It's hard to believe that an analysis of disgust could lead us into
a greater understanding of the fundaments of human society, but
that is certainly the case in Miller's entertaining discourse. He
take us on a journey to the essence of disgust as a reaction to the
world around us, showing how it can be used socially and
politically. Miller argues that we help to define the world and
ourselves through the use of disgust, and that morality and
aesthetics would mean nothing without it. Convincing and
enthralling throughout, this work shows us how human sensibility is
truly based on primitive human senses. (Kirkus UK)
William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of
disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even
as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately
dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions
of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent
recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on
overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure
from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine
aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine
morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and
cruelty.
Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes:
eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust
pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the
idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and
sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues,
play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social
hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an
equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous
division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are
sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.
Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our
ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile,
so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than
passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we
are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we
fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion
for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to
make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.
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