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That nauseous, rank and heaving matter, frightful to look upon, a ferment of life, teeming with worms, grubs and eggs, is at the bottom of the decisive reactions we call nausea, disgust or repugnance. Georges Bataille, Erotism, 56–57 Disorders of the stomach are become, in a manner universal . . . J. Hill, Centaury, the Great Stomachic, 3 The end of the world begins with a stomachache. Or it does so, at any rate, for the paranoiac. According to medical accounts that range from early-nineteenth-century physiology to contemporary clinical diagnostics , paranoia is associated with feelings of disgust and nausea. As literary critic David Trotter notes, disgust and nausea are understood to play a functional role in the production of paranoid fantasies: paranoia “mobilizes disgust at moments of crisis, moments when the ‘still persisting central core of the personality’ . . . is felt to be under threat” (67). In the normal course of things, of course, disgust and nausea bring to conscious awareness a sense that something has gone awry, that something is out of place. Nausea, for example, is a premonition of an imminent digestive reversal—a felt sign that the stomach may expel something upward and outward—while disgust has often been described as a culturally coded echo of this desire to distance oneself from something unclean or unhealthy. For the paranoiac, though, the corporeal semiosis of disgust and nausea are bound to an epistemological rupture: disgust and nausea occur as one understanding of the world is expelled and replaced with another, generally much more private and idiomatic, understanding of the system that governs the world. Thus, in the context of paranoia, disgust and nausea signal not simply the imminent expulsion of something, but also, and simultaneously, the incorporation of something else Chapter 4 Nausea, Digestion, and the Collapsurgence of System nausea, digestion, and the collapsurgence of system 105 (“Now I see that they were all part of the plot!”). We might call this phenomenon collapsurgence in order to capture those dynamics, both affective and epistemological , of the process by which one system for understanding the world collapses, and another, purportedly deeper, understanding of order surges forth. Nausea is part of a paranoiac’s project of making sense of the world in terms of systems—or, as Trotter puts it, “Paranoia’s commitment to system has as its obverse a commitment to nausea” (66). From this perspective, what should we make of the fact that a significant strand of modern literary practice seems specifically to aim at inducing nausea in its audiences as a means for making these latter aware of a controlling system? I am thinking here less of novels such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, which describes the existential sickness of the novel’s protagonist but does not seek to produce nausea in readers, and more of the graphic depictions of sperm, blood, urine, and shit in the novels of Georges Bataille; the references to ejaculation, repeated ad nauseum, in William S. Burroughs’s cut-up novels; or the lengthy descriptions of scatological practices and even voyages through shit in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity ’s Rainbow.1 Nor is this endeavor to produce nausea by framing bodily excretions limited to literature: consider sculpture and installation and performance art that present human effluvia, such as Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961); raw meat and blood, as in Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies-Mysteries-Theater (1962–1998); or living tissue, for example, the “frog steak” artificially grown and then consumed by the Tissue Culture and Art Project in Disembodied Cuisine (2000–2003).2 There is little point, of course, in approaching such works from the perspective of a clinical understanding of paranoia. Nevertheless, we can see these pieces as employing the connection between paranoia and nausea in a tactical sense. Such works suggest that in a world in which living human bodies come under the sway of systems, or a System, one can counter this control only by engendering corporeal shocks and affective counterflows. The mission of art, from this perspective, is to commit itself to sticky, slimy, oozing forms of transgression that will enable a controlled form of collapsurgence, and in this way allow audiences to achieve the extra-artistic goal of recognizing and freeing themselves from an otherwise hidden system. Though this goal of nausea-production emerged most clearly in twentiethcentury art, the origins of this strategy are to be found in Romantic-era literary texts. Depictions of “low” bodily functions have a long history in Western literature...

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