Emily Lawson

This paper examines an enduring puzzle about enjoying aesthetic disgust as it arises for Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025 CE). Abhinavagupta claims that all aesthetic emotions (rasas), including the disgust (bībhatsa) rasa, are pleasurable for the sensitive appreciator. Yet he elsewhere characterizes disgust as incompatible with enjoyment of its object. Taken together, these are puzzling claims. I trace the puzzle through a number of Abhinavagupta’s works and those on which he commented in the Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition. Along the way, I consider three possible but philosophically unsatisfying answers, each of which provides important pieces of the solution. Putting these pieces together with the Pratyabhijñā defense of impurity’s value and phenomenological analysis of imagination, I reconstruct an Abhinavaguptan solution according to which reflexive appreciation of expanding the limits of human imagination can explain how it is possible to enjoy experiencing aesthetic disgust and why we have reason to seek out this difficult pleasure.