This chapter reconstructs the singular, outsized role played by one particular emotion — disgust — within this wide-ranging and still-unfolding nineteenth-century drama of civilizational ideology, social transformation, and the universalization of emotion. It argues that disgust has had a tendency to turn up in unexpected places, connecting disparate areas of social life. The chapter places the nineteenth-century discourse of disgust within a wider historical and conceptual arc, one that reaches back into the eighteenth century as well as forward into the twentieth and toward the present. Zooming out from the Darwinian moment, the chapter finds that in the second half of the eighteenth century, disgust was the focus of heated debate among German and British philosophers working in the new field of aesthetics, where the repulsive was taken to be the antithesis of the beautiful; now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the philosophers are joined by neuroscientists, who conduct brain scans of the insula, seeking to elucidate the primal nature of our revulsion. Ultimately, the chapter explores the highly productive nature of this seeming contradiction in the discursive function of Victorian disgust.

This chapter shifts the focus from the natural to the social sciences. Against the economic backdrop of the financial revulsion of 1857, the chapter provides a genealogical account of the role of attraction–repulsion in early twentieth-century works of urban sociology and social theory through readings of mid-nineteenth-century texts by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. It contends that the fin-de-siècle notion that attraction–repulsion sits at the core of all social relations cannot be understood in isolation from the fact that attraction–repulsion in various guises and iterations was a de facto affective posture for many of the major protosociological urban investigators of the preceding hundred years. The chapter seeks to use the genealogy of attraction–repulsion to complicate the role that has customarily been attributed to emotion and affect in historical accounts of the rise of the social sciences. Ultimately, it illustrates how a confusion between pleasure and disgust, which had been the de facto affective state for Victorian bourgeois social observers, was, for fin-de-siècle social theorists like Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud, excluded from sociological method while simultaneously diagnosed as a fundamental precondition for all sociality.

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