Still, even in the case of the beautiful hollow body, those zones leading to the body’s inside on the body’s outside remain ineffaceable: body apertures are the true skandalon of both “classical” aesthetics and politics of the body. They are the signified of disgust, thus requiring elaborate regulation." [Disgust]

William Bouguereau. La tolette de Venus.

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Meninghaus wrote:

"It is the case that “ripened” youth, indeed even the “eternal youth” of the gods, is the ideal age for the Classical body. Here as well, that body con- forms with today’s most up to date imperatives for beauty. “In the case of young children,” Winckelmann explains, “the concept of a beautiful form does not actually come into play: we say that a child is beautiful and healthy; but the expression of form already comprises the maturity of a certain number of years.” Such ripe youth, however, is not only aesthetically “blissful” by virtue of its roughly identical distance between birth and death, or even because it “hides the ever unfinished nature of the body.”

Herder maintains just the opposite: “eternal duration” falls to the “mummy” alone, to the rigidity of the “grave” and “doing nothing.” The “perfection” inherent in youthful “blossoming” rests precisely in its positive incompletion—its nonidentity with itself. It is not simply a Being—or even merely a telos—out of and in itself: something that would seem to apply more aptly to our contemporary ideology of normatively enduring youth. Rather, it is always also a promise—a “view” onto something still outstanding. Herder refers to a “view of a laughing world” and to the “beautiful idea of hope” as a performative correlate of the beautiful body.

In this manner, the “forms of beautiful youth” leave room for charging the Apollonian perfection of the figure with a highly dynamic temporality, indeed to defigure all its apparent stability:

"The forms of beautiful youth resemble the unity of the surface of the sea, which at some distance appears smooth and still, like a mirror, although constantly in movement with its heaving swell. The soul, though a simple being, brings forth at once, and in an instant, many different ideas; so it is with the beautiful youthful outline, which appears simple, and yet at the same time has infinitely differ- ent variations. . . . The forms of a beautiful body are determined by lines the center of which is constantly changing, and . . . has a stationary point in our sex still less than in the female."

The classical aesthetics does not simply avoid birth and death, with the concomitant disgusting visions of a prefigurative becoming and a decomposition into stinking corruption. Instead, it attempts to inscribe both, as it were, “at once, and in an instant,” upon the beautiful body. To be sure, this inscription takes a distinctly moderate form: for the defigurative infinitization of a particular fruitful moment shortly before maximal articulation is actually aimed at overcoming every disgustatory value—even disgust at the “merely beautiful” itself. Despite all vibration in the smallest detail, this eternity of beautiful youth is averse to decisive external alterations. It does not wish to endure birth and death as its other— but rather, through a process of infinitesimalization, to incorporate them into its own confinium. Apollo remains Apollo, Venus Venus. The extreme counterpole of their eternity is not represented by the gradual figurative transformation from birth to death, but by the abrupt metamorphosis in Ovid’s sense." [Disgust]

William Bouguereau. Venus with Doves, 1879.

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Meninghaus wrote:

"Michail Bakhtin has described a construct governed by both positive and negative rules that are opposed, point by point, to those for the aesthetic body. The “extra-essential accretions” of the one mark the positive realm of the other:

"The grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and off- shoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. . . .

The age of the body is most frequently represented in immediate proximity to birth or death, to infancy or old age, to the womb or the grave, to the bosom that gives life or swallows it up. . . .
The Renaissance saw the body in quite a different light than the Middle ages, in a different aspect of its life, and a different relation to the exterior nonbodily world. As conceived by these canons, the body was first of all a strictly completed, finished product.

Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies. All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed. The ever unfinished nature of the body was hidden, kept secret; conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death throes, were almost never shown. The age represented was as far removed from the mother’s womb as from the grave, the age most distant from either threshold of individual life.

In the new bodily canon, the focus is on the individually characteristic and expressive parts of the body: the head, face, eyes, lips; on the muscular system; and on the body’s position vis-á-vis the external world."

With striking precision, the inversion of Bakhtin’s description produces the ideally beautiful body in the sense of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder." [Disgust]

Satyr wrote:

What can be more disgusting than something beautiful degrading itself before the ugly; something brilliant smothering itself in shit?

The Sacher Masoch fetish of giving what he owned, to something base and vile
Degrading himself through it.  

The difference between the ideal beauty and the erotic beauty; the latter turning into a reactionary festish against the excessive anaesthetics and fear and disgust at the sight of blood, of death as pollution and its covering up. The perversion of extreme leftists like Bataille could call disgusting travesties "affirmation of death" - as the highest affirmation of life's reality principle...

The distinction between affirmation of life and the worship of death is severed:

Meninghaus wrote:

"Pollution of the beautiful, self-mutilation, and aesthetic practices of the informe all terminate in an affirmative relation to death in its material existence: corpse and decay. Against the cosmetic struggle against death’s traces, Bataille’s “heterology”—as a “science of what is completely other”—offers a “play of man and his own decomposition.” Bizarre archaic festivals epitomize this play:

"We are far away from the savages who hung the skulls of their ancestors on greasy poles during enormous festivals, who rammed the tibia of their fathers into pig-mouths the moment the slit-throat pigs vomited waves of blood. [. . . Today,] the play of man and his own decomposition continues in the most desultory conditions, without the former ever having the courage to confront the latter. It seems we shall never be able to stand in face of the grandiose image of a decomposition whose risk, intervening with each breath, is nev- ertheless the very sense of a life that we prefer, we do not know why, to that of another whose respiration might survive us. Of this image, we only know the negative form, the soaps, the toothbrushes, and all the pharmaceutical products whose accumulation allows us to painfully escape, each day, from filth and death."" [Disgust]

Meninghaus wrote:

"Already for early Bataille, de Sade embodies “sacred” violence:

“Art . . . proceeds in this sense through successive destructions. To the extent it liberates libidinous instincts, these instincts are sadistic.”

In the field of these “instincts,” the pivotal ideal of beautiful form receives new definition: its charm now lies solely in its capacity to intensify the pleasure at its own pollution and destruction. Henceforth, beauty is the substrate of a “filthy and glaring sacrilege” to be inflicted on it: “It seems, in fact, that desire has nothing to do with ideal beauty, or, more precisely, that it only arises in order to stain and wither beauty.”

True, beauty does construct a ban on animality, a ban transformed into form—Bataille here confirming the classical rules for disgust avoidance and the diagnoses of both Nietzsche and Freud concerning the taboo inscribed within aesthetic culture. But precisely through this process, it attracts the “transgression” of “desire.” From this idea, the later text L’érotisme (Death and Sensuality) concludes, in complete seriousness, that ugly women are “depressing” for men because they offer nothing to “sacrifice,” nothing to pollute:

Beauty is desired so that it can be befouled. Not for its own sake, but for the joy tasted in the certainty of profaning it. In sacrifice, the victim was chosen in a manner allowing his perfection to render perceptible the brutality of death. Human beauty, in the union of bodies, introduces the opposition between purest humanity and the hideous animality of the organs. . . . For a man, there is nothing more depressing than the ugliness of a woman, from whom the ugliness of the organs or the sexual act does not emerge. Beauty’s importance primarily resides in the assumption that ugliness cannot be befouled, and that befouling is the very essence of eroticism.

Self-mutilation is an additional channel for the transgressive violence of desire. Bataille aligns Vincent van Gogh’s severing of his own ear with ritual self-inflicted injuries in sacrifices and initiations. He celebrates the “radical transformation” made possible through such acts:

Such an action would be characterized by the fact that it would have the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual, in the same way that vomiting would be opposed to its opposite, the communal eating of food. Sacrifice considered in its essential phase would only be the rejection of what had been appropriated by a person or by a group . . . the victim struck down in a pool of blood, the severed finger or ear, the torn-out eye—do not appreciably differ from vomited food. . . . The one who sacrifices is free—free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself or a bull." [Disgust]

Satyr wrote:

Floating through the caves of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], with its lighted stalagmites reflecting reds and greens, I was taken over by sadness when I thought about the possibility of all those formations, that took thousands of years to become what they are, could be destroyed by a vulgar imbecile with a hammer he purchased at a convenient store.
Sadness became rage, and considered the pleasure I could derive from smashing such a creature with his own hammer, after the damage had been irreparably completed.

Then, at the pit of my stomach disgust.
Like when watching a beautiful woman fornicating with a chimpanzee.
All that time it took to make her what she is, gone with one careless, vulgar, act.  

beautiful.

I experimented once by making my sexual behavior unfiltered for one day. When I saw an attractive young woman I would stare as much to my "heart's" content, knowing it would likely creep them out. Two girls walking together returned the looks reciprocally, raising their eyebrows from behind their sunglasses and smiling at me. Another young woman in the school's library gave me a look of disgust; I persisted and her expression turned increasingly twisted as I only responded with a defiant, almost laughing grin. In my mind I told myself I was delivering a message to her that I wouldn't feel ashamed about my attraction to her. I told myself what I wanted to hear, a justification for why she deserves to feel uncomfortable (i had misogyny issues). Eventually she got up and left, likely realizing any expressions of dislike towards my behavior were fruitless and in fact only inflamed the situation.

I wonder how she felt as she left - did she feel disgusted (superior) or upset? Maybe both. Seemed more like a moral disgust than a sexual one. It's peculiar how you can tell. With a moral disgust there seems to be a kind of retreat of the heart/chest area - to keep your heart from being infected with the disease of base and uncultured behavior. Sexual appears more focused around the mouth, consumption - perhaps even a tongue sticking out like a baby does to unsavory foods.

I have trouble recalling having felt moral disgust in any way. I can't really recall a retreat of the heart/chest area either except during a free fall. Would you describe a situation when you've felt moral disgust?

Stuart- wrote:

I have trouble recalling having felt moral disgust in any way. I can't really recall a retreat of the heart/chest area either except during a free fall. Would you describe a situation when you've felt moral disgust?

I'd imagine the circumstance would emerge out of the realization of the disparity between a shortsighted understanding or misunderstanding and farsighted understanding of, say, a woman for whom one has fallen.

Stuart- wrote:

I have trouble recalling having felt moral disgust in any way. I can't really recall a retreat of the heart/chest area either except during a free fall. Would you describe a situation when you've felt moral disgust?

I was using my empathy for her behavior to conclude this, but perhaps the retreat of her chest was a signal of something different. Perhaps it was fear that initiated that behavior, or something else entirely. After all, her face was still twisted, whether it was moral or sexual repugnance.

The gaping mouth is disgusting because it is symbolic of the abyss...

Chaos was metaphorized as the great gap, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Its why there's been a custom since old of fear or inauspicion, to quickly snap the fingers to close the mouth while yawning.... watching another yawn is contagious and the gap opens wider... a "tearing", a "fissure"...



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Menninghaus wrote:

""The grotesque face," explains Bakhtin, “is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss.” The “wide entrance into the depths of the body” maintains close rela- tions with the motifs of the open womb and bodily hell: “The bodily depths are fertile; the old dies in them, and the new is born in abundance. . . . The grotesque body has no façade, no impenetrable surface, neither has it any expressive features. It represents either the fertile depths or the convexities of procreation and conception.”50 The gaping mouth has left its stamp on mys- tery plays not only as something represented, but also as the law of scenic rep- resentation itself:

In 1474 the author of a mystery play gave these stage directions, “Hell must be represented in the form of huge jaws which open and shut when needed.” Thus the gaping maw was what all mystery-play viewers saw directly before them. This entrance to hell was located precisely in the middle of the stage foreground and at the eye-level of the viewer. The “hell maw” (la guelle d’Enfer, as it was usually called), seized the attention of the medieval public. . . . The public befriended the gaping maw in its cosmic aspect.

In light of this now-forgotten prehistory, German classical aestheticians’ attention to the gaping mouth attests to their highly developed sensorium for strategic approaches to debates. Bakhtin’s general observation that “in the new canon, such parts of the body as the genital organs, the buttocks, belly, nose and mouth cease to play the leading role”52 in no way applies to nose and mouth in the classical ideal. In fact, these body apertures are the objects of special attention. On the one hand, they are incorporated into the doctrine of the beautiful even as repudiated and disgusting entities. On the other hand, they are recoded into something thoroughly positive. Winckelmann’s codification of the ancient Greek canon sets the tone for the subsequent circulation of the gaping mouth as a disgust-cipher in texts of Lessing and Herder:

Next to the eyes, the mouth is the most beautiful facial feature. . . . The lips of figures in the most ancient style are usually closed; but in the later periods of art, they are not entirely closed in all figures of divinities, either male or female; and this is especially the case with Venus, in order to express the languishing quality of her desire and love. The same holds true of heroic figures. . . . Very few figures represented as laughing . . . reveal their teeth.

According to Winckelmann, only one statue he knows of reveals the teeth of a god; such a degree of oral opening is normally reserved for “some satyrs and fauns,” which is to say figures strewn along the edge of the Olympian canon. (In this regard, the now-habitual display of gleaming white teeth cannot appeal to ideal Olympian figures, but only to prototypes of a lower rank.) The rule of the most moderate possible lip-opening particularly proves its idealizing force in instances such as the expression of violent pain, where the repre- sented object would be expected to have a wide-open mouth, as in a scream. This is the case of the Laocoön, which thus serves to epitomize the rule of the closed or slightly opened lips. Winckelmann’s famous words on this theme are as follows:

The pain which manifests itself in all the muscles and sinews of the body, and which neglecting the face and other parts we believe to feel from the belly alone, contracted in agony; this pain, I say, still does not express itself with fury, neither in the face nor in the entire posture. No awful cry is raised, as Vergil sings of his Laocoön: the opening of the mouth does not allow it.

Lessing succinctly confirmed that a Laocoön with gaping mouth is irreconcilable with the “law of beauty.” He also was the first to expressly define the oral danger to beauty as the danger of disgust:

The master strove to attain the highest possible beauty under the given condition of physical pain. The demands of beauty could not be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring violence, so he had to reduce it. He had to soften the scream into a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the face in a disgusting manner. Simply imagine Laocoön’s mouth forced wide open, and then judge! Imagine him screaming, and then look! . . . In painting, the wide-open mouth—putting aside the fact that the rest of the face is thereby twisted and distorted in an unnatural and loath- some manner—becomes a mere spot, and in sculpture a mere cavity, with the most disagreeable effect in the world.

Not the mouth, but the uninterrupted surface of the skin, is the dominant speech-organ of the sculptural body. As soon as the mouth speaks in excess, it disturbs—or indeed even destroys—the authentic discourse of plastic form, because it distorts this forms’s beautiful curvature and generates an ugly crater. To this extent, a wide-open mouth is not “disagreeable” through offering a view into the body’s depths, or to speak with Bakhtin, the “hell of the body’s innards.” From the perspective of Winckelmann and Lessing the mouth does not play such a role at all—or only to the extent of making visible the next external border, the rows of teeth. Rather, a gaping mouth is already ekel because in sculpture, it appears in itself as “a cavity,” with the accompanying secondary effect that through the illegitimate opening, the adjacent surface is “distorted in a loathsome manner.” The widely open mouth thus elicits dis- gust—in both a direct and a metonymical manner—simply by inscribing a “spot” onto the perfect skin of the aesthetic. Darwin’s famous treatise on the expression of the emotions illuminates another source for the classicists’ oral regulation: for Darwin, a “widely opened mouth” is the first physical sign of disgust—its forbidding thus being directly identical with an exclusion of the disgusting from the realm of art.

The talk of “spots” and the distortion of the body’s surface tends to attach the gaping mouth to the contaminative series folds, warts, wrinkles, and scars from smallpox—and not to the series within which it figures in the field of the grotesque: namely the gaping womb and gaping anus. It thus needs to be asked if the taboo on the gaping mouth is also, or above all, a masked proxy for the taboo on vagina and buttocks, birth and excretion; or rather if the Classical body does not simply integrate the mouth in an entirely new series.

Winckelmann’s assertion that “Laocoön suffers like Sophocles’ Philoctetes” thus receives a decisive rebuff:

"But how does [Philoctetes] suffer? It is strange that his suffering has left us with such different impressions. The laments, the cries, the wild curses with which his anguish filled the camp and interrupted all the sacrifices and sacred rites resounded no less terribly through the desert island, and brought about his banishment there. . . . Screaming is the natural expression of physical pain. Homer’s wounded warriors not infrequently fall to the ground screaming. Venus shrieks loudly at a mere scratch. . . . And Sophocles even lets [the dying Hercules] wail and moan, weep and scream." [Lessing]

With the scream, the gaping mouth’s disgust-value also receives its license in the realm of the aesthetic: that which has been excluded now returns as something included.

The licensing of the wide opening is not at all concerned with the biological site of exchange between inside and outside, the devouring and expelling entry into the corporeal cavity in the sense of the grotesque body. It applies to an entirely other mouth: the mouth which, even when opened to an extreme, is above all an individual speech-organ of the body’s surface. “Cavity”—Vertiefung—here does not signify depth, but rather an indented, injured surface: one that can even appropriate this lesion for its own expressivity." [Disgust]

The Moth in the Mouth is the primal scream wanting to lacerate, rip and tear open into voice, language, existence in the case of one, and the primal scream from the abyss that wants to be closed, sealed, and healed in the other in the silence of the lambs...

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Lyssa wrote:

The Moth in the Mouth is the primal scream wanting to lacerate, rip and tear open into voice, language, existence in the case of one, and the primal scream from the abyss that wants to be closed, sealed, and healed in the other in the silence of the lambs...

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The Hauntology of Modernity's dis/ease...

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Quote :

"Another important point to mention about this, indeed, extraordinary image, is the silent scream. In many nightmares, dreams where one "lives" the experience of trauma as a repetition of what cannot be contained or understood in everyday life, people experience an attempt to scream, an attempt which fails due to being violently stifled. If the scream can be understood as the last shred of the capacity to express, thus "articulate" something one has experienced, then the stifled scream means that in the traumatic moment even this capacity is taked away from us. Thus painting which, by definition can show a scream but cannot make it heard, brings us to "experience" this limit moment which the traumatized look showed as well, of being stifled, not being allowed to use our last means of discursive expression. The painterly image thus marks the visual image as the failure of the voice and of language to articulate a meaning, and thus marks the memory of this stifling nightmare of the invisible excess over the frame, where we lose our head."

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Clarice and Bill are both traumatized; one believes he has erased his identity and has left it all behind. He wants to be heard, speak, exist and his tortures are how tortured he is. Clarice is unable to forget all the violence she has seen. Her scream is stiffled, and silent.
They are both opposite spectrums of modernity, suffering from their inability to digest; one inflicts pain, the other is afflicted. It reflects Nietzsche's predicament and his own disgust on how to overcome life's nausea...

"When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you..."

And when you look into a monster, and the monster looks back at you... do you become a monster yourself?

Clarice wrote:

""Officer Murray: [about Hannibal Lecter] Is it true what they're saying, he's some kinda vampire?"

"Clarice Starling: They don't have a name for what he is."" [Harris, Hannibal]

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Menninghaus wrote:

"The affect of disgust is always already in contact with that disgusting object which the philosopher engages—in voluntary heroism and up to the borders of almost sacrificing himself—in his descent into the hell of insight...
In the voluntary contact between disgust-sensation and disgust-object, what checks disgust from becoming absolute?

The penetrating insight into what elicits disgust already implies a first “self-overcoming” of disgust within “the elect man of cognition”: he has, after all, to open himself to the repellent in order to diagnose it. But this first overcoming leads precisely to the danger of “great disgust”—the danger of a circular reinforcement of disgust-sense and disgust-object into a closed system. A second overcoming of disgust is thus necessary at the end of its processing in the field of cognition. Nietzsche specifies only this second stage as an affirmation of life, or aesthetic legitimation of existence

With the return from the “transport of the Dionysian state, everyday reality . . . is experienced as such with disgust”; but in the course of just this danger, art shows itself to be a “healing enchantress”:

Nietzsche wrote:

"In awareness of the once-seen truth, the human being now sees only the horrible or absurd within existence; he now grasps the symbolic quality of Ophelia’s fate; he now understands the wisdom of wood-god Silenus: it disgusts him.
Here, in this supreme danger to the will, art approaches as a redeeming, healing enchantress. She alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horrible or absurd element in existence back into ideas that can be lived with: these are the sublime, as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic, as the artistic release from the dis- gust at the absurd. The satyr-chorus of the dithyramb is Greek art’s agent of salvation; the nihilistic mood described earlier exhausts itself facing the intermediate world of this Dionysian escort.
The metaphysical consolation,—with which . . . every true tragedy leaves us—that despite all changes of outward appearance, life is in essence indestructibly powerful and joyful: this consolation appears in bodily distinctness as a satyr-chorus, a chorus of natural creatures, living, as it were, ineradicably behind all civilization, remaining the same for ever despite all change of generations and the history of peoples." [BOT]

Around ten years later, Nietzsche presents a variation of this model for overcoming disgust as the “blissful art” and “fool’s cap” of the intellectual “fool”:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Our ultimate gratitude to art.—If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue: then the insight into the general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science would be completely unbearable—the insight into delusion and error as a condition for our intellectual and sensual existence. Honesty would be followed by disgust and suicide. But now our honesty has a counterforce that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to illusion. . . .

As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and through art we are furnished with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times, we need a rest from ourselves by looking up and down ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or crying over ourselves. We must discover both the hero and fool hiding within our passion for cognition; we must now and then enjoy our folly, in order to keep on enjoying our wisdom! And precisely because deep down we are ponderous and seri- ous human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap: we need it waving before us—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art, in order not to lose that freedom above things that our ideal demands from us."

[Disgust]

But art cannot save the attack of great disgust, where vomiting the black snake that has crawled into your throat is involuntary; it has to be a voluntary kill, its head bitten off by yourself:

Menninghaus wrote:

Nietzsche wrote:

"I favor everything clean; but I do not like to see the grinning mugs and thirst of the unclean. . .
Are poisoned wells necessary, and stinking fires, and dirtied dreams, and maggots in the bread of life?
Not my hate but my disgust hungrily devoured my life! Alas, I often grew weary of the spirit [Geist] when I found the rabble, too, full of wit [geistreich]
And I turned my back on the rulers when I saw what they now call ruling: bartering and haggling for power—with the rabble!
I lived with stopped ears among peoples with a strange tongue: that the tongue of their bartering and their haggling for power might remain strange to me.
And holding my nose, I went ill-humoredly through all yesterdays and todays: truly, all yesterdays and todays smell badly of the scrib- bling rabble!
Like a cripple gone blind, deaf, and dumb: thus I lived for a long time, that I might not live with the power-rabble, the scribbling-rab- ble, the pleasure-rabble.
My spirit mounted steps wearily and warily; alms of delight were its refreshment; the blind man’s life crept along on a staff.
And yet what happened to me? How did I free myself from disgust? Who rejuvenated my eyes? How did I fly to the height where the rabble no longer sits at the well?
Did my disgust itself create wings and water-divining powers for me? Truly, I had to fly to the extremest height to find, once more, the fountain of pleasure! [TSZ]

Zarathustra describes the crisis and joy of such rediscovery of life as a “fountain of pleasure” in the vision of a “heavy black snake” that has “crawled into the throat” of a twisting, choking, twitching shepherd; while its body hangs “out of his mouth,” it has nonetheless first succeeded in biting into his innards:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Had I ever seen so much disgust and pale horror on a face? . . . My hands pulled and pulled at the snake—in vain! they could not pull the snake from the throat. Then it screamed out of me: “Bite away! Bite away!
Its head off! Bite away!”—thus it screamed out of me, my horror, my hate, my disgust, my pity, all my good and bad screamed out of me with one scream . . .
—The shepherd, however, bit as my scream had advised him; he bit with a good bite! He spat the snake’s head far away—: and sprang up.— No longer a shepherd, no longer a man,—a transformed being, surrounded with light, laughing! Never on earth had any man laughed as he laughed!
O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter." [TSZ]

The attack by “great disgust” is here once again represented as an oral attack. But simple vomiting no longer helps—what is now necessary is a determined bite into the “heavy, black snake” of life-satiation, in order to transform choking disgust into the light dance-step and superhuman laughter. This primal scene prefigures a repetition by Zarathustra himself, and a repetition of this repetition by all “convalescents.” In the process, it points to the limits of outside help in the cathartic crisis: no helping hand can replace the liberating analogon of involuntary vomiting—the intentional combination of biting and spitting.

As Zarathustra indicates, the attack by disgust can itself “create wings.” For just this reason, he prescribes his “brothers” with “the great lookout, the great sickness, the great disgust”—in order, that is, to reach the point where the self-overcoming of disgust leads to a new affirmation." [Disgust]

Hannibal's psychiArtry is in making Clarice re-Call and regurgitate her terror; make her Bite and Spit it Out. The one unable to confront their own monsters will be unable to confront another, unable to even See the other. Hannibal has to instruct her on how to "see" First Principles. The path to healing is to become healthy to endure your own vomit...
Trauma doesnt go away by stifling or external Psychoanalysis and its theories of studying behaviourism. An attack on the Freudian school.
And this is what the Nietzschean concept of the Eternal Recurrence was...

Nietzsche wrote:

"Must not whatever can run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever can happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?”

...-"Ah, man returneth eternally! The small man returneth eternally!"

... But the plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined,- it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.

I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent- not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life:

-I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things,.." [TSZ]

The great disgust and severe nausea at modernity can only be overcome by a certain kind of Voluntary Regurgitation - re-Calling as though one would Want to relive the same moment again and again...

c.1600, from M.L. regurgitationem, noun of action from regurgitare "to overflow," from L.L. re- "back" + gurgitare "engulf, flood" (found in L. ingurgitare "to pour in"), from gurges "whirlpool, gorge, abyss." Meaning "to vomit" first attested 1753.

Menninghaus wrote:

"Rumination is suited for being the extreme countermodel to “disgust” for one simple reason: it is an enjoyment of the (almost) regurgitated. Rumination fills the mouth with the stomach’s repumped contents. But rumination dallies, peacefully and agreeably, with one’s own half-digested matter, instead of seeing to its convulsive expulsion. It is thus at once vomiting and not-vomiting— in its repetition, a virtually endless vomiting and equally endless pleasure taken at what has been vomited. This figure of an immanent transformation of disgust into a “fountain of pleasure” is likewise the physiological cipher of eternal return. For in both cases, pleasure in return is the prominent sign— rather: the only one—of affirmation.

And for this reason, the laughter of the transformed shepherd, who has bitten off and spat out the heavy, black disgust-snake’s head, figures as a metonomy and interpretation of the eternal return, captured immediately before in another image. Ruminating, we say “yes” to what our “stomach” has pumped into our mouths, hence to the threshold of regurgitation. Nietzsche demands this diet, and this demanding practice, from a process of disgust-supported cognition that must not end as “great disgust”—as the definitive rejection of the world in a convergence of disgust-sensation and disgust-object.

The philosopher of disgust as worshipped donkey; the pathos of life- affirmation as yee-a: this surprising turn is open to a double reading. Most obviously and importantly, within the “tragedy” of knowledge—as the “affirmation of life even in its strangest and hardest problems”—it repeats the role of the satyrs’ chorus. As the analogon to a satyrs’ performance, the donkey festival of Zarathustra inherits the overcoming of “great seriousness” through disgust-free laughter that Nietzsche ascribed to the Aeschylean satyr in The Birth of Tragedy, and to the scholarly satyr’s gambols in The Gay Science. It is precisely as a tragedy of knowledge that Zarathustra must embody “an excess of the highest and most mischievous parody of the tragic itself, of the whole horror of earthly seriousness and earthly misery”:106 this the requirement of Nietzsche’s antipessimist reading of tragedy. To this extent, the foolishness of the donkey festival in no way denies the psychology of tragic knowledge; rather, it completes it. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche even asks if, as a yee-a sayer, the donkey might not be as tragic as the philosopher of tragic affirmation: “Can a donkey be tragic?—To be crushed by a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? . . . The case of the philosopher.” [Disgust]

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Hannibal's cannibalism is his Rumination at the great disgust. In feeding society its own vomit, but dressed and cooked so clean on the outside, just as how they present and appear so clean on the outside, he is at once, satyr and philosopher...
There is no escape from life, but certainly from life's disgust. How proper it is, that they Could be made to affirm their own, and then life feels right and they can sit together. Art alleviates sickness without denial.

Bill wants to erase his past, thinks he even has erased it, while Clarice cannot erase hers and the guilt she feels towards those she wanted to save but couldn't. She identifies with the prey and the weak and the defenseless.
Modernity is the dis/ease haunted between such "evil" and "good"; and she, just as ill as he is.

If one is not to become a monster oneself, like Bill, while staring into the abyss, one must ruminate on the terror before us, which is not this or that person, this or that criminal, but the whole eternal recurrence of the same nausea and the same monstrosities. The whole recurrence that vomits up such midgets and fragments of men, who are in truth nothing but body parts, again and again... this is the most primal scream, the attack of the black snake lodged in your throat...

Hannibal conducts psyche-Artry. Without art, one becomes a monster; art helps forget memories' poisons, enduring the eternal recurrence, life that Is essentially regurgitation of the same...

Bill and Clarice are haunted at either ends of modernity;
Bill wants to forget his own scream and so enjoys making the others scream.
Clarice cannot forget her own screaming.

And that is what Hannibal shows her. The one who cannot forget is as much a beast as the one who does not remember;

Nietzsche wrote:

"A person who wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who had been forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination. Moreover, it is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is completely and utterly impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.

In order to determine this degree of history and, through that, the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we would have to know precisely how great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is. I mean that force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one’s self. There are people who possess so little of this force that they bleed to death incurably from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch. On the other hand, there are people whom the wildest and most horrific accidents in life and even actions of their own wickedness injure so little that right in the middle of these experiences or shortly after they bring the issue to a reasonable state of well being and a sort of quiet conscience. The stronger the roots which the innermost nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we were to imagine the most powerful and most immense nature, then we would recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all over which the historical sense would be able to grow or cause damage. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is closed and complete, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions, doctrines, and purposes beyond it. And this is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself and too egotistical to enclose its own view within an alien one, then it wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all these depend, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides what is observable and bright from what is unilluminated and dark, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential." [Untimely Meditations]

To ruminate on the same, yet unlike a beast that cannot forget, one must be able to "Do no", than only "say no" to overcome the nausea of living...

Nietzsche wrote:

"The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he, who to an unheard-of degree says “no,” does “no,” to everything to which one has up to now said “yes,” can nonetheless be the opposite of a “no”-saying spirit..."

The no-doing means turning Hunter...  not be affected by disgust, but Hunt it.

Cultivation of taste is hunting for ever new disgust...  and in cultivating oneself, one Separates out, and no longer has to say-no...
Defensive energy would only refill ressentiment and nausea; increased discrimination is a no-doing, such that no-saying becomes superfluous...

Menninghaus wrote:

"This no-doing side, the “critique of modernity, the modern sciences, the modern arts, even modern politics,” does not omit any opportunity to make a finding of disgust. In doing so, it contradicts the dietetic imperative of avoiding “defensive expenditures” through a detour around the disgusting:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one—first piece of ingenuity, first proof that one is no accident but a necessity. The customary word for this self-defensive instinct is taste. Its imperative commands, not only to say “no” . . . but also to say “no” as little as possible. To separate oneself, to depart from that to which “no” would be required again and again. The rational element here is that defensive expenditures, be they ever so small . . . lead to a completely superfluous impoverishment. . . . In face of this, would I not have to become a hedgehog? But to have spikes is a waste, even a double luxury, if it remains free to have no spikes, but rather hands that are open."

For Nietzsche, “it” apparently did not remain free: the Genealogy of Morals is anything but a text with open hands. It moves more decisively than ever to that disgust-steered “no”-saying on whose dangerous “diet” Nietzsche had already long since “pampered” himself. The spike of disgust survives rumination along with all repetitions of “yes”- (“yee-a”-) saying. But this survival implies a shift from a “defensive expenditure”—a negative reaction to the dangers of contamination—to an “aggressive pathos,” to a weapon in that “war” Nietzsche had named the “revaluation of values”: “we’re learning disgust anew!” [Disgust]

Vagina and Penis.

Miller wrote:

"It is when vaginas are accessible that they evoke disgust and horror in their own right. It is then that male fears make them monstrous, hellish, and vile, disgust-evoking places. Recall Lear's image:


Beneath is all the fiend's.

There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah! pah!


But I suspect that the reason vaginas are capable of evoking disgust depends on something more than that "Love has pitched its mansion in the place of excrement" or that they are surrounded by pubic hair, or that they secrete viscous substances, or that they are victim of centuries of misogyny. It is not only what they secrete or what they look like, but that they are receptacles for that most polluting of male substances, semen. Semen pollutes in a number of ways. First, by fertilization. It makes the vagina the site of rank fecundity and gen- eration that assimilates it to the constellation of images that makes teeming, moist, swampy ooze a source of disgust. Second, semen has the extraordinary power conferred on it by patriarchy to feminize whatever it comes into contact with. In a sense, semen is more fem- inizing than the vagina itself. Whatever receives it is made woman. The feminizing power of semen can reduce men to women, even lower than women in some moral orderings since as biological men they had the option not to become sociological women. Semen is dangerous to oneself as well as to others, self-defiling as well as defiling. Ascetic communities that feared the contaminating powers of women felt that nocturnal emissions were contaminating also. Pen- itentials frequently required penance for nocturnal emissions.

Still today men are trapped between competing fears with regard to their semen, fears that manifest themselves in ancient medical literature as well as the literature of virtues and vices. Retaining semen sent poisonous vapors to the brain and heart (and feminized the male so retaining it); releasing it risked enervation and desiccation; and both were seen as causes of melancholia. Semen evokes disgust not only because it is slimy and viscous, "nasty slime" in the words of the Earl of Rochester, but also because its appearance is accompanied by a little death, an orgasm, which is a loss of self-control accompanied by facial expressions as undignified as those that revolted Swift when he imagined a woman defecating. Or as Rousseau noted regarding the facial expressions ofa man who had been aroused to ejaculation by desire for him: "And I really know of . . . nothing more revolting than a terrifying face on fire with the most brutal lust ... If we appear like that to women, they must indeed be fascinated not to find us repulsive."

I am of the view that semen is of all sex-linked disgust substances the most revolting to men: not because it shares a pathway with urine, not even because it has other primary disgust·features (it is slimy, sticky, and viscous), but because it appears under conditions that are dignity-destroying, a prelude to the mini-shames attendant on post-ejaculatory tristesse. The appearance of semen signals the evanescence and the end of pleasure. Male disgust with semen also bears no small connection with misogyny. The crabbed moralist's fulmi- nations against womankind often suppose the loathsomeness of semen and the defiling power of male sexual contact (which women are then blamed for taking in): "What are you but sincks and privies to swal- low in men's filth?" Men can never quite believe that women aren't as revolted by semen as men feel they should be. Such lack of re- vulsion or such overcoming of revulsion bespeaks the power not only of women's insatiability but of their inchoate drive to spawn, teem, and wax thick with fecund life no matter what the cost to their purity.

As a general rule in Western folk beliefs the vagina is more con- taminated by ejaculant than the penis is by having penetrated to ejaculate. Part of this is a reflex of the metaphors of invasiveness, of penetrator and penetrated, that organize the usual conception of the mechanics of coitus. Even the competing, less conscious conceptual construct which sees the vagina as a devouring and engulfing mouth has the vagina bear more risk of contamination by what it ingests than is borne by the engulfed one for being ingested. The risk the latter runs is of annihilation, not of pollution. The metaphor of pen- etration is in a way a desperate male defense against the male fear of being engulfed, a different sort of fear I think than the usual castration anxiety. Since penises penetrate, they, like knives, do much less damage to themselves than they do to the other. And the belief is that they clean up more easily, it being easier to clean the outside of the penetrating instrument than the inside of the penetrated "victim"...

That such images still hold us in their grip is reconfirmed by the enormous expenditures on pharmaceuticals, personal "hygiene" products, and advertising designed to cleanse the whole terrain. Consider too the difference in importance accorded to female virginity as compared with male chastity. Only in ascetic communities is male virginity prized to the same extent as female virginity, with the con- sequence that in that world penises· are put more at risk by vaginas than vaginas by penises. Outside such communities, in the routine social world, female virginity (unto this liberated day) carries enor- mously more social and moral significance than male virginity, the latter almost disqualifying someone as a male, whereas one's femaleness still survives virginity quite well.

The penis, though penetrable itself under dignity-challenging medical circumstances, is the original image of the contaminating, defiling, and dominating penetrator. Though dry, it emits ooze, and it is condemned by location to suffer the ignominies of pubic hair and the general disgust that its location elicits. But the danger to the penis and testicles is not penetration, since its orifice seems too small to entice other organs of penetration. It is excision, and that is a topic I have no wish to embark on because it seems everyone else has, castration underlying as it does so much academic discourse in various Lacanian and Freudian idioms. I allow myself only a few observations.

I suggested that the horror of semen is that it has the power to feminize, but then so does a scalpel. The castrating blade "deforms" the male into female, making him bleed from his genital region in a parody of menstruation. The misogyny that drives this conceptual order is what raises the stakes for castration as against other maimings, mutilations, and deformities which do not require misogyny to account for their uncanny and disgusting qualities. Women, after all, as well as men, can be deprived of eyes, nose, and limbs. Castration, however, does not need misogyny to make it disgusting. It only needs misogyny to explain why it is more disgusting than either men or women losing arms, legs, and noses or women suffering clitorectomies. Maiming disgusts and horrifies quite well without any psychosexual theory informing it. Semen, however, disgusts because it is sexual, fertilizing, and reproductive. Its way of feminization is rather different from castration's way, but it need be no less sadistic for all that." [AOD]

Phew! The irrevocable stench of a lingering piece of shit obfuscates your olfactory senses.
From where does it emanate —
This shit, incapable of even mold, however, was scooped up and collected and situated within the ambit of your senses with less conscientiousness than science.
What conceivable rationality could one conclude to why you would risk the stains, smears and contamination of containing a piece of shit:
shit can only attract flies.
To be sure, this fly trap — not even cognate, much less a deviation, of the Agaric toadstool with its intoxication and noxious purges and eliminations — shrouding and sinking behind rocks and in shades. An unequivocal living lie, a coward at the orifices of accretion and excretion.
What life can this neither organic nor inorganic aberration and lump of infertility enchant except the compendium of maggots, the spawning of the fly within scope.

Lo! So indeed it is to catch a fly, but flies incessantly buzz around your space, getting into your Business, encroaching on you, regurgitating and thumbing your skin and stumbling in your hair.
Disarm your trip wires. Cut your snares.
Shoo, fly! You pestilence. You're too pathetic to squash: your guts and innards procure no fruition.
Hold your breath: you're unstable for life blows.
Cross your arms: you're insensitive to gentleness.
Lock your fingers: an undeserved tap of disgust.

Behold! Divert: to abate the shit - you cannot squash it either, for then it confers a mess trebled and the tracking of it is misconstrued as your own.
To light it afire, but then the stench is intensified, enveloping in extenso your proximity.
Resolution: effectively then, you give it light, sun, ships of the rising, monsoons of the peak, ambers of the setting, with the integration of fluctuating, restless and motionful, circular and criss-crossed currents and streams, to inhibit and confine its pollution and externality to its own space, whence it belongs and has no Business elsewhere. It has no tributaries; all coagulation.

Your Sun dries it out, quells its fragrance, burns it, turning it gray, an ashtray it might, subverting it with the playful and comforting impression that it is still critical.
This how you keep it nearest, and farthest, concurrently entrapping your fly.

Herein, hear, here now, the question still implores: why catch a fly if this fly is by extension also a piece of shit, transfixing and transposing and transporting pieces of its attraction into your gulfs and winds.
Brew the Witch's Cottage —
The schism therein is twofoldly and comprehensively bridged. Then cut this embryonic contorted conflation at its nucleus and hoist up horizontal walls inestimable, of inexhaustible perfection, in directions incomprehensible.

That's what a vagina actually looks like?!!!

Diiiiisgusting....

Patterns everywhere.

With a bit of imagination.

The beat up, "roast beef" ones are generally an indicator to establish distance.

Perchance you can share one of your too-cool-for-school "what have I done"experiences with one or three?

Supra-Aryanist wrote:

Phew! The irrevocable stench of a lingering piece of shit obfuscates your olfactory senses.
From where does it emanate —
This shit, incapable of even mold, however, was scooped up and collected and situated within the ambit of your senses with less conscientiousness than science.
What conceivable rationality could one conclude to why you would risk the stains, smears and contamination of containing a piece of shit:
shit can only attract flies.
To be sure, this fly trap — not even cognate, much less a deviation, of the Agaric toadstool with its intoxication and noxious purges and eliminations — shrouding and sinking behind rocks and in shades. An unequivocal living lie, a coward at the orifices of accretion and excretion.
What life can this neither organic nor inorganic aberration and lump of infertility enchant except the compendium of maggots, the spawning of the fly within scope.

Lo! So indeed it is to catch a fly, but flies incessantly buzz around your space, getting into your Business, encroaching on you, regurgitating and thumbing your skin and stumbling in your hair.
Disarm your trip wires. Cut your snares.
Shoo, fly! You pestilence. You're too pathetic to squash: your guts and innards procure no fruition.
Hold your breath: you're unstable for life blows.
Cross your arms: you're insensitive to gentleness.
Lock your fingers: an undeserved tap of disgust.

Behold! Divert: to abate the shit - you cannot squash it either, for then it confers a mess trebled and the tracking of it is misconstrued as your own.
To light it afire, but then the stench is intensified, enveloping in extenso your proximity.
Resolution: effectively then, you give it light, sun, ships of the rising, monsoons of the peak, ambers of the setting, with the integration of fluctuating, restless and motionful, circular and criss-crossed currents and streams, to inhibit and confine its pollution and externality to its own space, whence it belongs and has no Business elsewhere. It has no tributaries; all coagulation.

Your Sun dries it out, quells its fragrance, burns it, turning it gray, an ashtray it might, subverting it with the playful and comforting impression that it is still critical.
This how you keep it nearest, and farthest, concurrently entrapping your fly.

Herein, hear, here now, the question still implores: why catch a fly if this fly is by extension also a piece of shit, transfixing and transposing and transporting pieces of its attraction into your gulfs and winds.
Brew the Witch's Cottage —
The schism therein is twofoldly and comprehensively bridged. Then cut this embryonic contorted conflation at its nucleus and hoist up horizontal walls inestimable, of inexhaustible perfection, in directions incomprehensible.

What is disgust to us, is manure and nutrition for plants ; )



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Flowers of Evil

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Menninghaus wrote:

"Baudelaire splits an allegorical depiction of organic putrefaction into two analogous and complementary images. Yet instead of the double opposition of above-below and physical-moral, the analogies are here articulated by way of the double opposition anonymous animal-beloved human being and present-future. In the mode of memory, the first image unfolds, not below the city, but apparently before its gates:

"Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d’été si doux:
Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux,
Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique, Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.

"[Recall, my beloved, the object we saw on that summer morning, so sweet and beautiful: at the bend of a path, a vile carcass on a stone-strewn bed,

legs in the air like a lustful woman, scorching and sweating its poisons, offering, in nonchalant, cynical fashion, its belly full of exhalations.]"


Perhaps Baudelaire’s “so sweet and beautiful” summer morning not only offers a contrast to the disgusting scene, but also alludes to the disgust-paradigm of the excessively sweet. Be that as it may, on such a morning a couple out for a walk chances on an animal’s rotting carcass, “at the bend of a path.” The poem’s locus of the disgusting is thus a locus of discontinuation, its time that of sudden confrontation. From the start, the putrefying body is depicted as a figure of sexual desire. It can only be called infâme (vile) because it still, in a way, lives and acts—because it submits and gives birth shamelessly and ardently (cf. brûlante—“scorching” or “burning”). Resembling a “lustful woman” with its spread-out legs and exposed belly, the carcass lies on a bed semé de cailloux: disseminated with pebbles as with male semen. Indeed, the entire organic mass is in a state of orgasmic movement, “sinking and rising,” it reads in the next strophe, “like a wave.” The maggots that gather in the car- cass’s swollen belly are depicted as a result of this sexual union—as the analagon of a pregnancy, or repellent life in something dead. At the same time, moving beyond mere disgust at a hyperanimated mass of insects, “black battalions of maggots” vary and intensify a disgust-paradigm prevailing throughout the poem: the paradigm of the excessively fatty. The maggots pour forth from a woman’s exposed belly like an unctuously “thick liquid”; her “lubricious”—lubrique—lustfulness even opens up the series of the fatty. In the end, a third form of the disgustingly fatty, “fat flowers,” will cover the grave of the beloved as she turns, in the imagination of the speaking “I,” into food for worms.

The carrion’s view is thus not merely voyeuristically depicted, but is also staged as a hybrid mix of sexual act and birth. As a “superb carcass,” the putrefying body, far from marking the death of (male) desire, is itself that desire’s object and trophy. The disfigured image of the female carrion also represents the “superb” beloved—if not, entirely, her convulsive sex— through an inversion of two stereotypical evocations of attractive feminin- ity: the corporeality of the woman as flower is rendered into a flower of decay, and the irresistibility of this flower’s scent becomes an intolerable stench. The blending together of carrion, flower, and lustful woman reveals Baudelaire’s carrion as a figure, if not as the figure of the fleurs maladives fur- nishing the title Les Fleurs du Mal. The sun cooks the rot of this abject fem- ininity “till done”—à point. In doing so, it intensifies both the stink and magnificent blossoms of rot and putrefaction to the peak of their unfolding. At the same time, the culinary metaphor points once more to the status of the flowery flesh as object of consumption and pleasure. The vapors of cook- ing and putrefaction emanating from this flowery flesh replace—indeed are themselves—the scent of blossoming.

It is not just that only memory of the carrion remains from the sweet summer walk, but the lyric voice’s accompanying beloved is also imagined prospectively as moldy food for worms:

"Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure, A cette horrible infection,
Étoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

"[And nevertheless, you will resemble this ordure, this horrible infec- tion, star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you, my angel and my passion!]"

The adversative “and nevertheless” here hangs oddly in the air. It evokes the supplementation of a thesis whose qualification or antithesis is articulated in what comes after. Something like the following might be extrapolated: “nothing, dear beloved, could resemble you less than this carrion in the most extreme state of lewd putrefaction.”

Even the sun, initially appearing present in the poem’s first putrefactive image as part of the positive, scenic contrast to the unanticipated sight of the cadaver, falls victim to putrefaction. Proceeding, already in the first image, from merely illuminating the scene to serving as putrefactive agent and accomplice, the sun now becomes directly, by way of equation with the beloved, the body of putrefaction itself. Hence even light putrefies in this scenario of all-devouring, cannibalistic decomposition. Above ground is thus revealed as no brighter than “beneath the grass and the fat flowers”—the sec- ond flowery disgust-figure, marking the grave where the “queen of graces” putrefies among her bones. The disgust-predicate “(too) fat” here also repre- sents one more link to the soul’s “fat”—grasse—payment for confession cited in Au lecteur. The semantic opposition as well as phonetic indiscernibility between “grasses” (fat) and “graces” even condenses the movement of the entire poem into a single pun.

The address to the beloved closes with a request that she proffer her own words to the worms:

"Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine de mes amours décomposés!

"[Then, oh my beauty! tell the worms devouring you with kisses that I preserved the form and divine essence of my decomposed stirs of love!]"

Similar swings from drastic evocations of transiency to invocations of constantia are present in many Renaissance and Baroque poems of love and tombeau. But Baudelaire only cites this structure in order to dissimulate it in a sustained fashion. We find no trace of Baroque mourning at the loss of a blissful state of human grace. The carrion’s depiction unmistakably emanates a libidinous obsession with the carrion; Baudelaire is here—and not only here—enthusi- astically imagining coition as the metonomy of one cadaver and another cadaver (“as a cadaver stretched out along a cadaver”). Both from a metonymic and metaphoric vantage, the “sinuous folds of old capitals” and old women possessing virtually all of Horace’s vetula-defects are reciprocal figu- rations; through one and the same credo, Baudelaire is irresistibly drawn to the charms of both “flabby monsters.”

Elsewhere in Baudelaire’s poems as well, “the image of multiplication through demonic vermin and decomposition” serves as a “central metaphor.” For in Baudelaire’s poem, desire in no way experiences the putrefaction of the desired body and one’s own putrefaction as simply a border and the other to itself, in order to then offer the “classical” metaphysical remedy of a time- and rot-resistant life beyond the grave or in the poem. Rather, from itself and the very beginning, desire aims, in scarcely hidden form, at precisely the imagination of the putrefying body as something excessively alive—if not as the cipher of sexu- ality itself. Such a desire that obsessively plunges into putrefaction clearly does not need conventional reassurance of putrefaction’s powerlessness, or of indifference against the evils of putrefaction.

Nevertheless, Baudelaire does not here offer a depiction of the disgusting for its own sake, “true disgust” in the sense of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Just as his dedicatory “Au Lecteur” presents its flowers of evil and the disgust-

ing as a contemporary syndrome of vices, many perspectives suggest a func- tional or allegorical reading of “Une Charogne”: as a powerful resource, typical of the times, for qualitative and quantitative stimulus intensification; as a stylistic device for aesthetic satanism; as a mise-en-abîme of the juncture between décomposition and (poetic) création; as an (ironic) self-exhibition of misogyny and sexual disgust; as an exposure of abysses of sexuality or dark areas of the human soul; as the negative medium of a metamorphosis, a “self- overcoming of the ugly” demonstrating, precisely, the triumph of poetry—of representational beauty—over the vileness of what is represented. If the skin-surface’s uninterrupted line is the law of the beautiful body, then the anti-illusional disruption of the textual body of art is the schema of romantic irony; it here readily invokes the parekbasis of Aristophanian com- edy. Disrupting the very form of aesthetic illusion, the disgusting is a pow- erful intermitting agent. To this extent, it promotes the Romantic art work’s formal tendency toward self-irony, although (or precisely because) the disgust-reaction proper leaves no room for ironic reflection, but rather disrupts any reflective maneuvering-room through a decisive and finite act of expulsion." [Disgust]

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Menninghaus wrote:

"For Rosenkranz excrement becomes the master trope not only of decadent Romantic literature, but also of contemporary culture in general. For its part, as “an inverse becoming of what is already dead,” putrefaction emerges as something other than the continuance of dying and passing away. Instead, it is a perverse reversal, a rendering inside out, a turn of and toward vomit within the temporality of life and death, a ghostly post-mortal life. With its various “scraps of cultural decay,” the city—space of culture—provides the natural excretions with a “dreadful” intensification:

"If one could turn a big city like Paris upside down so that the lowest would rise to the surface and not only the sewer-filth, but also those animals that shy away from the light, the mice, rats, toads, and worms living from putrefaction, would emerge, this would be a dreadfully disgusting picture."

This image had already figured as a cardinal disgust-paradigm in the eigh-teenth century’s discourse on public hygiene. It not only locates putrefaction in the cultural cipher par excellence, in Paris as capital of the nineteenth century. It acquires an even more striking power for both aesthetics and the critique of contemporary culture when read in terms of yet another reversal: not only as an image of the underbelly of culture, but also as an image of the above-ground state of civilization itself. The “ideal of satanic pretense” in contemporary art and reality, the deliberate reveling in “depravity” and “beautiful disgust,” present the same image of “abominable putrefaction” on the street and in the drawing room: a radical decay striking “people of the present age” already in their living bodies. The ingredients of this “putrefaction” are not sewage, rats, and worms, but rather: pleasure-craving impotence, satiated boredom, refined cynicism, a brilliant impudence of the immoral, an abandonment to evil in the affirmation of aestheticized satanism. To repeat an observation of Rosenkranz: in the Romantic age, “putrefaction” has seized the “negative principle,” robbing good, old evil of a “certain naive healthiness.” Analogously, Tieck repeatedly employs “putrefaction” as a key signifier of a disgusting sickening of the “Romantic,” and he, as well, describes the deliberate indulgence in “what is most offensive” as an unfettered disdain for “genuinely happy freedom,” for the sake of “senseless caprice” and “nullifying absoluteness.”" [Disgust]

Menninghaus wrote:

"The decomposition of the negative principle leads to a decomposition of dialectic itself. Instead of a movement of comprehensive integration, the older paradigm of indigestibility and “healthy” rejection of the unassimilable maintains the upper hand. The exorbitance of the disgusting is reconfirmed on a new level in that it even inverts the “confidence” of the dialectic appetite for appropriation into decisive repulsion.
The “brilliant audacity that leaves morals to the philistines,” the “‘beautiful disgust’ in this diabolics, that intentionally plunges into sin in order to then enjoy the sweet shudder of repentance,” and all other vices of the “man of today,” “restlessly exhausted, pleasure-craving yet impotent, bored out of satiation . . . ready to submit to every weakness,” face the same judgment as that implied in the presentation of venereal diseases that might have been avoided out of “free morality”:

“Art must exclude disgusting diseases resting on immoral ground. Poetry prostitutes itself when it depicts such things. . . . They represent aberrations of a period that, as a result of its morbidly pathological interest in corruption, considers the misery of demoralization to be poetic.”

Putrefaction and corruption, both read as moral ciphers, are joined in the (non)concept of the disgusting, thus forming one chief category in a pathology of the modern age—more generally, in a pathology of decadence. The prosti- tution of art at the hands of all these evils revolts the dialectical system, lead- ing it to take recourse to the classical devices of border-demarcation and exclu- sion. Time and time again, it is urban life that provides Rosenkranz with striking examples of aesthetic impossibility:

"The disgusting is also rendered aesthetically impossible when it mixes itself with the unnatural. Decadent epochs of nations like those of individuals, tease the slack nerves with the most intense and thus not infrequently the most disgusting stimuli. How hideous the newest fashionable entertainment of London idlers, the rat fight! Can anything more disgusting be imagined than a mass of rats in mortal agony defending themselves against a bestial dog? Some would say: but yes, those gamblers standing around the brick pit with their watches in hand. However, in his first, immortal letters of a deceased person, Pückler Muskau relates something yet more dis- gusting. Namely, that on the Boulevard Mont Parnasse in Paris he saw how the petit bourgeois shot at a rat they had bound to a crooked board so that it desperately ran back and forth in this narrow space. To shoot at a rat for pleasure! Infernally disgusting.""[Disgust]

Disgust of Compassion.

Menninghaus wrote:

"In rhetorical self-apostrophe, Nietzsche repeatedly recalls this danger of infection:

And hence, let us have good air! good air! and away, in any case, from the vicinity of all asylums and hospitals of culture! And hence, let us have good company, our company! Or loneliness, if need be! But away, in any case, from the evil vapors of inner corruption and the secret worm-fodder of the diseased! . . . So that we, my friends, can defend ourselves at least a little while longer against the two worst plagues that could have been reserved precisely for us— against great disgust at the human being! against great compassion for the human being! . . .

Great disgust at the human being would be the closure of the individual facets of Nietzsche’s panorama of disgust into a system without egress. In the figure of great disgust, the diagnosed evils of modernity and Nietzsche’s affective response to them would be so intertwined that his own project of a “tragic” saying “yes” to life would risk drowning in the “no” of disgust:

What is to be feared, as having an incomparably disastrous effect, would not be a great fear, but great disgust of the human being; the same with great compassion. If these two ever mated, something most uncanny would unavoidably and immediately come into the world, the human being’s “last will,” his will to nothingness, nihilism.

Nietzsche classifies contemporary literature with, precisely, this grid of double danger from “great disgust” and “great compassion”:

To “great disgust,” sometimes suffering from it, sometimes producing it

nervous-Catholic—erotic literature
France’s literature-pessimism/Flaubert. Zola.

Goncourt. Baudelaire. the dîners chez Magny

To “great compassion” Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky

Parsifal

Counting them agents of “great compassion,” Nietzsche has little mercy to spare for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. On the other hand, some of the authors consigned to “great disgust” are granted a double relation to disgust: “sometimes suffering from it, sometimes producing it.” This doubling allows literature to move past a simple example of the contemporary-disgusting, aligning it with Nietzsche’s own politics of disgust. In particular, Nietzsche perceives affinities with Baudelaire, the “very first intelligent disciple of Wagner”— although he directly singles out Baudelaire’s “pessimism” for rejection.

In contrast, “Paris naturalism” is censured as a movement “drawing forth and exposing only the part of nature that prompts nausea and simultaneous amazement—today people like to call this part la verité vraie.” In his regis- ter of “my impossible ones,” Nietzsche reserves a separate entry for this “dis- ease of will”: “Zola: or ‘delight in stinking.’”

The “great disgust” threatening, according to On the Genealogy of Morals, the man of cognition expressly reappears as a basic feature of Zarathustra’s life-trajectory. Before his ascent into the mountains, Zarathustra has almost “stifled” on “disgust”; he also sends forth his followers on the path of a self-overcoming of “great disgust.” This “great disgust, the great sea-sickness” only seizes the individual when he shatters “false shores and false securities,” the mendacious “tablets of the good.”

The dictum then applying is “Not my hate but my disgust hungrily devoured my life!” And Zarathustra continues with a question motivating Nietzsche’s entire work: “Yet what happened to me? How did I free myself from disgust?” Nietzsche’s answers to this question not only pass beyond disgust, but, above all, enter it more deeply." [Disgust]

Disgust and Morality.

Menninhaus wrote:

"Latent self-contempt is revealed to be the agent of modern moralizing, as well:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Those who are from the start casualties, defeated, broken—they are the ones . . . who most dangerously poison . . . our trust in life, in human beings, in ourselves. . . . Such an individual speaks to himself . . .

“I wish I were anyone else! . . . but there’s no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I escape from myself? And yet—I’ve had enough of myself!” . . . On such soil of self-contempt, a real quagmire, every weed will grow, every poisonous plant, and all so tiny, so hidden, so dishon- est, so sweet. Here the worms of vindictive feeling and reaction squirm; here the air stinks of things kept secret and unacknowledged; here the net of wickedest conspiracy is continually spun—the conspiracy of the suffering against the fortunate and the victorious, here the victor’s sight is hated. And the mendacity needed in order not to acknowledge this hate as hate! What a display of grand words and poses, what an art of “honest” defamation! These failures: what noble eloquence streams from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble devotion is swimming in their eyes! What are they really after? To represent, at least, jus- tice, love, wisdom, superiority—such is the ambition of these “lowest of the low,” these sick souls! And how skillful such an ambition makes them! Admire, in particular, the forger’s skill with which the stamp of virtue, even its cling-clang and golden sound, is faked here. . . . There is, among them, an abundance of vindictive men disguised as judges, their mouths continually secreting the word “justice” like a poisonous saliva, their lips always pursed, ready to spit at everything that does not look unsatisfied and goes its way in good spirits. Among them, there is also no shortage of that most disgusting species of vain men, the mendacious deformities out to play the part of “beautiful souls,” and for instance, dressed up in poetry and other nappies, to market their ruined sensuality as “purity of heart”: the species of moral onanists and indulgers in “self-satisfaction."

Quagmires, worms, stench, sugary sweets, saliva and slime: Nietzsche here serves up the entire arsenal of disgust-topoi in order to drag into view the self- sickness and satiatory disgust, the “no” to oneself and to life, that secretly characterize the agents of morals. He sees “whole epidemics of such satiety” at play in history." [Disgust]

Menninghaus wrote:

"Those historians, for instance, who are “sweetly witty” and have “wholly and entirely rented out the praise of contemplation for themselves” serve for Nietzsche as models of such “impotence”:

Nietzsche wrote:

"I could think of nothing so disgusting as such an “objective” armchair scholar, such a scented little historical hedonist, half-Pope, half-satyr, perfume Renan, his high falsetto applause immediately revealing what he is lacking and where, where the Fates have in this case applied their cruel shears in an oh! all too surgical manner! This offends my taste, and also tries my patience. . . . Nature, which gave the bull its horns and the lion its chasm’ hodónton—why did this Nature give me feet? . . . For treading . . . and not just for running away: for trampling these decayed armchairs, this cowardly contemplation, this prurient eunuchdom in the face of history, this flirtation with ascetic ideals, this justice-Tartuffery of the impotent! All my honor to the ascetic ideal, so long as it is honest, so long as it believes in itself and avoids playing the fool for us! But I dislike all these coquettish bedbugs whose insatiable ambition is to smell of the infi- nite, until in the end the infinite smells of bugs; I dislike the white-washed graves that play the part of life."

Nietzsche here imagines nothing less than a recastration of someone already castrated. Shears, tread, bull-horns, and lion’s maw are aimed at an “impotence” which, in fact, is potent to an unheard-of degree: its “moral posing” successfully renders invisible its own foundation (i.e., its own failings), and indeed manages to endow itself with the aura of a “beautiful soul.”" [Disgust]

Disgust and Cruelty.

Menninghaus wrote:

"Nietzsche’s examples possess, to the contrary, a thoroughly premodern festive-spectacular quality, often resembling Bakhtin’s description of the carnival. They extend from the Trojan War and archaic sacrificial practice— as a theater of cruelty for divine spectators—to royal marriages, and the world of Don Quixote:

Nietzsche wrote:

"It seems to me that such false delicacy, indeed the Tartuffery of tame housepets (meaning modern man, meaning us) likewise fails to acknowledge the extent of naiveté and innocence with which prior generations’ need for cruelty presents itself, and how fundamentally they regard precisely “disinterested malice” (or, to speak with Spinoza, sympathia malevolens) as a normal human characteristic—hence as something to which the conscience heartily says yes! Perhaps even today a more profound eye would discern enough of this earliest and most basic human festive joy; in Beyond Good and Evil . . . I pointed a careful finger at the transformation of cruelty into something ever more spiritual and “divine,” a process running through the whole history of higher culture (and, in a significant sense, even constituting it).

In any case, it is not so long ago that royal weddings and popular festivities in the grandest style were inconceivable without executions, torture, or for instance an auto-da-fé, or similarly a noble household without a creature upon whom one could unhesitatingly vent one’s malice and cruel teasing (—remember, for exam- ple, Don Quixote at the court of the Duchess: today we read the whole Don Quixote with a bitter taste on the tongue, almost in tor- ture, and we would thus seem very alien, very obscure to its author and his contemporaries—they read it with the best of all consciences as the most cheerful of books, they almost laughed themselves to death over it)."

" [Disgust]

Disgust, Cynicism and Cognition.

Menninghaus wrote:

"Chapter 26 of Beyond Good and Evil expounds on this basic idea in terms of the relation between philosophical knowledge and the strong “instinct” of disgust. Disgust, it turns out, is a necessary condition and catalyzer of cognition; and for the “favored child of cognition,” it even returns, mixed with “enchantment,” in the form of knowledge itself:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Every elect human being instinctively aspires for his castle and secret spot where he is delivered from the crowd, the many, the almost everyone, where he may forget the rule “man” himself being its exception—that one case excepted where, as a man of cognition in the great and exceptional sense, he is impelled directly toward this rule by an even stronger instinct. He who, when dealing with human beings, does not occasionally scintillate with all colors of distress, green and gray with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness, is certainly not a man of elevated taste; but if he does not voluntarily assume this burden and displeasure, if he continually avoids it and, as said, hides himself away quietly and proudly in his castle, then one thing is certain: he is not made, not predestined for cognition. . . . The study of the average human being, protracted, serious, and to this end much dissembling, self-overcoming, intimacy, bad com- pany . . . this comprises a necessary part of the life-history of the philosopher, perhaps the part that is most unpleasant, bad-smelling, and disappointing. If he is lucky, however, as fitting a favored child of cognition, he will encounter people shortening and easing his task—I mean so-called cynics, hence those simply recognizing the animal, the baseness, the “rule” in themselves, and yet still possessing a degree of spirituality and appetite that constrains them to speak of themselves and their kind before witnesses—sometimes they even wallow in books as in their own dung.

Cynicism is the only form in which common souls come close to honesty; and the higher man must prick up his ears at every cynicism, coarse or refined, and congratulate himself whenever a shameless buffoon or scholarly satyr speaks out in his presence. There are even cases in which enchantment mingles with disgust: namely where, by a caprice of nature, such an indiscreet goat and monkey is touched with genius, as in the case of the Abbé Galiani, the profoundest, most sharp-sighted, and perhaps also dirtiest man of his century—he was far more profound than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more silent. . . .

And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, rather innocuously, of man as a belly with two needs and a head with one; wherever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see nothing but hunger, sexual desire, and vanity, as if they were the actual and only motives of human actions; in brief, whenever anyone speaks “badly”—and not even nastily—of the human being, the lover of cognition should listen carefully and diligently, and in general he should lend an ear whenever anyone speaks without indignation. For the indignant man, and whoever is continuously tearing and lacerating himself to shreds with his teeth (or, instead of himself, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense, he is the more commonplace, less interesting, less instructive case. And no one lies so much as the indignant man."

The opposition between “indignant man” and “laughing and self-satisfied satyr” is a variant of the opposition between moralistic-mendacious denial and amoral life-affirmation. Sigmund Freud would have had good chances of figuring among such laughing satyrs, who, with absolutely no indignation, see “nothing but sexual desire, and vanity . . . as if they were the actual and only motives of human actions.”

According to this memorable narrative of the “life-history of the philosopher,” disgust—above all in its function as pathos of distance and the experience of difference—is located at the origin of the movement of cognition. But it only transforms itself into cognition when it overcomes its own fear of contact, opening itself to the unpleasant, stinking, and disappointing object. Upon the path of such “self-overcoming,” that which disgust would have initially simply rejected (a wallowing in one’s own dung; the dirtiest of men) can then indeed return, but now in a new mixture and on the side of knowledge. A posthumous fragment directly defines the necessary exposure of cognition to disgust as the “fate” that “henceforth rests upon Europe”—a fate stamped by the fact

Nietzsche wrote:

"that precisely its strongest sons rarely and belatedly arrive at their springtime,—that for the most part they perish young and full of disgust, winter, gloom, precisely because they drank, drained, the cup of disappointment—and that is presently the cup of cognition— with all their strength’s passion—and they would not be the strongest if they were not also the most disappointed of men!"

Without this interplay of disgust, “cup of disappointment” and “cup of cognition,” cognition would be cut off from its strongest source of power. It needs a disgust-engendering experience passing with “all [its] strength’s passion” through “all the age’s illness”: a dialectic model defining negativity in the form of a heroically desired suffering from the disgusting as the signature of cognition.

“The elect man of cognition” is an individual who has “almost” been “sacrificed” to disgust—what this terminology reveals has already been depicted in The Birth of Tragedy in the medium of art, indeed as the accomplishment of art: as the “saying ‘yes’ to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I named Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. . . . In this sense I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher.”

The “tragedy” of the man of cognition only finds its “new way to ‘yes’” in self-exposure to disgust’s “no”:

Nietzsche wrote:

"As I have understood it and lived it until now, philosophy is the voluntary search for even the execrated and vile aspects of existence. From the extensive experience offered by such wandering through ice and desert, I learned to see everything that has been philosophized until now in a different manner. . . . The sort of experimental philosophy that I live tentatively anticipates even the possibilities of a fundamental nihilism: without this meaning that any move beyond negation, “no,” a will to the negative is precluded. Rather, such a philosophy desires to break through to the inverse—to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, and selection."

[Disgust]

Menninghaus wrote:

"In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche stages the almost-sacrifice of those who are both knowledgeable and filled with disgust as a literal almost-death: as the protagonist’s seven-day coma and near-death-experience. The crisis of sym- bolic death arrives on the scene when Zarathustra “summons [his] most abysmal thoughts” aloud and “turns [his] ultimate depth out into the light” by an act of vomiting. With a threefold Ekel, Ekel, Ekel, seemingly applying to both his own “abyss” and the process of “turning it out into the light,” Zarathustra collapses, before emerging from just this crisis as “the convalescent.”
The path of such cognition, its emphasis on “the execrated and vile aspects of existence” and the almost-sacrifice of the perceiving subject, confronts the Enlightenment model of cognitive light with a disgust-bathed “gloom” and “winter” to cognition. I feel disgust, therefore I am predestined for cognition: this the later doctrine of Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. According to The Birth of Tragedy, this “main thesis” comprises another thesis, aimed at the knowledge already achieved within disgust: I feel disgust, therefore I have recognized something. Disgust is what arrives with a return from the “transport of the Dionysian state,” as a “true look into the essence of things”:

Nietzsche wrote:

"For its duration the transport of the Dionysian state, abolishing the usual barriers and boundaries of existence, contains a lethargic element into which all past personal experience is plunged. Through this gulf of forgetting, the worlds of everyday and Dionysian reality become separated. But as soon as the everyday reality again emerges into consciousness, it is experienced as such with disgust; an ascetic, will-denying mood is the fruit of this state of affairs. In this sense, Dionysian man is similar to Hamlet: both have once cast a true glance into the essence of things, they have understood, and action disgusts them; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things—they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they are expected to restore order to a world out of joint. Understanding kills action; action involves being cast in a veil of illusion—this is what Hamlet teaches us, not that cheap wisdom of Hans the Dreamer who, from too much reflection, as it were from an excess of possibilities, never gets around to action; not reflection! no!—true understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action, for Hamlet and Dionysian man alike. No consolidation avails any longer; longing passes beyond a world after death, beyond the gods themselves; existence, including its glistening reflec- tion in the gods or in an immortal beyond, is negated. In awareness of the once-seen truth, the human being now sees only the horrible or absurd within existence; he now grasps the symbolic quality of Ophelia’s fate; he now understands the wisdom of wood-god Silenus: it disgusts him."

Nietzsche’s early and later doctrines of disgust and cognition converge in pre- suming disgust as correlate to an extraordinary condition or sign of “election.” Consequently, cognition as the effect or implicit accomplishment of such disgust is here bound up with an anti-modern and anti-egalitarian model of tragic-heroic distinction. Hence despite the epidemic increase of disgusting phenomena in modernity, in Nietzsche’s specific definition both the sense of disgust and cognition are radically untimely: “In heroism, disgust is very strong. . . . The weakness of disgust defines industrial and utilitarian culture.”

In view of its universal utilization interest, such culture cannot favor the disgust linked to “elect” human beings of refinement and distinction. That culture truly marks, for Nietzsche, the victory of optimistic dialectics, whose “confidence” (Hegel) shoves nothing aside. It thoroughly betrays the “lack of shame” Nietzsche attributes to an all-pervasive journalism:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Much has been gained when the feeling has at last been instilled into the great multitude (into the shallow-pates and greedy-guts of every sort) that there are things they must not touch; that there are holy experiences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep their unclean hands away,—it is almost their highest advance towards humanity. Conversely, there is perhaps nothing about the so-called cultured, the believers in “modern ideas,” that arouses so much disgust as their lack of shame, the self-satisfied insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick, and fumble with everything; and it is possible that more relative nobility of taste and reverential tact is to be discovered today among the people, among the lower orders and especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the cultured."

Like the peasants, the other agents of Nietzschean disgust-knowledge are historically marginalized. Nietzsche favors a polemically generalized concept of the “Germans” to denote the contemporary norm contrasting with the “elect” of disgust-led insight. “German” here signifies “my bad air,” an “uncleanliness in psychologicis become instinct” (“one does not want to be clear about oneself ”), absent “feeling for distance,” no “finger for nuances,” no “délicatesse,” and “no esprit in his feet.” Where all such disgust-sensoria are lacking, Niet- zsche sees no chance for himself and his project: “woe is me! I am a nuance." [Disgust]

Lyssa wrote:

Supra-Aryanist wrote:

Phew! The irrevocable stench of a lingering piece of shit obfuscates your olfactory senses.
From where does it emanate —
This shit, incapable of even mold, however, was scooped up and collected and situated within the ambit of your senses with less conscientiousness than science.
What conceivable rationality could one conclude to why you would risk the stains, smears and contamination of containing a piece of shit:
shit can only attract flies.
To be sure, this fly trap — not even cognate, much less a deviation, of the Agaric toadstool with its intoxication and noxious purges and eliminations — shrouding and sinking behind rocks and in shades. An unequivocal living lie, a coward at the orifices of accretion and excretion.
What life can this neither organic nor inorganic aberration and lump of infertility enchant except the compendium of maggots, the spawning of the fly within scope.

Lo! So indeed it is to catch a fly, but flies incessantly buzz around your space, getting into your Business, encroaching on you, regurgitating and thumbing your skin and stumbling in your hair.
Disarm your trip wires. Cut your snares.
Shoo, fly! You pestilence. You're too pathetic to squash: your guts and innards procure no fruition.
Hold your breath: you're unstable for life blows.
Cross your arms: you're insensitive to gentleness.
Lock your fingers: an undeserved tap of disgust.

Behold! Divert: to abate the shit - you cannot squash it either, for then it confers a mess trebled and the tracking of it is misconstrued as your own.
To light it afire, but then the stench is intensified, enveloping in extenso your proximity.
Resolution: effectively then, you give it light, sun, ships of the rising, monsoons of the peak, ambers of the setting, with the integration of fluctuating, restless and motionful, circular and criss-crossed currents and streams, to inhibit and confine its pollution and externality to its own space, whence it belongs and has no Business elsewhere. It has no tributaries; all coagulation.

Your Sun dries it out, quells its fragrance, burns it, turning it gray, an ashtray it might, subverting it with the playful and comforting impression that it is still critical.
This how you keep it nearest, and farthest, concurrently entrapping your fly.

Herein, hear, here now, the question still implores: why catch a fly if this fly is by extension also a piece of shit, transfixing and transposing and transporting pieces of its attraction into your gulfs and winds.
Brew the Witch's Cottage —
The schism therein is twofoldly and comprehensively bridged. Then cut this embryonic contorted conflation at its nucleus and hoist up horizontal walls inestimable, of inexhaustible perfection, in directions incomprehensible.

What is disgust to us, is manure and nutrition for plants ; )



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Mark of independence to grow out one's own shit.
It's evocative of the growing pattern of tomatoes. Duly, eat tomatoes for such mediation.
At the same time, could tomatoes be a contraindication for cancer patients, given the autonomous behavior of cancer cells?

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It took nearly to the end of the 20th century to allocate laws for prohibiting the imprudent dumping of shit into bodies of water and the environment altogether.
Humans - not even once.
"Man is not to be preserved, but overcome."