Synopses & Reviews
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, intimatelydependent 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 comesin 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 idiomit 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 respectfor 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 fairin 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 theworld, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.
Review
William Miller...[is] an original and imaginative law professor...who studies what used to be called the "moral passions". He has followed his 1993 book Humiliationwith afascinating study of disgust--a universal human feeling that underpins many moral responses...His literary evidence is rich: Swift's fascination with the stinking privy stool behind the dressing table; Shakespeare's bubbling cauldron ofwitch-brew; the maggot-blown world of Jacobean tragedy; Freud gaping at the engulfing vagina...But Mr Miller does more than catalogue revoltingness. His interest is in the moral meaning of disgust...[T]his is a thought-provoking, humanestudy.
Review
[A] most useful book...one that takes its readers, however reluctantly, down alleys of life worth traversing. One wouldn't have thought that the subject of disgust could exfoliate so elaborately, or throw off somany provocative insights, as it does in these pages, not only into the way we live but into the way we have always lived. The capacity for disgust, it turns out, may be as significant as any quality we possess...[Miller] is excellentwhen, enlarging his argument beyond the level of the heartily repulsive, he takes up the social subtleties of disgust.
Review
Miller has written a wide-ranging and rich account of the emotion of disgust, drawing on psychology, literature, and history--all filtered through his own vivid narrative of the phenomena of bodilyexistenceandhellip; Many writers about disgust have treated it as a bare feeling, with little or no cognitive content. Miller argues powerfully that this approach is inadequate. Disgust actually has a very complex andsophisticated cognitive content.
Review
While much of Miller's The Anatomyis devoted to a discussion of psychological responses to the disgusting, his most important contribution may be his detailing of the social andpolitical ramifications of those responses.
Review
Miller is a professor of law, but he brings to his task a mind well-stocked in literature, psychology, anthropology and history. He aims to bridge the academic and lay worlds, and to restore moral psychology to thewholeness it had for Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld...He wants us to treat disgust with the seriousness it deserves, as a determinant of love, sexuality, politics, and even our sense of self. And against all the odds he's succeeded:this is a fascinating book. Disgust is more than a feeling: it is an emotion with an inescapably moral tinge, and it has to be learned (the Wolf Boy of Aveyron did not know it). It is not simple misanthropy or plain nausea, but it isSartre's existential nausee; it is Hamlet's view of the world and everyone in it. It is a response to defilement; it denotes a recoil from horror (cruelty and gore, or even Beauty and the Beast); itarises suddenly, but is slow to dissipate. And disgust is not a disembodied emotion like contempt. It is too visceral to be ironic, it always involves the senses, and it expresses itself in physical terms...Dealing in ideas which arefrowstily familiar, [Miller] makes of them something startlingly fresh. This exploration of the psyche's murky byways would make a major book in itself, but Miller's purpose is deeper: he wants to prove that disgust is actuallyuseful--in love, and possibly in the social arena.
Review
[A] most useful book...one that takes its readers, however reluctantly, down alleys of life worth traversing. One wouldn't have thought that the subject of disgust could exfoliate so elaborately, or throw off somany provocative insights, as it does in these pages, not only into the way we live but into the way we have always lived. The capacity for disgust, it turns out, may be as significant as any quality we possess...[Miller] is excellentwhen, enlarging his argument beyond the level of the heartily repulsive, he takes up the social subtleties of disgust.
Review
[A]n enjoyable, methodologically eclectic academic romp.
Review
Gripping, solid, and utterly comprehensive.
Review
[A] most useful book...one that takes its readers, however reluctantly, down alleys of life worth traversing. One wouldn't have thought that the subject of disgust could exfoliate so elaborately, or throw off so many provocative insights, as it does in these pages, not only into the way we live but into the way we have always lived. The capacity for disgust, it turns out, may be as significant as any quality we possess...[Miller] is excellent when, enlarging his argument beyond the level of the heartily repulsive, he takes up the social subtleties of disgust.
Review
Although Miller is not the first scholar to bring disgust out from the spell of silence under which it has traditionally been kept hidden, he is the first to do so with a depth and empirical amplitude thatcorresponds to the complexity of the topic...Miller has written a compact study of a roiling subject, studded with local brilliances, that makes a large, but clearly arguable, point. Human society needs the "moral emotions," disgustperhaps most of all, to enforce its taboos, its armory of boundary-rules, and to keep pollution at bay.
Review
William Ian Miller...meticulously dissects the notion of disgust with the rigor of a legal brief, trying to determine its boundaries and powers.
Review
'While much of Miller\'s The Anatomyis devoted to a discussion of psychological responses to the disgusting, his most important contribution may be his detailing of the social andpolitical ramifications of those responses.'
Review
'Mr. Miller\'s novel line of inquiry, as well as frequent displays of wit and insight, makes The Anatomy of Disgustan engaging book.'
About the Author
William Ian Milleris Professor of Law at the <>University of Michigan.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. Darwin's Disgust
2. Disgust and Its Neighbors
3. Thick, GreasyLife
4. The Senses
5. Orifices and Bodily Wastes
6. Fair Is Foul, and Foul Is Fair
7. Warriors, Saints, and Delicacy
8. The Moral Life of Disgust
9. Mutual Contempt and Democracy
10.Orwell's Sense of Smell
Notes
Works Cited
Index