Love and Disgust

Ernest Becker argued that the “self” is not limited to the body but extends to “the things in which our true feelings are located”: “A person literally projects or throws himself out of the body, anywhere at all. As the great Williams James put it almost 80 years ago: A man’s ‘Me’ is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, his yacht and his bank-account. In other words, the human animal can be symbolically located wherever he feels a part of hum really exists or belongs” (from Birth and Death of Meaning, quoted in Richard Beck, Unclean, 85-6).

Richard Beck draws on this notion of an extended self to suggest that “love is a form of inclusion. The boundary of the self is extended to include the other. . . . Love is on the inside of the symbolic self” (86). Love imitates the perichoretic life of the Trinity, the beloved “in” the lover as the lover is in the beloved.

And this can happen, Beck goes on to suggest, only when lovers overcome the boundaries of disgust. He quotes William Milller: “A person’s tongue in your mouth could be experienced as a pleasure or as the most repulsive and nauseating intrusion depending on the state of relations that exist or are being negotiated between you and the person. . . . The marks of intimacy depend upon the violability of Goffman’s ‘territories of the self.’ Without such territory over which you vigilantly patrol the borders there can be nothing special in allowing or gaining access to it. . . . Consensual sex means the mutual transgression of the disgust-defending boundaries” (Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, quoted in Beck, Unclean, 87).

This leads Beck to the conclusion that “Love and intimacy involve the dismantling of these boundaries of the self. . . What we discover in all this is that disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries. . . . Love is, at root, the suspension of disgust, the psychic fusion of selves” (88).

When Beck applies this, he seems to shift gears. Borrowing Miroslav Volf’s language, he claims that exclusion and embrace involve “an either/or dynamic” (89), and says that mercy and sacrifice “reliably come into conflict due to the reciprocal nature of love and disgust” (90). 

But this is not what Beck’s previous argument implies. Miller is clear that the boundaries of disgust are necessary for love to be intimate: If everyone is welcome to put her tongue in my mouth, then there’s nothing special about the intimacy of lovers. Falling in love is the halting, difficult breaking of barriers, but if there are no barriers there’s no transgression, and no falling in love. Exclusion and embrace may be either-or in the abstract; in time, they are moments of a single process. Beck’s argument seems to lead to this conclusion: Boundary-regulation seems to be a moment in the process of growing intimacy, a necessary starting point for the cultivation of love – perhaps a pedagogue to lead us to love.