The aesthetics of vomiting in Nietzsche’s philosophy

Abstract

Through the historical link of the aesthetic with the concept of the sublime, this article allows the former to not only encompass the beautiful but also include within it a darker side, one which enables us to connect it to the concept of disgust. Following the theories of Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche, this essay proposes that disgust and vomiting are forms of the aesthetic and the sublime, not their “other”. Further, the paper relates vomiting to the expressive and emetic functions of language—two important concepts in theorising aesthetic thinking carried out by M.H. Abrams in his analyses. This article discusses the possibility of employing the emetic function in order to structure a text and presents Nietzsche’s works as an example for understanding nausea and vomiting as textual practices, or as aesthetic ideals, on which texts are based.