Disgust: A Liturgy

Disgust is the only remaining form of moral certainty.

We live in an age of mandatory empathy, where the traditional vocabulary of hatred has been sanitized into the clinical language of "concerns." Yet, humans require a vessel for their revulsion. Deprived of the right to be disgusted by the neighbor’s morals or the stranger’s skin, the modern subject has turned inward, toward the gut. The meal has become the new battlefield of the soul. We no longer eat to sustain life; we eat to perform a liturgy of purity.

Justin Taylor, reflecting on the posthumous collection Near Flesh by Katherine Dunn, reminds us that Dunn’s oeuvre exists as a monument to the "body as site of both fascination and repulsion." Dunn, the architect of Geek Love, understood what the modern foodie ignores: that the body is not a temple for nutrition, but a laboratory for the grotesque.

The fascination with Dunn’s freaks—the amputations, the chemical deformities, the Cult of Binewski—is not a fascination with the "other," but a recognition of our own somatic anxiety. In Dunn’s world, the body is plastic, malleable, and fundamentally treacherous.

"We are so afraid of eating each other. Sharks do—wolves do—it is irresistible—there are no vegetarian summer camps in the sea."

This line from Attic (1970) cuts through the soft-focus delusions of contemporary environmentalism. It posits a universe where consumption is the only honest relationship. To exist is to be potentially edible. The modern obsession with "clean eating" or "ethical carnivorism" is a desperate attempt to ignore this shark-like reality. We moralize our diets because we cannot stomach our own mortality. We want a "vegetarian summer camp in the sea," but we find only the raw mechanics of the teeth.

Dunn’s characters do not seek "wellness." They seek a radical, almost religious confrontation with their own flesh. In one of the stories of Near Flesh, a woman decapitates chickens and finds herself darkly smitten with the discovery of her own capacity for bloodshed:

"A faint shade of pink seemed to have been thrown over her during the day. As she looked close she saw millions of tiny drops of blood stuck to the hairs of her arms and the nap of her garments... She stretched her clean, soft hands beneath the white light and smiled, admiring their strength."

This is the anti-recipe. Here, the handling of meat is not a culinary step but an ontological awakening. The blood on the arms is the "pink shade" of reality. Modern food culture attempts to hide the slaughter behind the "artisan" label, but Dunn forces us to stare at the "soft, spineless feathers" and the "white light" of the slaughterhouse. The smile of the killer is the only honest response to the meal.

There is a specific kind of heteropessimism and somatic alienation in Dunn’s early work that functions as a precursor to the "viscous" literature of today (Moshfegh, Zhang). In Attic, the narrator K. speaks of her sex appeal as "Dogsbody," an entity separate from herself, a spirit familiar joined at the crotch.

"If Dogsbody were in shape she’d rub her titties on his arm and roll her eyes and get us to a john pretty quick... It’s like being a Siamese twin joined at the crotch and trying to recover from pneumonia while your other half does the Watusi."

This is the ultimate diagnosis of the modern condition: the self as a parasitic twin to its own biological imperatives. We are all Siamese twins joined at the crotch to a body that wants things we cannot justify. The "Dogsbody" is the part of us that eats, sleeps, and shits, while the "other half" tries to curate a personality. The tragedy of the digital age is the attempt to delete the Dogsbody entirely, leaving only the Watusi.

Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror, gives this pathology its name: the Abject. The abject is what "disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules." It is the skin on the surface of milk, the vomit that is both me and not-me, the corpse that reminds us of the fragility of the subject.

"Abjection is a vortex of summons and repulsion... The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life."

Dunn’s work is a sustained meditation on the abject. By centering the freak—the subject that refuses the "clean and proper" borders of the human—she forces us into a Kristevan crisis. We recoil not because the freaks are alien, but because they are too close. They are the "return of the repressed" in a monotheistic culture of sterile perfection. Our current obsession with dietary restrictions is our pathetic attempt to manage the abject. We think that by filtering our water and organic-sealing our fruit, we can keep the "vortex of summons and repulsion" at bay. We are wrong.

"You are who eats you." This inversion of the common diet-dictum appears in Truck (1971). It suggests that identity is formed not by what we consume, but by what consumes us—by the sharks we allow to bite into our narrative.

The obsession with food politics today—the disgust at gluten, at carbs, at factory farming—is a displaced political emotion. We cannot fix the world, so we fix the plate. We cannot exile the tyrant, so we exile the carbohydrate. Disgust has moved from the parliament to the pantry. We have become a culture of fermented misanthropes, seeking in the "organic" label a secular version of salvation.

Katherine Dunn’s return to the shelf is a reminder that the body cannot be subbed out for a better model. We are the chickens, the killers, the Siamese twins, and the abject. The feast is ready. The rules are clear. There are no vegetarian summer camps in the sea.