Disgust
Vilém Flusser essentially uses the expression
disgust (or nausea) in two senses: an existentialist
one, not very original, often used in the
1960s, which goes back to Jean-Paul Sartre’s
philosophical novel Nausea (French original
1938), according to which human beings feel disgust
for themselves and their concrete situation
in the world. We find similar ideas in Flusser’s
works; in essays such as “Do Tempo e de como
ele Acabará” [On Time and Its End] (1962), “Do
Diabo” [On the Devil] (1963), and “Da Gula” [On
Gluttony] (1963). In “Da Gula,” Flusser assigns
his own meaning to the idea of disgust, connecting
it with a theory that is critical of progress and
technology.
The second sense of disgust is more original,
but it also falls within a long line of attempts to
conceive disgust in anthropological terms. The
key idea of Flusser’s theory of disgust can be
found in Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: “We belong
to the phylum Chordata, that of animals hung
by an internal coat hanger. This manifests itself
existentially in every encounter with another animal:
when we crush under our foot life that has
bones that can break, we identify ourselves with
this life. When the life crushed is soft, we feel
disgust. It is possible to imagine a phenomenology
of disgust that supports the hypothesis that
‘disgust recapitulates phylogeny’: the farther an
animal is from man, the more disgust it causes.”
(Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, 2011, p. 31)
For Sigmund Freud faeces disgust us because they remind us of our animal nature (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1961, p. 52), and for Julia Kristeva, excrement is something that is refused, ejected, vomited; in other words, a primal “object.” It confronts us with those “fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1982, p. 12). With his anthropological theory of disgust, Flusser can be included in this tradition which perceives the feeling of disgust as an expression and mode of de ning ourselves in confrontation and tension with the animal.
Original article by Márcio Seligmann-Silva in Flusseriana