Florence Vatan

The Lure of Disgust: Musil and Kolnai

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. Kolnais phenomenological study and Musils 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.”

L'esprit (dé)réglé: Literature, Science, and the Life of the Mind in France, 1700–1900

Abstract: The case studies presented in this special issue illustrate the unique appeal that the puzzle of the mind exerted across fields of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They highlight the diversity of approaches and perspectives that the exploration of the mind elicited in literature, philosophy, and the sciences de l’homme. They also testify to the conceptual challenges and persistent nebulousness that surrounded the notion of esprit and its close associates. That fluidity of meaning was, in its way, productive: it provoked debates about the nature of the self, the precarious status of consciousness, and the relevance of human exceptionalism.

Esprit, bêtise, idiotie : Le cas Flaubert

Abstract: In Flaubert’s literary universe, intellectual pretensions are often derided as stupidity in disguise. With a mix of fascination and rejection, Flaubert explores the many facets of stupidity and lays bare its key symptoms: vanity, literality, automatism, and animality. By attacking bourgeois stupidity and valorizing idiocy as genuine simplicity, Flaubert reassesses the powers of the mind. In contrast to contemporary metaphysical conceptions of the mind as sovereign, he develops a continuist and immanent approach that links intelligence and idiocy. At the same time, he asserts the mind’s ability to counter the inertia of stupidity through the practice of irony and aesthetic transfiguration.

L'aventure de la pensée

As a former student of philosophy, Robert Musil kept measuring himself against philosophy and its specific challenges. If he uncompromisingly criticizes the esprit de systeme, conceptual abstraction, and nebulous speculations, his essayistic and novelistic project remains nevertheless driven by philosophical ambitions. With its experimental dimension, Musils alternative philosophy promotes intellectual vigilance, clarity, and attentiveness to the ordinary world. It also encourages the ability to think for oneself at ones own pace. This intellectual adventure remains open to conjectures and to forays into indeterminacy.

Robert Musil ou les voies de la mystique diurne

La quete musilienne d’une « mystique diurne », denuee d’occultisme, s’inscrit en rupture avec le culte de l’irrationnel en vogue dans l’Allemagne et l’Autriche de l’entre-deux guerres. La ou ses contemporains celebrent le naufrage de la raison, Musil s’inspire des connaissances scientifiques de son epoque – en particulier de la psychologie de la forme – pour approfondir la connaissance de l’extase.