The Lure of Disgust: Musil and Kolnai

Abstract

What makes disgust so alluring? Why does it elicit fascination in spite of its long-standing outcast status in the aesthetic sphere? Both Aurel Kolnai (1900–1973) and Robert Musil (1880–1942) explore the ambivalence of disgust and its strong connection to sexuality and mortality. As a visceral defense reaction against a disturbing or threatening proximity, disgust implies at once the collapse of distance and the desire to reinstate boundaries. Its elicitors are often associated with decay, amorphousness, coalescence, and self-dissolution. Kolnai's phenomenological study and Musil's observations on disgust mirror contemporary anxieties about male identity, female sexuality, and sociocultural changes in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the First World War. Unlike Kolnai, however, Musil questions the epistemic and ethical value of this emotion. His aim is to counter the immediacy of disgust with reflexive and aesthetic distance on behalf of what he coins the “necessary civility of the mind.”