Miller, William Ian : University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

William Ian Miller is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

"William Ian Miller...meticulously dissects the notion of disgust with the rigor of a legal brief, trying to determine its boundaries and powers."

--Edward Rothstein, New York Times

"[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."

--Joseph Epstein, The New Yorker

"While The Anatomy of Disgust does disgust, it also enthralls, enlightens, dazzles and entertains. It `anatomizes' disgust--which Miller defines as a `strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its powers to contaminate, infect or pollute'--by exploring it as both a physical sensation and a moral sentiment. In both cases, it turns out, disgust has enormous political and social implications. But perhaps the most striking thing about The Anatomy of Disgust, as Miller himself says, is its willingness to be `methodologically promiscuous', to draw on history, literature, moral philosophy and psychology as well as on events from Miller's own life...What this beautifully written book reminds us so brilliantly is how much the humanities--and in some ways only the humanities--can tell us about the empirical world, the world of physical sensation, social behaviour, and political conflict."

--Andrew Stark, Times Literary Supplement

"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 Humiliation with a fascinating 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 of witch-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, humane study."

--The Economist

"Gripping, solid, and utterly comprehensive."

--Spy Magazine

"Mr. Miller's novel line of inquiry, as well as frequent displays of wit and insight, makes The Anatomy of Disgust an engaging book."

--Robert Grudin, New York Times Book 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 bodily existence. 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 and sophisticated cognitive content."

--Martha C. Nussbaum, New Republic

"While much of Miller's The Anatomy is devoted to a discussion of psychological responses to the disgusting, his most important contribution may be his detailing of the social and political ramifications of those responses."

--Michael Kenney, Boston Globe

"[A] marvelously fertile new book...a wonderfully unclassifiable work that mixes history and philosophy with autobiographical reflections, [and] ranges from frank (though never crude) discussions of the comic potential of flatulence to the deeper implications of disgust for a democratic society."

--David Futrelle, Salon Magazine (Web)

"Miller's book has secured one of those rare gifts: a perfectly realized cover. In a dark room, a large group of diners looks disapprovingly at the viewer. The one empty seat indicates that he or she once had a place at the table but is now excluded...Miller mines history (particularly the Middle Ages), literature (particularly skaldic), Freud, Orwell and his own experiences as a parent of four young children to show the holes in Mary Douglas's theory that the disgusting is anomalous, something that doesn't fit (say, hair growing out of ears), and in Paul Rozin's argument that disgust resides in `food rejection or in anxieties about our animal origins.' There's plenty of talk about unconscious desire and surfeit of the generative...but above all, Miller argues that disgust establishes rank...Especially after the 18th century, disgust became more clearly bound up with class, bourgeois good taste and moral values. Miller's a fine, entertaining, self-deprecating writer who has created a book that, if not always appetizing, is still a tasteful examination of a strong emotion that is generally held at arm's length."

--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Harvard University Press Web Site, November, 2000

Winner of a 1997 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Award of the Association of American Publishers, Anthropology and Sociology Category

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, intimately dependent 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 comes in 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 idiom it 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 respect for 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 fair in 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 the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

Darwin's Disgust
Disgust and Its Neighbors
Thick, Greasy Life
The Senses
Orifices and Bodily Wastes
Fair Is Foul, and Foul Is Fair
Warriors, Saints, and Delicacy
The Moral Life of Disgust
Mutual Contempt and Democracy
Orwell's Sense of Smell

Notes
Works Cited
Index