加载中…【恶心：一种强烈感觉的理论与历史】
(2014-04-12 17:52:20)
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Disgust:The Theory and History of a Strong
Sensation 
“Disgust” is accounted one of
the most violent affections of the human perceptual
system. Kant, one of the first
theoreticians of disgust, called it a
“strong vital sensation.”1 Such
sensations “penetrate the body, so far as it is
alive.” Whether triggered
primarily through smell or touch, eye or intellect,
they always affect “the whole
nervous system.”2 Everything seems at risk in
the experience of disgust. It
is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis
of self-preservation in the
face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive
struggle, in which what is in
question is, quite literally, whether “to be or not
to be.” This accounts, even in
apparently trivial cases, for the peculiar gravity
of the distinction at issue in
disgust, the distinction between digestible/wholesome/
appetizing and unpalatable,3
between acceptance and rejection (vomiting,
removal from proximity). The
decaying corpse is therefore not only one
among many other foul smelling
and disfigured objects of disgust. Rather, it
is the emblem of the menace
that, in the case of disgust, meets with such a
decisive defense, as measured
by its extremely potent register on the scale of
unpleasureable affects. Every
book about disgust is not least a book about the
rotting corpse.
The fundamental schema of
disgust is the experience of a nearness that
is not wanted.
Stated very abstractly, the
defense mechanism of disgust consists in a
spontaneous and especially
energetic act of saying “no” (Nietzsche).
Eighteenth-century anthropology
regarded the sensation of disgust as an
unconditional given of human
nature, as an elemental reaction type of very
considerable
importance for the physical,
intellectual, moral, and social spheres of
life. By the same token,
evolutionary theory, empirical psychology, and finally
neurology5 have regularly,
since Darwin, reckoned “disgust” as being one of the
most elementary human
feelings.
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