The disgust and the thing

Abstract

In the following essay we intend to discuss the possibility of the existence of a latent disgust in Western societies, which is expressed as a reaction to the enormous magnitude of things produced beyond the control of the individual, and to the insignificant position to which he is reduced in front of it, whose operation annihilates his frame of understanding. Our approach will be the use of a certain phenomenological interpretation of texts, which will begin with the analysis of the German notion of the ungeheuer in texts by Marx and Kafka, to then review passages from Karl Ove Knausgård's major novel. Finally, we will delimit the notion of disgust, as cognitive repulsion in the face of the overflow of the subject and its concepts, as well as the impossibility of a way out through the posthumanist perspective.