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→Ugly
Third, what if the reversal of the ugly into the comical (or the sublime) does not occur? Herman Parret describes such an option with regard to the Kantian sublime. If the overwhelming pressure of the ugly gets too strong, it becomes monstrous and can no longer be sublated/negated into the sublime. It's thus a question of an acceptable limit:
there is for Kant a progression from the ''colossal ''to the ''monstrous, ''i.e. towards the total annihilation of our faculty of presentation ''[ver '<nowiki/>'''nichtet]'''''<nowiki/>. '''. If the colossal can already be considered a sublime correlate, then it remains certainly inside an acceptable limit; with the monstrous, on the other hand, one has passed beyond the acceptable limit, in full terror and total unpleasure. With the monstrous we are in the margin of the acceptable where the imagination is fully blocked to function. It looks as if the monstrous is the Thing, inexpressible and abyssal. The monstrous does violence to subjectivity without submitting it to any legality.'''
The sublime pleasure is a pleasure in unpleasure, while the monstrous generates only unpleasure, but, as such, it provides enjoyment. In short, what Kant already elaborated in the distinction between pleasure (''Lust, ''regulated by the pleasure principle, which makes us avoid all painful excess, even the excess of pleasure itself) and enjoyment ''(Genuss, jouissance). ''Therein resides the link between enjoyment and disgust:
'''The "disgust for the object" arises from a certain "enjoyment" ''[Ge '<nowiki/>'''''<nowiki/>''<nowiki/>'''nuss] '''''<nowiki/>'''in the "matter of sensation" which distances the subject from its purposiveness. Pleasure ''[Lust] ''is opposed to "enjoyment" insofar as "pleasure is culture" ''[wo die Lust zugleich Kultur ist] . . . . ''"enjoyment" ''in matter, ''in contrast, provokes disgust. In addition, this enjoyment of losing oneself in the matter of "charms and emotions" has a direct impact on the health of our body: it generates disgust which manifests itself in corporeal reactions like nausea, vomiting and convulsions. Pleasureunpleasure ''[Lust/Unlust] ''in the feeling of the sublime has nothing to do with that "enjoyment" ''[Genuss] ''destructive of culture and generative of disgust.'''
What, precisely, is the ontological status of this weird ''Genuss ''that threat ens to drag us into its selfdestructiveself-destructive, vicious cycle? It is clearly not culture, but it is also not nature, as it is an "unnatural" excess that totally derails nature. So, should we not posit a link, an identity even, between this ''Genuss ''and what Immanuel Kant isolated as the
"unnatural" savagery ''(Wildheit) ''or passion for freedom specific to hu man nature: "Savagery [or unruliness, ''Wildheit"] is independence from laws. Through discipline the human being is submitted to the laws of humanity and is first made to feel their constraint. . . . Thus, for example, children are sent to school initially not already with the intention that they should learn something there, but rather that they may grow accustomed to sitting still and observing punctually what they are told, so that in the future they may not put into practice actually and instantly each notion that strikes them. Now by nature the human being has such a powerful propensity towards freedom that when he has grown accustomed to it for a while, he will sacrifice everything for it." The predominant form of appearance of this weird "savagery" is passion, an attachment to a particular choice so strong that it sus pends rational comparison with other possible choices. When in the thrall of a passion, we stick to a certain choice whatever it may cost: "Inclination that prevents reason from comparing it with the sum of all inclinations in respect to a certain choice is ''passion (passio animi)''." As such, passion is morally reprehensible: "far worse than all those transitory emotions that at least stir up the resolution to be better; instead, passion is an enchantment that also refuses recuperation. . . . Passions are cancerous sores for pure practical reason, and for the most part they are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured and flees from the dominion of principles, by which alone a cure could occur…… And, as the subdivision "On the inclination to freedom as a passion" tells us, "For the natural human being this is the most violent ''[heftigste] ''inclination of all." Passion is as such purely human; animals have no passions, just instincts. The Kantian savagery is "unnatural" in the precise sense that it seems to break or suspend the causal chain that determines all natural phenomena—it is as if in its terrifying manifestations, noumenal freedom transpires for a moment in our phenomenal universe.''
Do we not get here even an echo of what Julia Kristeva calls the abject? The object of enjoyment is by definition ''disgusting, ''and what makes it disgusting is a weird superego injunction that appears to emanate from it, a call to enjoy it even if (and precisely because) we find it ugly and desperately try to resist being dragged into it:
Kant insists on the non-representability of ugliness in art: "'''[in] ''dis'''''<nowiki/>''<nowiki/>'<nowiki/>'''gust . . . '''''<nowiki/>'''that strange sensation, which rests on nothing but imagination, the object is presented ''as if ''it insisted, ''as it were, ''on our enjoying it even though that is just what we are forcefully resisting." ''' This is a typically Kantian approach: in a single phrase, there is a ''gleichsam (as it'<nowiki/>'''''<nowiki/>''it were) ''and an ''als ob (as if)''. The ugly object has no reasonable effect on the ''Gemüth''. Instead, an excited and dangerously disconcerted imagination petrifies the subject ''in its corporeity''. This is the very essence of disgusting ugliness: it threatens the stability of our corporeity, our body 'forcefully resists' the incitement to enjoy that ugliness deceitfully imposes on us.
''<nowiki/>''<nowiki/>'''''<nowiki/>'''''
''<nowiki/>''<nowiki/>'''''<nowiki/>''''' This, finally, brings us to the very heart of disgust: the object of disgust "threatens the stability of our corporeity"; it destabilizes the line that sep arates separates the inside of our body from its outside. Disgust arises when the bor der border that separates the inside of our body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out, as in the case of blood or shit. "It's similar with the saliva: as we all know, although we can without problem swallow our own saliva, we find it extremely repulsive to swallow again a saliva [which was spit into a glass] out of our body—again a case of violating the inside/outside frontier." What distinguishes man from animals is that, with humans, the disposal of shit becomes a problem: not because it has a bad smell, but because it issued from our innards. We are ashamed of shit because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not have a problem with it because they do not have an "interior," as humans do. Hence I should refer to Otto Weininger, who called volcanic lava "the shit of the earth." It comes from ''inside ''the body, and this inside is evil, criminal: "The Inner of the body is very criminal." One should return here to Sigmund Freud who, in ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ''describes how the living substance:
''floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most potent energies, and it would be destroyed by the operation of the stimuli proceeding from this world if it were not furnished with a protection against stimulation ''(Reizschutz)''. It acquires this through its outermost layer—which gives the structure that belongs to living matter—becoming in a measure inorganic, and this now operates as a special integument or membrane that keeps off the stimuli, i.e. makes it impossible for the energies of the outer world to act with more than a fragment of their intensity on the layers immediately below which have preserved their vitality. These are now able under cover of the protecting layer to devote themselves to the reception of those stimulus masses that have been let through. But the outer layer has by its own death secured all the deeper layers from a like fate—at least so long as no stimuli present themselves of such strength as to break through the protective barrier. For the living organism protection against stimuli is almost a more important task than reception of stimuli; the protective barrier is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all endeavor to protect the special forms of energytransformations energy transformations going on within itself from the equalizing and therefore destructive influence of the enormous energies at work in the outer world.''
Or, as Ray Brassier put it concisely, "the separation between organic interiority and inorganic exteriority is won at the cost of part of the primitive organism itself, and it is this death that gives rise to the protective shield. Thus, individuated organic life is won at the cost of this aboriginal death whereby the organism first becomes capable of separating itself from the inorganic outside."
Disgust arises when the dead barrier is broken and the organic inte riority interiority penetrates the surface. One should be clear here and draw all the consequences; the ultimate object of disgust is ''bare life itself, ''life deprived of the protective barrier. Life ''is ''a disgusting thing, a sleazy object moving out of itself, secreting humid warmth, crawling, stinking, growing. The birth itself of a human being is an ''Alien-''like event: a monstrous event of something erupting out from the inside of a body, a big, stupid, hairy body crawling around. Spirit is above life; it is death in life, an attempt to escape life while alive, like the Freudian death drive that is not life but pure repetitive movement.
=Creepy=
