Carolyn Korsmeyer 
Disgust 
Introduction: art and emotional paradox 
The classic tragic emotions, according to Aristotle, are pity and terror; but 
pity and terror share company with other emotional responses as well. When 
Sophocles describes the terrible plight of the abandoned Philoctetes, he 
emphasizes how no one can tolerate the polluting stench of his wounded 
foot and his unbearable, agonized cries. »His foot was festering, oozing pus/ 
From a foul wound,« explains Odysseus. »Even at festivals/ We hardly dared 
touch the wine or meat.«' Philoctetes' fellow soldiers bemoan his loneliness, 
but their senses are so revolted by his suppurating flesh that they cast him 
out of their company. His festering wound arouses the powerful aversive 
reaction of disgust- both in his companions in the story and on the part of 
the audience of the play. 
Of all the emotions that art can inspire, disgust is the most difficult to 
reconcile with positive aesthetic response, especially when that response is 
cast in the s tandard terminology of aesthetic pleasure. Of the painful 
emotions, fear is the one that has chiefly occupied philosophy of art, and 
indeed it has always been acknowledged as an indispensable component of 
certain types of art such as tragedy. But disgust is a relative newcomer as a 
subject for sustained theoretical analysis, having been traditionally considered 
uniquely disqualified from the lists of aesthetically enjoyable emotions. As 
Kant emphatically states: »There is only one kind of ugliness that cannot be 
presented in conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetic liking 
and hence artistic beauty: that ugliness which arouses disgust.«2 
Kant was evidently wrong. In addition to the case of Philoctetes, there 
are numerous other examples from the history of art where the arousal of 
disgust is an important component of appreciative understanding. (Some 
of the paintings of Titian, Gericault, and Goya come to mind.) Moreover, 
contemporary culture seems positively obsessed with the presentation of the 
disgusting - in stories and novels, in the visual arts, and in the powerful 
1 Sophocles, Electra, Antigone, Philoctetes, trans. Kenneth McLeish (Cambridge University 
Press, 1979) p. 109. 
2 Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 [1790]) p. 180. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 43-62. 43 
Carolyn Korsmeyer 
combination of narrative and visual effects that film and video avail. With 
the refinement of computerized special effects, audiences can now savor a 
corpse decomposing before their very eyes or human bodies invaded by rot 
or fungus, not to mention all manner of repulsive alien species. High or 
gallery culture features the same titillating shocks, such as Odd Nerdrum's 
depictions of evisceration, amputation, and excrement in unsettling classic 
pictorial style. Cindy Sherman's virtual trademark has become the disgusting, 
notable in this unappetising still life (Figure 1). It would strain credibility to 
claim all such examples as objects of artistic beauty, but their affective power 
and ascendence in art testify to the »aesthetic liking« they arouse, a 
phenomenon that demands explanation. 
Perhaps it is the sheer number of works that arouse disgust and 
companion emotions such as horror, loathing, and dread, that has helped 
Figure 1: Cindy Sherman, 
»Untitled #172« (1987) 
Courtesy the artist and Metro 
Pictures 
44 
Disgust 
to propel the recent industry of studies on emotion in the arts and the familiar 
philosophical paradoxes they present. Disgust joins the venerable paradox 
of tragedy and the paradox of horror, variations on the general puzzle 
p re sen ted by the fact that seemingly well-balanced people seek out 
experiences in art that they would flee in reality: the painful, the terrifying, 
the disturbing, the perverse, and the repulsive.3 To add to the paradoxes of 
the painful or aversion emotions, we have the more general paradox of 
fiction, made acute with the now widely-accepted cognitivist theories of 
emotion, that is, theories that maintain beliefs to be constituents of emotions. 
If works of art describe worlds we recognize as not real (fictional), then they 
do not present us with facts in which to believe. How, then, do they succeed 
so effectively in arousing emotions, absent relevant beliefs?41 shall direct 
these familiar questions to the emotion of disgust, adjusting the terms of 
debate to fit this powerful aversion. What kind of an emotion is disgust? And 
what about aesthetic disgust, by which I do not mean disapproval but rather 
an emotion appropriately aroused by art that is indicative of aesthetic appreciation. 
At this point I should stipulate the scope of disgust that will be my focus, 
for »disgust« and kindred terms are used in a variety of contexts. I may report 
my disgust at the slime that has accumulated in a clogged drainpipe, and I 
may claim to be disgusted by the hypocritical behavior of a colleague. While 
the latter sort of mental or moral disgust can be an interesting constituent 
of aesthetic response, it is probably only a metaphorical extension of the 
kind of disgust that interests me here.51 refer to the kind of emotion that 
typically follows encounte r s with sour milk, sewage, and slime; slugs, 
3 Disgust in ar t is rarely encoun te red alone. Its close cousin is fear, which is why these 
two emotions are the major candidates for the emotions of horror . (See Noel Carroll, 
The Philosophy of Horror [ New York: Routledge, 1990] ch. 4.) But fear is also the painful 
emot ion that is classically unders tood to under l ie the powerful and t ranscendent 
aes thet ic r e sponse tha t would seem to be the diametr ic opposi te of disgust: the 
encoun te r with the sublime. These footnotes carry on suggestions regarding sublimity 
in comparison with disgust. 
4 T h e di f ferent paradoxes of emotional arousal by art are comprehensively analyzed by 
Jer ro ld Levinson, »Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain,« in Emotion 
and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjor t and Sue Laver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 
See also various o ther essays in this volume. 
5 T h o s e who write on the subjec t t end to inc lude all such categories a m o n g the 
p h e n o m e n a that disgust. William Ian Miller, for example, refers to moral revulsion as 
a reflective response that occupies a more complex place on a cont inuum that begins 
with physical revulsion and nausea. Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject begins with 
nauseat ing food and ends with hypocrisy. I doubt that visceral disgust represents the 
bo t tom po in t on a con t inuum end ing with moral repugnance. Of course, an au thor 
might exploit disgusting physical features in the service of expressing a moral point 
abou t a charac ter . 
45 
Carolyn Korsmeyer 
centipedes, maggots, and lice; in fec ted sores, g a n g r e n e d f lesh, and 
decomposing corpses. These things prompt visceral disgust, which is closely 
tied to unpleasant involuntary responses, including the gag reflex, nausea 
and even vomiting. Even if we do not reach the latter stages of reaction, the 
physical recoil of disgust is palpable.1' This kind of revulsion is the hardest 
to account for in terms of attraction - indeed, it seems to represent the very 
bedrock of aversion. Yet at the same time that which disgusts sometimes 
exerts a peculiar allure, what Julia Kristeva calls »a vortex of summons and 
repulsion.«7 Indeed Plato used the fascination of disgust in one of his most 
powerful pictures of the warring factions of the soul when he described 
Leontius, who admonished his own eyes for desiring to look upon the corpses 
of executed criminals. The upsetting fascination of the disgusting has been 
recognized for a long time, and its puzzling nature is deepened when we 
consider what kind of emotion disgust is. 
Theories of emotion 
What one surmises about disgust is influenced by the direction from 
which one approaches emotions in general. In the course of this paper I 
shall chiefly employ insights from philosophical theories of emotion that 
dovetail with neurobiological and psychological research. Ideally, science, 
phi losophy, and art theory shou ld converge towards an e n r i c h e d 
understanding of aesthetic disgust. However, we shall find that answers that 
satisfy some of our questions generate problems as we try to answer others, 
stirring us to further perplexity about what appears at first to be one of the 
simpler emotions. General theories of emotions usually regard them as 
complex mental events involving in ten t iona l objects , p ropos i t iona l 
grounding, dispositional and immediate causes, and affective states that have 
physiological, interpretive, and subjective components.8 The cognitivist 
theories of emotion now popular among philosophers hold that relevant 
6 In English this can be character ized as the »yuck« response , which interest ingly 
compares to startle, a reflex that is heavily exploited in thea ter and film. With startle, 
the typical reaction is a physical j u m p and a gasp, a quick intake of air. T h e disgust 
response is also a physical recoil, often with a notable gesture of repulsion as the body 
folds inward and turns away. But the verbal response is the opposi te of startle: it is an 
expulsion of air, a »yyeech!« sound, expelling the presence of the disgusting object as 
though it were a bodily contaminant . 
7 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, t rans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Co lumbia 
University Press, 1982) p. 1. 
8 The analyses covered in this paper concern occur ren t emotions. 
46 
Disgust 
beliefs or (a weaker version) non-asserted propositional thoughts are 
components of emotions." The propositional content of thoughts differentiate 
one emotion from another, for the raw »feelings« accompanying emotions 
are not determinate enough to distinguish their characters. Many emotions 
are incomplete without a grounding belief. Grief or embarrassment, for 
example, are incoherent in the absence of a belief that loss has been sustained 
or dignity compromised. Most philosophers of art adopt a cognitivist 
perspective, and it is this picture of emotion that exacerbates the paradox 
of fiction: For if emotions are dependent upon beliefs, and we do not hold 
(existential) beliefs about entities we acknowledge to be fictional, how can 
we account for the emotions we feel in response to art? This question has 
prompted a host of theories that attempt to soften the belief requirement 
for emotions or to qualify the emotions aroused by art such that they are 
not quite the same as those aroused by real situations.101 shall not engage 
in these debates because I favor an analysis of disgust that bypasses them 
altogether. I take my cue from scientific and philosophical studies of disgust 
that analyze this emotion as a reactive response that does not depend upon 
the complex cognitive components that emotions such as pity, embar-
rassment, and guilt require. As we shall see, this approach to disgust solves 
some problems and exacerbates others. 
According to neurologist Antonio Damasio emotions are triggered at 
two distinct sites of the brain. One site is the prefrontal region of the 
neocortex, which governs what Damasio calls »secondary« emotions." 
Secondary emotions are reflective and cognitively sophisticated. They include 
empathy, moral approval and disapproval, and caring in general, whether 
about others or about events that affect one's own well-being. The other site 
of emotional stimulation is in a part of the brain that is considered old from 
an evolutionary standpoint: the region sometimes called the limbic system 
that contains the cingulate gyrus, the hypothalamus, and the amygdala. It is 
here that Damasio locates »primary emotions,« including disgust. While the 
secondary emotions require not only consciousness but self-consciousness, 
9 Varieties of cognitivism are usefully reviewed in John Deigh, »Cognitivism in the theory 
of Emotions,« Ethics 104 (July, 1994). 
10 For example, Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990); 
Peter Lamarque, Fictional Points of View (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Susan 
Feagin, Reading with Feeling (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 
11 Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: 
Avon Books, 1994) Part I. Patients who suffer impairments of the prefrontal cortex 
are dysfunct ional in practical terms, quite unable to make decisions and to hold 
positions of even minimal responsibility, al though they continue to perform well on 
tests designed to test reasoning and cognitive ability. 
47 
Carolyn Korsmeyer 
the primary emotions are more reactive and appear to be rather »hard-
wired« in the brain. That is to say, they substantially involve the autonomic 
nervous system and are hence less voluntary, being harder or impossible to 
control with conscious effort.12 Primary emotions appear to be pan-cultural, 
and they are correlated with standard physical reactions, including cringing, 
blinking, typical facial expressions, and measurable responses such as skin 
conductance of electrical charge. Disgust is among the emotions apparently 
controlled in the limbic centers. It is also on the list of what some psychologists 
consider »basic« emotions, joining anger, fear, surprise, joy, and sadness.13 
They are considered more or less automatic and involuntary, though just 
how consciously manipulable they maybe is a matter for debate.14 Damasio 
proposes that such emotions are innate responses that are »pre-organized.« 
For example, though one learns that certain foods are taboo according to 
social or religious tenets, thereafter those foods provoke disgust as a visceral 
reaction because the pre-organized response is easily trained and locked 
into place. 
The division of emotions according to the physiology that grounds them 
is continued in some philosophical analyses. Paul Griffiths, in his widely-
acclaimed book, What Emotions Really Are, is among those who argue that 
»emotion« is not a univocal label for the disparate phenomena to which it 
is applied. Disgust and the other limbic-centered responses are among the 
emotions that he prefers to label »affect programs,« which are roughly 
12 This is a part of the brain that we have in common with o ther animals, and scientific 
studies of these emotions sometimes deliberately pay little heed to conscious experience. 
Biologist Joseph LeDoux argues tha t f ea r is best exp la ined wi thou t r e f e r e n c e to 
consciousness at all, for not all species that fear are conscious in any full sense of the 
term. The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 
13 Exper iments show dif ferent ia ted a u t o n o m i c nervous system activity fo r six basic 
emotions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and disgust. See e.g. Paul Ekman, 
Rober t W. Levenson, Wallace V. Fr iesen , » A u t o n o m i c Nervous System Activity 
Distinguishes Among Emotions,« Science 221 (September, 1983) 1208-1210; Levenson, 
Ekman, and Friesen, »Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic 
Nervous System Activity,« Psychophysiology 27:4 (1990) 363-384). T h e n u m b e r of basic 
emotions varies by theorist. T h e term may be used to mean a set of f u n d a m e n t a l 
responses out of which more complex emotions are built; emot ions shared by non-
human animals; pan-cultural emotions displayed by all social groups. T h e r e are many 
who dispute the soundness of the idea of basic emotions at all. See The Nature of Emotion, 
ed. Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 
pp. 5-47. 
14 The startle reflex, a feature of several emotions, is completely uncontrol lable . J e n e f e r 
Robinson analyzes the startle response in an a rgument against the cognitivist t r end in 
philosophical studies of emotion. »Startle,« Journal of Philosophy XCII:2 (Feb., 1995) 
pp. 53-74. 
48 
Disgust 
equivalent to Damasio's primary emotions.15 Affect programs are patterns 
of a u t o m a t e d a n d c o o r d i n a t e d response tha t a re »biased l ea rn ing 
mechanisms« sensitive to objects with significance for the organism's well-
being. In the case of disgust, we are evolutionarily programmed for quick 
response to things that are foul: dangerous or noxious to contact or ingest. 
Such emotions are subject to a degree of learning, but they set patterns of 
rapid response that become immune to override from higher-level cognitive 
systems such as conscious beliefs. An important feature of affect programs 
is that they do not require assent to beliefs to make sense of their occurrence. 
For example, while grief is only plausible on the premise that one believes 
that one has suffered a loss, disgust is »modular« and »informationally 
encapsulated.«1 1 5 This means that the response occurs quickly and 
automatically without input from other cognitive systems. 
There are features of this approach to disgust that require modification. 
In particular, Griffiths refers to affect programs as »...phylogenetically 
ancient, informationally encapsulated, reflexlike responses which seem to 
be insensitive to culture.«17 But disgust, whether aesthetic or natural, is clearly 
not insensitive to culture, no matter how visceral its character. Despite this 
shortcoming, which I shall address in the next section, in many respects affect 
program analysis is particularly apt for an emotion such as disgust, including 
aes the t i c disgust . T h e reactive, involuntary charac te r of disgust is 
accommodated, as well as its recalcitrance in the presence of contrary belief.18 
(For example, one may believe that a slug is quite benign and yet recoil at 
15 Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are (University of Chicago Press, 1997) ch. 4. 
Unlike Damasio, Griffiths does not speculate that higher-level cognitive emotions are 
d e p e n d e n t on affect p rogram emotions. The two systems may operate independently. 
(See pp. 103-106.) 
10 Griffiths offers this picture of the affect program emotions: »These emotions consist 
of complex, coordinated , and automated responses.... There is a flow of perceptual 
informat ion to the mechanisms controll ing these responses which is separate f rom 
the flow of information f rom perception to the higher cognitive processes responsible 
for in tent ional action. This e lement of modularity is required to account for the lack 
of fit between emotional responses and conscious evaluations of the significance of 
stimuli. In some cases h igher cognitive processes may be able to trigger emotional 
responses directly, but in o ther cases the associations which lead to the response must 
be separate f r om the evaluations made by higher cognition.« Griffiths, op. cit. p. 93. 
Griffiths adopts the terms »modular« and »informationally encapsulated« f rom Jerry 
Fodor , The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). The term »affect 
p rogram« comes f r o m Paul Ekman 's research. 
17 Griffiths, op. cit. p. 16. In fact, Griffiths allows for modification of affect programs. 
18 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
1997) asserts that in order to find something disgusting, we must believe it is in a category 
that warrants disgust. While many instances of disgust require cognitive activity such 
49 
Carolyn Korsmeyer 
its touch. Or - slightly closer to art - one may be embarrassingly unable to 
pick up a tarantula that one knows is made of rubber.)19 Affect program 
analysis makes it both more difficult and easier to resolve paradoxes 
generated by arousal of emotions by art. In fact, we can introduce some 
»limbic puzzles« into the paradox of disgust. What happens when responses 
supposedly so primitive and hard-wired come to be features of the highly 
acculturated and theorized products we call art? Many of the limbic-based 
emotions are aversion reactions probably designed through evolution to 
protect an organism from immediate threat. This is why they are modular — 
so that the organism can respond quickly before slower cognitive deliberation 
can make its assessment. But how and why do they become — in humans - a 
focus for attraction? The paradox of aversion is heightened by the analysis of 
disgust as an affect program. However, the paradox of fiction is solved. 
The standard formulation of the paradox of fiction focuses on the 
problem of belief. How can a reader feel grief on behalf of Anna Karenina, 
for example, if he or she does not believe that any real woman has been 
harmed?20 Whether or not this is a sensible problem for proposi t ional 
emotions or merely an academic conundrum, with affect programs we can 
invoke the fact that responses are encapsulated and thus independent of other 
cognitive systems, including beliefs.21 There is no paradox because there is 
no inconsistency of belief such that one responds with an emotion that 
requires a belief or propositional attitude that one does not hold.22 
More importantly, this analysis of disgust permits us to answer the 
question of whether emotions aroused in response to art are genuine emotions 
of their type. Although art arouses experiences that certainly feel like 
emotions, if we do not hold the beliefs that constitute the emotions we 
as recognition, I think this may be accomplished th rough the t ra ining of the affect 
program and need not require belief in the sense of assent to a proposi t ion. 
19 Psychologist Paul Rozin has experimentally demons t ra ted the inability of subjects to 
eat foods they like that have been molded in the shape of feces. (See discussion in 
Miller, ibid.) 
20 See Colin Radford, »How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« Proceedings 
of the Aristotelian Society 69, suppl. vol., (1975). 
21 Note that psychologists who study emotive response of ten use pictures or descriptions 
of emotion-arousing scenes to test their subjects, and they do not consider the scientific 
validity of their findings to be compromised by these »fictional« situations. 
22 Nor do we have to resort to any of the alternative proposals for the cognitive con ten t 
of emotions, such as simulation theory or the so called t hough t theory, which holds 
the emotive response to art to be responses to non-asserted thoughts r a the r than 
beliefs. Of course, there is a sacrifice involved in accepting this solution to the paradox 
of fiction, since it jettisons the cognitive const i tuent of emot ions that provides the 
strongest grounds for establishing their rationality. 
50 
Disgust 
apparently feel, perhaps we need to modify our understanding of this 
element of aesthetic response.23 Many conclude that although the emotive 
responses art arouses may be powerful and meaningful, they are not the 
same as e m o t i o n s a r o u s e d in real life. But aes thet ic disgust is an 
unambiguously and completely real case of the emotion, and its target object 
is the work of art. It is this image of food and vomit that arouses aesthetic 
disgust (Figure 2), and aesthetic disgust is real disgust that is occasioned as a 
part of the appreciative response to this work of art.241 suspect that the same 
argument could be made on behalf of other emotions such as some varieties 
of fear, and it certainly can be made for surprise. Other important aesthetic 
emotions, including the venerable pity, require a different analysis.25 
However, this is not to say that the disgust aroused by pictures and 
Figure 2: Cindy Sherman, »Untitled #175« (1987) 
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures 
23 Philosophers have suggested various modifiers to append to artistic emotions: fictional 
emot ions , quasi-emotions, s imulated emotions, and so for th . These modifiers are 
in t ended to account for the fact that our emotive responses to fiction are just that -
to fiction; to an entity that presents a world we acknowledge not to be real. 
24 T h e imitation-reality distinction is fur ther confounded by the work of Damien Hirst, 
famous for pickled animals, and Gunthervon Hagens, who reportedly preserves human 
bodies and exhibits them as sculpture. 
25 See Alex Neill, »Fiction and the Emotions,« in Neill and Ridley, Arguing About Art (New 
York: McGraw-Hill, 1995).Jerrold Levinson suggests that »Darwinian« emotions, that 
51 
Carolyn Korsmeyer 
narratives occasions exactly the same experience as the disgust that would be 
aroused if one came upon the scenes in reality that are pictured in visual 
art or described in fictions. There is a difference, and in the case of disgust 
that difference is best explained by reference to the senses that are assailed 
by the disgusting object.26 Philosophy is so biased in favor of the distal senses 
of sight and hearing that the other sense experiences that trigger emotions 
are often neglected. Works of visual art and narrative typically appeal to 
the imagination via the so-called higher or intellectual senses of vision and 
hearing. While visual scenes may disgust, the primary senses of disgust are 
the »bodily« senses of touch and smell and taste. The sensory conduits for 
disgust are limited in art, and the more basic sensations that occasion disgust 
are absent (though sometimes the visual display is sufficiently vivid that we 
can kinaesthetically smell or feel the object as well).27 If with our technical 
resources we had developed not just movies but the »feelies« that Aldous 
Huxley describes in Brave New World, our aesthetic disgust might be pushed 
to such extremes that Kant would be correct: this species of reaction cannot 
be converted to a positive aesthetic response. (Leontius rushed over to look 
at the corpses, not to smell them.) But as things stand, the most powerful 
avenues for the disgust affect program are bypassed, and the emotion is 
triggered by senses that can tolerate the experience and even dwell upon 
it.28 This observation provides us with one hint of how aesthetic disgust might 
become an experience to enjoy - or at least to savor. Sometimes we might 
is, those necessary for survival of the organism, are the ones tha t may be directly 
stimulated by art (The Pleasures of Aesthetics [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996] Ch. 
15.) While this is consistent with the position I adopt, I do not think that the appeal to 
evolution can be sustained; if Damasio is correct, higher-level cognitive emot ions are 
just as necessary to survival of the species as limbic-based emotions. 
2r> »What the idiom of disgust demands is re ference to the senses. It is about what it feels 
like to touch, see, taste, smell, even on occasion hear , certain things. Disgust canno t 
dispense with direct reference to the sensory processing of its elicitors.« (Miller, p. 
36.) 
27 E d m u n d Burke observed that primary sensat ions easily merge into me taphor i ca l 
sensations, such that, for example, the taste of sweetness transfers to a sweet shape or 
sound or expression. If this is correct, then the transfer of disgust f r om smell and taste 
- w h e r e it would likely occasion gagging or re tching - to vision, renders the response 
less visceral than the primitive aversion reaction that occurs when the m o r e direct 
sense is stimulated. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and 
Beautiful, ed.J.T. Boulton (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 [1757]) Part 4, Sects. 
XX-XXI, pp. 151-152. 
28 The question of the senses involved in the arousal of disgust is generally interesting for 
aesthetic theory, since it is the eyes and ears that are traditionally considered »aesthetic 
senses.« Most scientific researchers on disgust assume that taste is the basic sense for 
this aversion response, and subjects f r o m rats to humans display disgust react ion to 
52 
Disgust 
dwell on the disgusting simply because we can. Although it is an involuntary 
response, it takes place over a sufficient span of time that we are permitted 
to dwell upon our own reactions - unlike the sudden and momentary startle 
reflex, which is a stock component of horror movies. At least when disgust 
is aroused via the eyes and not the nose, we have an opportunity to focus on 
and even relish a limbic response for its own sake, taking a look at the 
machinery, as it were. It is rather like watching your own heartbeat. I don' t 
know if savoring an aversion counts as pleasure. Indeed, the issue of pleasure 
in disgust has now grown even more puzzling. 
So far we have answered two of the standard questions about emotive 
responses to art. Affect program analysis has helped us avoid the paradox 
of fiction, and we have demonstrated that aesthetic disgust is a genuine case 
of disgust. Now, as we turn to the issue of aesthetic attraction to this aversive 
response, we discover that in formulating these solutions, we have effectively 
cut off one of the time-honored ways to answer the paradox of aversion. The 
classic answer to this question was first supplied by Aristotle and has many 
modern variations: we are by nature imitative creatures who take pleasure 
in learning. The mimetic forms of art permit us to learn about painful and 
important matters without suffering the consequences of encountering them 
in reality. But I have just argued that in the case of disgust there is no 
distinction between imitation and reality, for the atypical sensory conduit 
for arousal only makes disgust tolerable and contemplatable; it doesn't 
diminish its genuineness nor screen us from its target object. So I cannot 
now revert to the imitation-reality distinction to account for the enjoyment 
of aesthetic disgust. How much of a theoretical sacrifice have I made? 
The imitation-reality divide has shielded human nature from unworthy 
enjoyment of nasty emotions by means of the assumption that certain 
emotions are by definition painful and must therefore be enjoyable only when 
their objects are fictional. However, such a distinction between venues of 
enjoyment does not survive scrutiny, as Edmund Burke observed long ago. 
He speculated that a theater would quickly empty of its audience were they 
to learn that a public execution was being held nearby. All would readily 
abandon art and hurry to the scaffold to gaze at the condemned prisoner in 
his final agonies.28 Burke thus anticipates what is now a fairly widespread 
foods that once made them sick. William Ian Miller makes an alternative case for touch 
and smell as the primary senses of disgust. He also considers disgust a peculiarly human 
trait that develops between the ages of two and six. The questions of which sense is 
basic and of whether disgust is a h u m a n development or a response we share with 
o the r animals are impor tant , though they exceed my attention here. 
2'J E d m u n d Burke, Part I, sect. XV, p. 47. See also John Morreall, »Enjoying Negative 
Emotions in Ficiton,« Philosophy and Literature 9, 95-103. 
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Carolyn Korsmeyer 
willingness to acknowledge that there is a real interest in witnessing painful 
emotions themselves, not just their artistic rendering. Indeed, if we can do 
so safely, we even want to experience them first-hand. However, if disgust is 
an emotion that is best understood as an affect program designed for 
protection, then it is doubly difficult to account for the appeal of the 
experience. Can the very reaction that nature seems to have evolved to be 
experienced as acute aversion be a source of pleasure?30 Or is its aesthetic 
power better understood in other terms? 
Objects of disgust: Aversion and Attraction 
There are three related questions that can be posed regarding the 
source and nature of the aesthetic power of disgust: (1) What objects trigger 
the experience? (2) What about the disgusting object is profound or valuable 
enough to convert aversion to attraction? And (3) When aesthetic disgust is 
aroused, does either the object or the experience itself become valued, 
savored, or pleasurable? Or is disgust a negative experience which gains its 
value by being a component of a larger positive experience? These turn out 
to be remarkably difficult issues to settle, partly because it is not clear what 
kinds of questions they are. At first they seem to request an empirical answer, 
but as I shall argue, this is a fruitless task. Exploring these questions also 
reveals a shortcoming of affect program analysis that requires repair if we 
are to understand disgust. 
Let us start with the question of the trigger, the target object of disgust. 
There is a notable convergence among those who have written about disgust 
when it comes to compiling a catalogue of disgusting things. The typical 
elicitors for disgust are objects that are foul. They stink and nauseate; they 
are slithery, gooey, sticky, and oozing. In addition to these sensory properties, 
disgusting things fester and decay; they generate low or monstrous forms of 
life; they pollute and contaminate. Excrement, maggots, slugs, vermin, and 
30 The issue of aesthetic pleasure blends with the question of the components of emotions 
in general, for one can make a plausible case that all emot ions contain an e lement of 
pleasure or pain. Spinoza, to cite a famous example, analyzed emotions as c o m p o u n d s 
of desire, pleasure, and pain. See also Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reason (London: 
Routledge, 1988). 
Spinoza introduces disgust in an interestingly ambiguous context when he refers to 
the pain a man feels when he imagines an unfa i thfu l lover: »...being compel led to 
associate the image of the object of his love with the sexual parts of his rival, he feels 
disgust for her.« (Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley, [Indianapolis: Hackett] p. 125 [Part III, 
Prop. 35, Scholium].) 
54 
Disgust 
things that have not too recently died - all these figure on typical lists of 
disgusting items compiled by theorists of vastly different stripes: anthro-
pologists , psychologists , ph i losophers ; empiricists , psychoanalysts, 
existentialists.91 But, as David Pole observes, despite this agreement about 
its objects and its sensory roots, »Disgust is no ultimate datum of experience, 
like the sweet taste of sugar...; it is a complex phenomenon requiring to be 
made intelligible.«32 
In his recent book, The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller proffers 
several general features of objects that arouse disgust: They are organic; they 
enter consciousness chiefly through the senses of touch and smell; and they 
have to do with life - its generation and its end. He summarizes the most 
basic and characteristic object of disgust as »life soup«: 
W h a t disgusts, start l ingly, is the capacity for life, and n o t j u s t because 
life impl ies its correla t ive dea th and decay: for it is decay tha t seems to 
e n g e n d e r l i fe . I m a g e s of decay i m p e r c e p t i b l y s l ide i n t o i m a g e s of 
f e r t i l i t y a n d o u t a g a i n . D e a t h t h u s h o r r i f i e s a n d d i sgus t s n o t j u s t 
b e c a u s e it smel ls revol t ingly bad , b u t because it is n o t an e n d to the 
process of living b u t p a r t of a cycle of e ternal r ecu r r ence . T h e having 
lived a n d the living u n i t e to make u p the organic world of generat ive 
ro t - r ank , smel l ing, a n d upse t t ing to the touch . T h e gooey m u d , the 
s c u m m y p o n d are life soup , f ecund i ty itself: slimy, slippery, wiggling, 
t e e m i n g a n i m a l l i f e g e n e r a t i n g s p o n t a n e o u s l y f r o m p u t r e f y i n g 
vege ta t ion . 3 3 
Miller's description is consistent with the idea of disgust as an affect 
program, because the decay and stench of the disgusting is often a signal of 
the noxious, poisonous, and dangerous, those objects we are well-advised 
to avoid before our slower cognitive efforts to investigate them get us into 
trouble. At the same time, the objects that arouse disgust obviously exceed 
that which is actually dangerous; they are charged with larger, culturally 
sc r ip ted m e a n i n g tha t af fec t programs alone would be s t rained to 
accommodate. As Miller observes: 
H e r e we have t h e m o s t e m b o d i e d a n d visceral of e m o t i o n s , a n d yet 
31 Many theorists who speculate about the disgusting invoke the support of anthropologist 
Mary Douglas, whose insights into the categories of the clean and the unclean are 
richly t ransferrable to food taboos, religious practices, myth, and art. Psychoanalyst 
Julia Kristeva uses Douglas to substantiate her theory of abjection; phi losopher Noel 
Car ro l l , who re jec t s psychoanaly t ic exp lana t ions , invokes Douglas in his own 
Aris totel ian accoun t of the pleasures of ho r ro r . See Douglas, Purity and Danger, 
(London: Routledge, 1991 [1966].) 
32 David Pole, »Disgust and Other Forms of Aversion,« in Aesthetics, Form, and Emotion, ed. 
George Roberts (London: Duckworth, 1983) p. 229. 
33 Miller, op.cit. pp. 40-41. 
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Carolyn Korsmeyer 
even w h e n it is o p e r a t i n g in a n d a r o u n d t h e b o d y , its o r i f i c e s a n d 
e x c r e t a , a w o r l d of m e a n i n g e x p l o d e s , c o l o r i n g , v i v i f y i n g , a n d 
con t amina t i ng political, social, a n d m o r a l mean ings . Disgust f o r all its 
visceralness tu rns out to b e o n e of o u r m o r e aggressive cu l tu re -c rea t ing 
pass ions . 3 4 
Life soup, in virtue of being life soup, comes freighted with meanings 
that insert themselves into what are supposed to be more or less involuntary 
responses to general qualities, such as that which is foul. But despite its reflex-
like character, disgust — especially aesthetic disgust — requires that we attend 
to its objects and their many varieties with great care for nuance and the 
relation of the emotion aroused to other objects and emotions. For as 
Spinoza observed, »The explication of the nature of every ... emotion must 
necessarily include an expression of the nature of the object by which we 
are affected.«35 Emotions, even affect programs, are partially and importantly 
constituted by their objects. Depending upon the degree to which context is 
included in »object,« allowing the intentional object partially to shape or 
const i tute an emot ion permits a wide la t i tude for var ia t ion a m o n g 
experiences that ride under the same name. I endorse this pluralism, for 
the appeal, attraction, pleasure, meaning, or value of disgust aroused by 
art cannot be addressed the same way for all instances. Just as a careful 
approach to emotions advises that one assess them case by case, so ajudicious 
study of disgust advises us to look at particular cases of that emotion. Aesthetic 
disgust can be a component of tragedy, as we saw in the case of Philoctetes; 
it can be a feature of response to comedy, as the gross burlesques of Rabelais 
demonstrate. It is a presiding response to science fiction and horror. And it 
can be foregrounded (as in the work of Cindy Sherman) in such a way that 
the disgusting is an object of aesthetic attention in itself. In all of these artistic 
venues disgust is part of an appreciative reaction. But the character of the 
emotion varies. In some instances, disgust is entirely aversion — a deep and 
unambiguous pain; with others, disgust exerts an appeal and attraction that 
invites understanding as a pleasure; and with others, there is an oscillation 
and ambiguity to the experience that is hard to stabilize. 
Much debate over the pleasure in disgust has focused on science fiction 
and horror, partly because it is a common response both to strange or rival 
forms of life and to agents of decay, features of the »life soup« Miller 
describes. Because this type of narrative makes little pretense of representing 
the world as it is, it also affords obvious examples of how disgust is 
deliberately and sometimes extravagantly employed to propel narrative with 
34 Ibid. p. xii. 
35 Ethics, op. cit. Part III, Prop. 56, p. 138. Spinoza is referr ing to passive emotions, which 
include disgust, though his comment obtains for all emotions. 
56 
Disgust 
»culture-creating« zeal. Precisely because of their roots in the generation of 
life, disgusting objects are invested with meaning that complicates and 
increases their fascination. Just one theme can illustrate how the natural and 
the cultural are manifest in the disgusting: reproduction — examples of which 
abound in popular film and television. The science fiction horror movie 
Alien, now with three sequels, features a female monster whose sole purpose 
appears to be to propagate, which it accomplishes by invading host bodies, 
including those of humans.30 She is a relentless engine of life, prédation, 
and death, and she is brutally disgusting. Or consider the many reproducing 
monstrosities featured in the popular television series The X-Files, including 
an explosively phallic fungus which erupts from the necks of its hosts to spray 
invasive spores into anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity; or a 
predatory h u m a n fluke worm, pale and bulbous like a huge, toothed 
maggot, that invades the livers of its hosts to perpetuate its kind. This latter 
creature is supposed to be a mutation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster, 
perhaps a parasitic version of the nobler Godzilla, also generated from 
nuclear fallout. Environmental catastrophe, political disputes, sexual politics, 
history — all are manifest in the spectacle of the disgusting. Doubtless the 
possibilities recently opened up for technological interventions in the 
reproductive process drive the current obsession with reproducing monsters 
(including the most recent incarnation of Godzilla) and with invasions of 
human bodies to aid their generation. They are the contemporary equivalent 
of ancient myths of demon lovers who seduce and corrupt, and in the realm 
of the disgusting they are shadowed by all the muck and slime that oozes 
primordial life. The visceral, aversive character of disgust is deployed in 
fictional objects which, in addition to their entertainment value, achieve 
potent meaning and awful allure. But what exactly is their attraction? 
One possible explanation of the appeal of the disgusting sees it as the 
purchase price of the discovery that eventuates f rom the unpleasant 
experience. This approach has its roots in Aristotle's idea of the pleasure of 
learning, and it is the one that Noël Carroll advocates in his explanation of 
the paradox of horror. Carroll believes the painful horror emotions of fear 
and disgust acquaint us with that which is monstrous, alien, and impure. 
Horror, like tragedy, stimulates curiosity, the satisfaction of which in the 
course of a narrative is a pleasure. The aversive quality of disgust is not 
transformed to pleasure. Rather, it is the pain one must endure for the sake 
30 B a r b a r a C r e e d a r g u e s t h a t such mons te r s r e p r e s e n t t he »archaic m o t h e r , « a 
p a r t h e n o g e n i c reproduct ive machine that is psychologically primitive to the pre-
Oedipal m o t h e r recognized by psychoanalytic theory. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, 
Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 
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Carolyn Korsmeyer 
of discovery at the far side of the horrid moment.37 When one first views 
»Firewalker,« the episode of The X-Files in which the parasitic fungus bursts 
from the neck of its host, the eruption is preceded by scenes of choking and 
gagging in which the ripening parasite visibly pulses in the swollen neck. It 
is tempting to close one's eyes, but one is also intensely curious to find out 
what is going on. Perhaps aesthetic disgust in this example is a pain that is 
necessary to experience in order to earn the pleasure of discovery at the 
end of the story. On the other hand, isn't there a desire to look, like Leontius, 
on the parasite itself, indicating its attraction? If so, is this attraction to 
something perversely pleasurable? 
When I first began thinking about aesthetic disgust, the paradox of 
pleasure seemed to me to be the most interesting puzzle to solve. However, 
as I explore the subject further, the questions generated by this issue appear 
to be badly formulated. There are two alternatives typically posed: either 
disgust is an experience in which aversion and pleasure mingle, or it retains 
its painful character but gains aesthetic value in virtue of its role in a larger 
experience. How in fact is such a dispute to be understood? This sounds at 
first like an empirical question, as though if we were to examine our own 
reactions very attentively, we might discern whether aversion and attraction 
occur in sequence or simultaneously, separately or blended. But can this 
be determined? Some writers on horror classify their experience of the 
disgusting as partly pleasurable; others do not.38 These are (presumably 
honest) subjective reports, and there is no vantage from which to adjudicate 
the dispute. Introspection is not a finely tuned instrument, and if the question 
of pleasure is construed empirically there is no way to settle the issue. 
Alternatively, one may suspect that the question affords only a stipulative 
answer dependent upon prior theoretical commitments. If this is the case, 
then one who adheres to the idea that disgust is an evolved aversive response 
might insist upon its intrinsically negative quality, whereas someone who 
subscribes to Freud's theory that disgust is a reaction-formation obscuring 
sexual desire would insist upon its combined aversion and attraction. 
(Perhaps the old oxymoron »negative pleasure« had its roots in the obscurity 
of this issue.) 
We can elaborate the difficulty of resolving the ambiguities of attraction 
37 Carroll , op.cit. , chap te r 4. Compare Kant ' s cr i t ique of Burke: f ea r c a n n o t be a 
component of sublime pleasure, because once the fear is overcome it brings relief 
and the desire never to experience that again. Kantjettisons all fear f rom the encounter 
with the sublime, whereas Burke retains it in the notion of sublime delight, which always 
teeters on the brink of terror and sustains both a positive and negative affective valence. 
38 See the exchange among Carroll, Alex Neill, and Susan Feagin in Philosophical Studies 
65 (1992) pp. 53-90. 
58 
Disgust 
and aversion in objects of disgust by noticing how a similar theme occurs in 
fairy tales - the enchanted frog who in amphibian form must be embraced 
by the maiden before resuming his royal countenance, or the loathsome 
Laidly Worm who must be kissed by the returning adventurer Childe Wynde, 
whose touch of the revolting monster (which is more of a dragon than a 
worm) restores the form of his beloved sister. These examples tantalize with 
the balance of pleasure and pain they indicate - for the worm is a hideous 
and fearsome creature, but the enchanted girl trapped within is an object 
of love. In these tales it is somewhat easier to separate elements of attraction 
and aversion, for they are externalized and personified as frog and prince, 
worm and sister. However, frog and prince are only extensionally identical. 
If they were entirely the same, one would get no credit for kissing a frog 
and would not merit the standard reward of living happily ever after. The 
story trades on the duality of - and possibly oscillation between - love and 
aversion, disgust and affection. Moreover, this comparison points out a 
fur ther ambiguity in the pleasure question: If there is pleasure in aesthetic 
disgust, is it pleasure in the object that arouses disgust, or an enjoyment of 
the feelingitse\P Given that intentional objects are constituents of emotions, 
this is an even more difficult distinction to draw than that between frogs and 
princes. But it directs our attention to the right place: to the various contexts 
and objects that occasion and constitute disgust. Whether there is one »mental 
event« here (a combination of pleasure and pain) or two (separate pleasures 
and pains co-existing), is impossible to determine with exactitude and 
probably differs f rom occurrence to occurrence. What is clear is that 
something about aesthetic disgust invites one to repeat the experience, not 
to flee from it as a simple aversion. It may be grimly pleasurable, it may be 
awful but valuable for its meaning and consequence. Or both. Much depends 
on the particular object of aesthetic disgust. 
Some art works without narrative seem rather compellingly to require 
the savorability of aesthetic disgust. (I leave open whether the savor 
constitutes a pleasure.) Cindy Sherman's photographs, all called »Untitled,« 
only hint at the sketchiest of narrative contexts. Disgust here cannot be 
alleviated by the satisfaction of curiosity.39 In fact, curiosity is aroused but 
thwarted, left in stasis, a permanent unsettled disturbance. The pictures elicit 
a somewhat inchoate anxiety about the borders of human and non-human, 
and about personal identity (heightened by the fact that nearly every picture 
is of Sherman herself). When art enters such territory, it prods at one's sense 
of self and prompts acute attention to the emotions aroused and what they 
might disclose about oneself. Sherman's pictures, with their air of the 
39 Although Carroll suggests that his solution is appropriate for non-narrative arts as well. 
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Carolyn Korsmeyer 
uncanny, the familiar, and the s t range, seem to tug at memory a n d 
recognition as if to pull to the surface something deeply buried. They invite 
an inward-directed account of their power that probes deep into the recesses 
of the mind, suggesting a psychology of disgust that invokes regions of the 
unconscious where deeper elicitors of this emotion lie in wait. 
Julia Kristeva regards disgust as an emotion that recognizes the threat 
of slimy, oozy, life-generating and death-dealing decay, which is not only an 
offense to the senses but also a threat to identity. Things that disgust 
r epresen t the overtaking of form by formlessness , of d is t inc t ion by 
undifferentiation. They call to mind the tenuousness of our own identity, 
under siege from the first moments of its formation.4" The attraction-aversion 
duality of disgust in Kristeva's analysis is underwritten by her psychoanalytic 
framework and her theory of abjection: Each developing consciousness forms 
its own identity through distinguishing itself f rom other things. The most 
primitive stage of the process of self-differentiation, in Kristeva's view, requires 
separation from the fusion state of pre-natal oneness with the internal matrix 
of the mother's body. The maternal body lurks beneath consciousness as 
invitation to regain this state of oneness, and so abjection attracts. But at the 
same Ume this invitation is a horrific threat to the formed self that would 
lose identity were it to succumb to the lure of the abject. 
The centrality of the maternal in Kristeva's theory provides a way to 
understand the eerie attention to gender and the female body of these 
photographs (Figure 3), a prominent feature of Sherman's work that is also 
found in many o ther works of the gallery and theater.4 1 I ndeed , the 
appropriateness of the concept of abjection for a good deal of contemporary 
art invites the suspicion that emotions have cultural form and moment, and 
that we might be playing out an obsession with this particular species of disgust 
more or less globally in ar t and e n t e r t a i n m e n t . T h e c o n f l u e n c e of 
preoccupations with femaleness and the grotesque body affords another way 
40 To draw what I hope is not too far fe tched a comparison: In a way Kristeva's theory 
partakes of similar virtues and problems as does the solution Kant posed to the pleasure 
of the sublime. Kant also directed our at tention inward away f rom the raging seas and 
starry heavens we thought we were enjoying; the p rope r object of sublimity is ou r own 
minds and our awareness of the supersensible d imension of reason that gives rise to 
the au tonomous moral will. The unsympathet ic might find Kant's sublime a bit self-
congratulatory. 
41 See Laura Mulvey, »Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87,« in Fetishism 
and Curiosity (Indiana University Press, 1996). Barbara Creed, op. cit., makes interesting 
use of Kristeva in her film analysis. See also Claire Kahane, »Freud's Sublimation: Disgust, 
Desire and the Female Body,« American Imago 49:4 (Winter, 1992) 411-426. 
See also the Lacanian analysis of disgust of Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 
(London: Verso, 1989) esp. pp. 76-79; 132-136. 
60 
Disgust 
to discern disgust as a culture-creating passion. A response that appears hard-
wired and natural emerges in art at a particular time in history with a 
prevalence and intensity that far exceeds deliberate manipulation of the 
theory employed on its account. 
However, all the independent interest of disgust itself, the grisly ti filiation 
of h o r r o r and science fiction, the difficult epiphanies that ensue, the 
intellectual recreation, and the occasional sheer fun of disgust, should not 
obscure the fact that the function of aesthetic disgust is often - perhaps most 
often - fraught with grave moral significance. Disgust alienates; it may both 
prompt and block sympathy; it evokes scorn and contempt as well as pity, 
and it certainly provokes fear, for the ills to which the flesh is prey are handed 
out at random. This is another way that the disgusting object represents a 
threat, for it presents the discomfort that we ourselves may become disgusting, 
Figure 3: Cindy Sherman, 
»Untitled #160« (1986) 
Courtesy the artist and 
Metro Pictures. 
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Carolyn Korsmeyer 
at least for that interlude before one becomes nothing at all. Befitting its 
modular character, disgust is very difficult to in ter rupt , and it can be 
deployed in art - and in life as well - both to evoke compassion and to 
ostracize. Aesthetic disgust in contexts that are tragic or otherwise difficult 
is rarely ambiguous in its affective valence, for appreciative understanding 
requires arousal of these emotions in their purely painful forms. Many scenes 
of Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List, for example, evoke difficult 
emotions, including disgust, in the course of appreciat ing its complex 
narrative. One unforgettable shot shows a child in the concentration camp 
at Plaszow hiding from the military detail which is rounding up inmates and 
shipping them to Auschwitz. He has desperately sought a hiding place by 
crawling down one of the barracks toilets. We see him awash in a pond of 
human excrement, which has splashed across his nose and mouth. The scene 
is difficult to endure, and the disgust evoked is one of an indispensable 
sequence of aesthetic emotions aroused by this film. This disgust matches 
its painful character as aversive response, and because this is a child, an utter 
innocent, disgust summons attendant emotions of pity, anger on his behalf, 
and dreadful hope that he will not be discovered. But it might have had a 
different effect, for when one becomes disgusting to others, it can take 
supererogatory effort to overcome the aversion and muster compassion. We 
may think again of Philoctetes, who although a hero had the misfortune to 
tread on forbidden ground, suffered his unhealable wound, and became 
an object so disgusting that no one would come near him. Disgust is a 
powerful and treacherous emotion. Sensitive to danger, it becomes itself a 
dangerous affective state, causing us to reject and degrade objects that we 
find disgusting. 
Though for the sake of simplicity I have tried to focus my discussion on 
disgust as a response to art, sometimes I have slid into consideration of this 
emotion as it is experienced in real circumstances. Some such slippage is 
inevitable; aesthetic emotions have moral salience both in and out of art. 
As we have seen, the border between imitation and reality, art and life, is 
thin and permeable at many sensitive points. Especially with an emotion such 
as disgust, the boundary can drop away altogether. Disgust incorporates its 
objects so deeply into consciousness that they become components of 
visceral, bodily aversion, thereby dramatizing the potency with which such 
emotions attach us to the world. 
62