Disgust (Ekel, degout) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives.

In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the...

Winfried Menninghaus bietet die erste umfassende Sichtung von Stellung und Funktion des Ekels in Philosophie, sthetik, Kunst, Psychoanalyse, Zivilisationstheorie und Alltagskultur von der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart. Dabei zeigt sich, da der Ekel als Chiffre der Bedrohung eine entscheidende Bedeutung innerhalb der sthetik von Kunst und Alltag hat.

Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing--such are the examples Kant's Critique of Judgment offers for a -free- and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghaus's book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely -modern- phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and radicalize Kant's move. Menninghaus shows parergonality and -nonsense- to be two key features in the spread of the arabesque from architecture and the fine...