Contaminated Words, Contaminated Worlds: A Phenomenology of Disgust and the Architecture of Exclusion (Graduate Seminar)

Abstract:

Most common inquiries into disgust portray it as an emotion designed to help individuals avoid pollutants and contaminants. The works of Ute Frevert, Sara Ahmed, Sara Heinämaa, and others exemplify how various inquiries into the nature of disgust can further expand and explicate various dimensions beyond just the empirical. I will show later how these contributions are vital for expanding the conception of disgust.

I will begin my talk with Aurel Kolnai’s phenomenological conception of disgust, which serves as the foundational starting point for interpreting any discourse on the subject. Kolnai’s conception, first appeared in 1928, stands alone as a rigorous, concentrated, and influential formulation of disgust that encompasses aesthetic, physical, moral, and existential dimensions. Additionally, there is a notable axiological aspect that imposes a negative valuation of objects. By invoking the phenomenological concept of sedimentation, I intend to analyze how these valuations sediment and are later reactivated in different dimensions and contexts. However, merely accounting for the transformation of disgust via intermediary concepts such as sedimentation (or habituation, normativity) fails to capture the complexity of disgust. Building on this phenomenological groundwork, I turn to the insights of Heinämaa, Frevert, and Ahmed, which are invaluable in understanding how disgust weaponizes the vocabulary of disgust. Their work is crucial in articulating how disgust evolves into a political force.

Finally, the kaleidoscopic inquiry into transformations of disgust reveals them as components of the social dimension. Hence, I propose recontextualizing the phenomenology of disgust within Mary Douglas’ account of the sociology of dangers. While Douglas’s perspective does not overlook the role of subjective experience, it presupposes the primacy of social organization, and as such, it is at odds with the phenomenological approach. If so, juxtaposing Kolnai’s and Douglas’s approaches could, at least to a limited extent, test if and then show how mechanisms, sediments, and habits of disgust transform, mutate, sediment, and manifest, assume a life of their own in the social sphere and vice versa. Through this concluding discussion, I aim to highlight that disgust is more than “a kind of behavioral extension of the immune system.”

Delivered in English.
All are welcome.